作为一种制度安排的文化

Institution Arrangement to Culture

文化是一个人类学、哲学及文艺评论等众多学科都会涉及的概念,本文对英文"culture"和中文中的"文化"的词义演化进行把握,并对文化这一范内涵进行了梳理,将文化视为一种由人际间公共的符号、知识和意义所构成的观念体系,即一种重要的非正式制度安排,文化为人们提供了一种认知体系,这种认知体系影响了人们的信念,而人们持有的信念决定了他们所做出的选择,这些选择建构了人类行为的变化。

Culture is a concept shared by anthropology, philosophy and literary criticism and many other disciplines. This paper, on the basis of an examination of the semantic changes that English term cul- ture and the Chinese term wenhua have undergone, attempts to understand the nature of culture. It redefines culture as a system of beliefs based on a set of social codes, knowledge and meaning shared by the community, i.e. an important informal institutional arrangement. Culture provides the community members a cognitive system, which influences their beliefs, which in turn determine whatever choices they make. These choices constitute changes in human behavior.