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

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Sept, 2005 by Yoosun Park

Culture as Deficit

In the literature reviewed, "culture" is inscribed unambiguously as a signifier of difference: "a state of enlightened consciousness enables one to connect with culturally different others at a new level of excitement and joy" (McPhatter, 1997, p. 265); "problems experienced by culturally diverse persons" (Sowers-Hoag & Sandau-Beckler, 1996, p. 38). This difference is written as a particular marker for ethnic minorities and people of color. All of the reviewed articles employ the labels "minority," "people of color," and "ethnic" as synonyms for the "culturally different" and the "culturally diverse." Morelli (1998) states, for example that:

   In the United States, our increasing populations of ethnic and
   racial minorities suffering with severe mental illnesses require
   culturally sensitive and culturally appropriate mental health
   services. The multiple facets of work involving culturally diverse
   individuals with severe mental illness challenge social work faculty
   to prepare students with salient, useful knowledge and skills.
   (p. 75)

Lieberman (1990), writes:

   on the average, it is more likely that a person from a
   particular culture (let's say Hispanic) will display
   more of a particular characteristic--let's say a
   tendency to defer to the wishes of others--than a
   person from another culture where that value is less
   prevalent. (p. 109)

That "culture" is conflated with race and ethnicity is conceptually and methdologically dubious; that it is invariably equated with minority races and ethnicities is cause for consternation. Deployed as a synonym for race, the traditional demarcator for difference in US society, and ethnicity, the sophisticated multifarious variant of "race," "culture" functions in this discourse as a referential demarcator measuring the distance these Others stand in relation to the Caucasian mainstream, inscribed in its turn as the "culture-free" norm. The inscription of "difference" begs the question "different from what?" Explicitly stated in some cases, (Pinderhughes, 1997; Mason et al, 1996; McPhatter, 1997; Lieberman, 1990) and implied in other cases (Sowers-Hoag & Sandau-Beckler, 1996; Haynes &Singh, 1992), the "white" mainstream as the point of comparison for difference and divergence is again consistent throughout the reviewed pieces. Lieberman (1990), referring to "Latino values," states in the most obvious example, that "when it comes to respect for the parents and the management of anger, the differences from Anglos are clear" (p. 108). Although,, this "cultural-sensitivity" accounting of group differences is a distinct improvement on the pernicious tradition of the mono-cultural grand narrative, this distinctively multiculturalist vision is not without problems.

Against the blank, white backdrop of the "culture-free" mainstream, the "cultured" Others are made visible in sharp relief, and this visibility--a sign of separateness and differentiation from the standard--are inscriptions of marginality. Embedded in the conceptualization of culture as difference, in other words, is that of difference conceptualized as deficiency. "Culture" in this arithmetic is a marker for the periphery, a contradictory descriptor for a deficit, since to have "culture," in this schema, is to be assigned a position subordinate to that of those inscribed as without "culture." As the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1993) puts it, "the more power one has, the less culture one enjoys, and the more culture one has, the less power one wields" (p. 202). "Difference" or "diversity," linked to the notion of culture in social work discourse does not describe the overall variance among cultures; does not function as a neutral descriptor for heterogeneity, but is a unidirectional identifier for those who are not normative.