Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word culture began as a verb meaning to till the soil. In the Tusculanae Disputationes, the ancient Roman orator Cicero used the term cultura animi to describe the cultivation of the soul. This original meaning persisted for centuries before evolving through the work of Samuel von Pufendorf and 18th-century German thinkers.
The Baka, Aka, and Efe foragers of the Central African forests developed polyphonic music at least 200 years before European composers developed similar music in the 14th century. This form of music represents the first known expression of polyphony in world music. These forest communities were discovered by non-African explorers in the 1200s.
The idea of the anxious, unstable, and rebellious teenager did not exist before the last two decades of the 19th century. Robert Epstein and Jennifer argue that American-style teen turmoil is absent in more than 100 cultures around the world. The creation of adolescence resulted from specific lifestyle and environmental factors generated by technology and affluence in North American urban-industrial society.
The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions were established to address the threat to cultural assets. Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, notes that these agreements aim to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity. The United Nations and UNESCO coordinate international protection and local implementation to safeguard these assets.
Adolf Bastian argued for the psychic unity of mankind, proposing that all human societies share a set of elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture and influenced the work of Franz Boas and the development of American anthropology. Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology that would synthesize the interests of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder.
By the 19th century, the English poet Matthew Arnold redefined culture as the pursuit of total perfection, identifying it with the best that has been thought and said in the world. This elite definition stood in stark contrast to the lives of the rural poor, creating a hierarchy that distinguished the high culture of the ruling class from the folk culture of the lower classes. Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution further reinforced these hierarchies.