CULTURE IN MODERN WORLD BY AZHAR SEIKH [HARDCOVER]

Dr. Azhar Seikh, did his Master's in Social Work (MSW) from Maharashtra. He is at present working as an associate professor in NANDED. He was awarded Ph.D. in Social Work. Dr. Seikh is a well-known authority on Islamic Culture. He regularly writes on Modern Islam. He has published many books on Social Welfare and Islam. Dr. Seikh has widely travelled in India and has visited Ajmer, Rampur, Deoband, Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad and Aurangabad in India. Dr. Seikh is associated with many governmental Committees on minorities and he advises social welfare departments of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses :

Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning. The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.

When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfilment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity. For the German no positivist sociologist, Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified n the course of history".