Culture as deficit: a critical discourse analysis of the concept of culture in contemporary social work discourse

Conclusion

This paper has outlined the position that in social work discourse, "culture" is inscribed as a marker for difference, and that difference, constructed from within an orthodoxic, hegemonic discursive paradigm, is deployed as a marker of deficit. "Culture" has also largely replaced the categories of race and ethnicity as the preferred trope of difference: it is a markedly less controversial indicator than race, a category despite whose continued ubiquity is increasingly denied both conceptual legitimacy and political bona tides. It is also a more profitable device than ethnicity, a descriptor which seems to be used currently as a kind of particularized progeny of "race," and appears to be particularly useful only when coupled with "culture," its functional enunciation. The concept of culture has come to characterize the minority, the "person of color." Additionally, "culture," as the operationalized measure of racial and ethnic status, is conceived as an objectifiable body of knowledge which can constitute the legitimate foundation for the building of interventions. Such interventions, produced entirely within the conceptual paradigm which constructs "culture" as a deficit marker for subjected populations, cannot be considered other than an instrument which reinforces the subjugating paradigm from which it is fashioned.

Given this proposition that social work, either as a conflicted entity which finds itself in an irresolvable bind between two antithetical imperatives, or as a subjugating body which claims to dismantle hegemony while actively promoting it, fails in achieving its professed goals, what then can be done? What alternative conceptualizations and modes of practice can be adopted? The single suggestion offered by this paper is for social work to take pause from its preoccupation with the production of interventions and critically examine, de-naturalize, its foundational concepts--to excavate and uncover the mechanisms which assemble and perpetuate the predicament that renders its interventions moot. As Henry Louis Gates (1986) put it: "To use contemporary theories of criticism to explicate these modes of inscription is to demystify large and obscure ideological relations and, indeed, theory itself" (p. 592). Or in the words of Cornel West (1990), "demystification is the most illuminating mode of theoretical inquiry for those who promote the new cultural politics of difference" (West, 1990, p. 589).

Whether such a demystifying process can produce a different kind of discourse, a qualitatively different means of language usage which can be employed by social work to address the needs of the population it serves, without automatically attributing deficiencies to them or the issues that they confront, is difficult to foresee. Such a language, or a method of discourse would have to allow for the de-inscription from "culture" its current encumbrance of subjugation, allowing it to be understood not as a marker for the Other, but as a descriptor for inevitable human variation.