 In the political and legal spheres, there is widespread disagreement about what culture is, and the next section is focused on elaborating these distinct views of culture. There is however considerable agreement that whatever it is, it matters to people and the meaning and value it provides to the lives of individuals are among the most important reasons, if not the most important ones, to defend and protect it in legal and political spaces. This value is why it is important to attempt to discover what culture is and correspondingly why, and which aspects of it in particular, should or should not be protected in the public sphere. Notice that the observation that cultures are valuable to people, and indeed that they bring value to the lives of individuals, is not the same as saying that individual cultural practices are all good. Any defensible account of culture must take seriously the importance of culture in general without defending all of its instantiations. There are four main ways in which culture has been interpreted: as an encompassing group, as social formation, in dialogic terms, and in identity terms.