‘Culture’ has long been seen as central to the constitution of human subjectivity and action. The word originated in an analogy with the ‘cultivation’ of farm land as an object of ‘agriculture’. Roman thought had linked cultura to the cultivated or educated way of life through which rational and intelligent ways of thinking are developed and this underpinned the Renaissance discourse of human difference in which the ­cultivated ‘reason’ of the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’ was contrasted with the ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ of the middle ages and contemporary non-European societies. This discourse allowed the observable differences in customs and practices uncovered through European colonial expansion and travel to be described and explained. Kant (1790) popularised this idea of Cultur and the view that a cultured, or refined, way of life is superior to the coarse and uncultivated ways of the primitives and the uneducated. Culture is the origin and mark of a truly human existence that goes beyond the merely ‘natural’ condition of animals and ‘savages’. Culture comprises the shared ideas, meanings, and values that were understood as ‘spirit’ (Geist or ésprit) or ‘soul’ (Seele or âme), the active mental and moral force in human life. Montesquieu (1748) held that a ‘general spirit’ – a ‘moral spirit’ or ‘national spirit’ – inspires the religion, language, custom, and form of government of a population.