Culture stands for the totality of institutions and practices (including forms of discourse) developed and established by some specific groups of human beings.
Ethnology – this branch of anthropology devoted to the study of culture – is the field from which many semioticians have come, and in turn, many others are leaning towards it.
Claude Lévi-Strauss‘s Structural Anthropology is perhaps the most famous attempt to apply the insights of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to cultural studies.