Cultural institutions are elements within a culture/sub-culture that are perceived to be important to, or traditionally valued among, its members for their own identity. Examples of cultural institutions in modern Western society are museums, churches, schools, work and the print media.
Television As a Cultural Institution Another example of a cultural institution is television. Television's has the power to communicate social values and ideas within a society through the shows and stories it exhibits. Television is viewed all over the world and has the power to shape society's political, social, and moral views.
Experts commonly name the following five cultural institutions as needed (at least in some way) in any society in order to survive: education, economic system, government, family, and religion.
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or institutions:
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Have we no culture, no refinement,—but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil?—to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions be like those chestnut burs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)