The Origins and Perspectives of ‘Culture’—Is it Relevant Anymore?

This paper argues that ‘culture’ is a crucial element of humans’ mental developmental dynamics and traces various threads of explorations of the concept of ‘culture’ and aims to contribute to its systemic understanding. Culture has been represented predominantly as external to a person or as something that is at the same time inside and outside of the mind by the various streams of Cartesian social sciences. The latter theoretical stances led to the essentialization, ‘entification’ and objectification of the concept/phenomenon. The systemic approach is proposed in order to more adequately reflect the relational organization of individuals, societies and cultures. ‘Culture’ should be understood as an entirety of relational processes of sense-making of experiences that are self-centred, intentional and future-oriented, however, always rooted in historically constructed sociocultural systems. Cultural elements and individuals are indissolubly and meaningfully linked and defined in relation to each other. Interaction between people and cultural elements is dialogical and is organized in intransitive hierarchical structures. The systemic approach to the cultural and semiotic dynamics allows us to understand how patterns of signs, meanings and behaviours are constructed through the past historical process and in relation to the anticipated short-term and distant future. ‘Culture’ is everywhere wherever and whenever human relates to or anticipates real or imaginary ‘other’, or whenever s/he constructs or interprets any ‘objectified’ sign. It is considered as the systemic totality of the processes of meaningful relating to others that is the basis for affectively charged meaning-making processes. The self-definition is possible only through ‘Culture’.