ABSTRACT
The present concept of culture emerged during the second half of the 20th century from theories that had grown on the substrate of predecessor approaches. Roman Herzog (1988) presented evidence that progress was triggered by the synthesis of merging cultures, referring to findings of various disciplines such as archaeology, linguistics and geology. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962b) popularised the notion of a spectrum from ‘cold’ to ‘hot’, on which a particular culture or a cultural subsystem could be located. Both Mario Erdheim (1988) and Jan Assmann (1992) integrated this concept in their theories, the former in his Psychoanalysis of Culture and the latter in his continuation of Halbwachs’s (1925) approach, Cultural Memory.
