ABSTRACT
Social space is now completely saturated with the image of culture, Fredric Jameson has claimed. In social work, this is visible in the increasingly broadening reaches of cultural competence as part of its instruction. While originally focused on increasing awareness of racial and ethnic differences amongst service users, cultural competence can now refer to the complex layers of identity formation, and the multiple and overlapping strands of oppression, which social work deals with. The dual attempt of organisations such as the International Federation of Social Work (IFSW) to hold both rigorous standards for social work practice across the globe, and to use such rigour as a force to challenge the global interconnection of oppression and marginalisation, must negotiate the question of culture. The sense in which the other is formed as a mirror image of the self is rooted in the dualisms of modern philosophy.
