This textbook is intended as an aid — nothing more, nothing less — to the broad field of research known as culture. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive work on the subject: there are, after all, much better media (including the Internet) available to look up facts and definitions. What, then, is the purpose of this book? The aim is to provide guidance and to outline the different perspectives on culture in the humanities. Long before it became a field of academic research, the concept of culture was surrounded by an aura of ambiguity. If one tried to defend the field of research dealing with culture, such an effort quickly degenerated into a clumsy inability to describe a single well-defined and defining method. And as in any controversy, the conflict revolves primarily around the conceptual framework of culture and therefore is about reputation, academic traditions in different countries, and the use of source material (written sources; visual sources in art and architecture, and landscape architecture; archaeological excavations). Moreover, the debates on culture are so diverse that it is difficult to get a handle on what culture is. Unlike in the field of history in which the concept of ‘truth’ and the ‘reliability’ of one's sources play a key role, the practice of cultural studies seems to be characterised by something approaching indifference to the quest for the truth.

Nevertheless, there is an academic discussion — one could even say a fierce debate — about the essence of culture, a discussion that is focused on our use of language in relation to the interpretation of imagery . The debate is essentially epistemological in nature (from the Greek word episteme (ἐπιστήμη), which means knowledge) and focuses on the nature and possibility of acquiring knowledge about culture. When such important concepts as truth and reliability are called into question in the broader field of the humanities — similar to the concept of gravity or the theory of evolution in science — the temptation is to design a theory in an attempt to manage the total chaos. There is a veritable industry of theory books that focus on the fields of culture, language, religion, memory, and art.