Short answers, pulled from the story.
Culture is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms of human societies, along with the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitudes, and habits of individuals in those groups. The anthropologist E. B. Tylor defined it as the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
The word culture comes from the Latin colere, meaning to inhabit, care for, till, or worship, and the related cultus, meaning a cult. The Roman orator Cicero used the metaphor cultura animi, the cultivation of the soul, in his Tusculanae Disputationes. In Middle English the word culture meant a place tilled.
Material culture is the physical expression of a culture, including technology, architecture, and art. Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas a society holds, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions.
Cultural studies was developed in the United Kingdom by scholars influenced by Marxism, including Stuart Hall, who lived from 1932 to 2014, and Raymond Williams, who lived from 1921 to 1988. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways cultural change can occur, including growth, evolution, revolution, diffusion, syncretism, and transformation. Cultures change internally through forces encouraging or resisting change, and externally through contact between societies via diffusion or acculturation.
According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is part of psychological warfare, because the target of the attack is the identity of the opponent. UNESCO and Blue Shield International coordinate protection, and the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict addresses this threat.