I UNDERSTAND A LITTLE ART

CULTURE

The term culture has a variety of meanings according to the discipline of study from which it is invested: ethnography, anthropology, sociology, among others. We will take the term culture in its ethnographic sense to define it as a complex whole that includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, technology, customs, traditions and any other habit and capacity acquired by human beings as a member of a society.

We know the evolution of the human being through:

• The written testimonies.

• The ritual, ceremonial and commemorative traditions.

• The artistic testimonies, such as the paintings, engravings and sculptures made by the first settlers, as observed in the stones found in different regions of our geography that present traces, drawings and symbols left on surfaces, and that are called petroglyphs.

  For the study of culture, it is important to bear in mind that knowledge, in the beginnings of humanity, was transmitted through the myths made known by the oral narrations of the peoples of poetry, that is, peoples without written alphabet known, that they expounded beliefs about the mysteries that disturbed the ancestral man; for example, the Venezuelan myth of Amalivaca of the ancient Tamanaco indigenous people, which describes the creation of the natural world and its people established in the Caribbean of the Orinoco.

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All the expressions of the past, as well as all the individual or collective practices that the human being currently performs, make up the culture, that is to say, only that which corresponds to the non-intervened nature is excluded from this definition.