1. Plural Cultures, Universal Culture, Naturalised Culture

In Beyond Nature and Culture,Philippe Descola claims that the idea of 'culture' arose from a tension between at least two of the 164 meanings of the term catalogued by Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhorn.Culture, in the singular, is defined as a distinctive characteristic of humanity, in a sense close to 'civilisation'. Cultures, in the plural, are defined as a plurality of human modes of organisation. In 1871, Edward Burnett Tylor stated that:

He defines culture as what distinguishes social humanity as a whole, and contrasts this concept with the concept of nature. When Franz Boas established North American ethnology at the dawn of the twentieth century, he defined 'cultures' as beliefs, customs, and institutions that individually characterise different societies. The meaning of cultures derives not from some primitive unity between culture and nature but from the plurality of cultures and the relations that they maintain between each other through an interplay of differences and identities.

Other possible meanings of culture exist, but its primary meaning derives from this conflict between the definition of a unified culture contrasting culture with nature, and the definition of plural cultures contrasting with each other. The problem with the determination of culture as the distinctive property of Man vis-à-vis Nature is that it assumes that the birth of society as a whole breaks with nature and entails the emergence of (cultural) qualities absolutely irreducible to the natural movement of appearance and the establishment of this social whole on its own.