What are Human Cultures?

Jim Mason
4 min readApr 12, 2022

Don’t mistake cultures for cultural artifacts or for the supra-organisms that animate them

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States by Howard Chandler Christy

The word “culture” in English has a number of different, but related definitions. Here are excerpts from how Wiktionary defines it, minus the senses that relate to botany (cultivation) or to microbiology (bacterial cultures):

culture (countable and uncountable, plural cultures)

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Jim Mason

I study language, cognition, and humans as social animals. You can support me by joining Medium at https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership