Recultivating culture : an analysis of culture as a site of ideology

In this paper, I examine the ways in which the concept of culture functions as a site of ideology that is used to Other individuals and communities. Political, economic, and geographical positioning is reduced and manipulated, elevating the idea of culture into a primary way of viewing and understanding the world. As a case study, I will be examining the way in which culture is applied to individuals associated with or deemed to be associated with, by the white Western world, "the Muslim world." The culturalization of these individuals will serve as evidence for the way in which the cultural framework is prominent in discourse today. I call for a closer critique of the ways in which the concept of culture is utilized in our world in order to call attention to a dependence on a logic of difference that results in the reproduction of historical systems of domination in the United States.