Grundlagen Kulturwissenschaft - Interculture Journal

Rathje: The Definition of Culture: An application-oriented overhaul
Exh. 1: Culture as a matrix – The expansion of the traditional usage of
the term "culture" to include the collective and individual perspectives
Considering these terminological requirements of the word
culture, the result is not a single definition of the word that,
as has been shown here, will be either too narrow or too
broad. What becomes clear instead is in one sense an expansion
of the scope of the cultural to include the collective. In
another sense, the standard plural understanding of culture
will include the individual as well. Culture as a complex holistic
phenomenon can then be analyzed through the use of the
four-field matrix shown above. Employing this tool, questions
regarding the customs of certain collectives are addressed in
the cultural/plural field while the collective/plural field can be
used to investigate the rules of membership and participation
in collectives. The cultural/individual field is dedicated to the
interdependencies between individuals and culture, while the
collective/individual field describes the individual's membership
in discrete collectives. This article will demonstrate that
such a differentiation of culture (rather than reliance on a
one-dimensional definition) allows a much more precise description
of cultural phenomenon while furthermore providing
a more sound critical foundation against the traditional
coherence-oriented understanding of culture.
4. Revision of the Coherence Paradigm - Almost Completely
Wrong
In order to more clearly understand the mistakes of traditional
interpretations of the term "culture," the assumptions
of the existing coherence paradigm will be applied to each of
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