1. Definition of culture and main approaches in its comprehension

-A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

-Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.

-Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

Different layers of culture exist at the following levels:

The national level: Associated with the nation as a whole.

The regional level: Associated with ethnic, linguistic, or religious differences that exist within a nation. The gender level: Associated with gender differences (female vs. male)

The generation level: Associated with the differences between grandparents and parents, parents and children.

The social class level: Associated with educational opportunities and differences in occupation.

The corporate level: Associated with the particular culture of an organization. Applicable to those who are employed.

The function of culture is to give us an all encompassing pattern for living. It provides us with the guidelines and rules for our membership of humankind.

2. Correlation between the world culture, ethnoculture, and national culture

The world culture is the experience, which was accumulated in the prospects of socio-cultural history of humankind. The world culture integrates all cultural units since the prehistoric times till our days, and all over the world territories, from the West to the East, and from the South to the North.

Ethnoculture (or folklore culture) is the culture of people, who are locally united by common origins (blood relations) and collectively organized economic activity. Elements of ethnoculture are: rites, customs, myths, superstitions, legends traditions, folklore, daily life standards and so on. Ethnoculture transmits them from a generation to a generation by means of collective memory, alive language, oral speeches, natural music ear, and organic plastics in an immediate communication of people. Ethnoculture has no authors, it is nameless and anonymous.

National culture is a culture of people, who inhabit a definite territory, and are not connected with blood relations, but constitute a nation. Nation is a unit more complicated than an ethnos. It is provoked by more refined level of communications and the latter is embodied in a national language, and disseminated by literature, mass media, and a system of education. National culture fastens together people at the boundaries of a nation and diminishes their regional and local differences. National culture is not primarily created by the whole ethnos (or several ethnoses which constitute a nation) but by its intellectuals – by writers, painters, philosophers, scientists.

3. Early forms of religious experience: animism, fetishism, totemism.

Totemism is a system of belief in which each human is thought to have a spiritual connection or a kinship with another physical being, such as an animal or plant, often called a "spirit-being" or "totem."

Animism is the belief that all plants, animals, and objects have spirits

Fetishism worship of or belief in magical fetishes. A fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others.