THE POWER OF CULTURE TO CREATE A BETTER FUTURE
Culture is a word, etymologically, driven from the Latin language from the word ‘cultura’ meaning to cultivate. This connotes growing of personality. This entails forming the seed of an individual’s character and life into societal structure. By cultivation, one is schooled in the beliefs and practical attitudes of a particular group of people who own the culture. However, the word culture is most commonly used in three basic senses: excellence of taste in fine arts and humanities; an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning; shared attitudes, values, and goals. Culture has been defined as the totality of way of life evolved by a people in their attempts to meet the challenges of living in their environment, which gives order and meaning to their social, political, economic, and religious norms and modes of organization, thus distinguishing a people from their neighbours. The understanding of personhood, one’s immanent metaphysics and the idea of phenomenal inquiry into the existence generally is rooted in culture. Culture explains, a great deal, the reason why one acts the way one does. Culture shapes man. It makes man read into his environment as to understand what exactly informs a people’s life style and how the people’s worldview cuts into their life world(by analysis of their existential structure). The explanation of culture opens to us the need for culture in the first place. It is accepted that culture sprang in time from human rationality and this is not without a purpose. Primarily, the need for culture arose from the necessity of maintaining social coherence. Culture comes up to construct social identity and maintain coherence with a social group which is too enormous for the pre-human community building methodology. This need justifies the place of culture, the nature of culture and the cultural functionality.