ABSTRACT
Culture, as Raymond Williams noted, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. The now widely used English term “culture” derives from the Latin noun cultura, which comes from verb colere. Despite this use of culture as what many would today commonly understand as religious worship, the primary etymology of the term comes from Old French, couture, whose meaning refers to animal husbandry and working the land. In some cases, especially in the subfield of Jewish studies, it has become fashionable in recent years to study something referred to as Jewish culture instead of Judaism. All of the problematic and ambiguous uses of the term “culture” emerge out of its complex etymological history. As critical anthropologists have long known, for whom it functions as their primary taxonomic tool, culture, not unlike “religion” in our field, often signals something special, something that makes one group fundamentally distinct from all others.
