civilization

civilization, culture are comparable when meaning the particular state or stage of advancement in which a race, a people, a nation, a specific class, or an integrated group of these finds itself at a given period.

Civilization always implies a definite advance from a state of barbarism; often it suggests the absence of all signs of barbarism or a divorce from all the ways of living, all the beliefs, all the conditions that distinguish a primitive from a civilized society

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the civilization of France has been for centuries and is still the central and dominating civilization of Europe— L. P. Smith

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this mesa had once been like a beehive; it was full of little cliff-hung villages, it had been the home of a powerful tribe, a particular civilization— Cather

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Culture (see also CULTURE), on the other hand, suggests rather the complex of attainments, beliefs, customs, and traditions which forms the background of a particular people or group, which distinguishes them from all other peoples or groups, and which gives their particular civilization, no matter how little or how far advanced, its peculiar quality or character

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Greece for our purposes means not a race, but a culture, a language and literature, and still more an attitude towards life, which for us begins with Homer, and persists, with many changes but no breaks, till the closing of the Athenian lecture rooms by Justinian— Inge

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it would no doubt have been more satisfactory to select a people like the Fijians rather than the Lifuans, for they represented a more robust and accomplished form of a rather similar culture, but their culture has receded into the past— Ellis

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Analogous words: cultivation, *culture, breeding, refinement

Antonyms: barbarism

Contrasted words: barbarity (see BARBARISM): barbarousness, savagery (see corresponding adjectives at BARBARIAN)