Origins of the concept of ‘culture’ in philosophy and the literary tradition

So what then is this thing called culture? What is this mediation that appears to rob ‘man’ of his nature and locate his action and practices within an endowment of socially produced symbolic forms? Culture

itself,whatever its facticity, is also a conceptwith a history, some ofwhich we shall try to trace in the chapters that follow. It is hoped that we will not succumb to any one ‘origin myth’ for, as anthropologists would tell us in relation to primitive cosmologies, such devices only serve to exercise closure, they silence debate and controversy and, usually, justify the existing rationale for the status quo; nevertheless we will ‘dig around’ for sources, albeit competing ones.