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Cultural distinctions
Culture is the consensual relationship between people in a civil society where their ideas, institutions, and people influence one another ([26] Said, 1979; [25] Popper, 2005). Cultural activity in its heterogeneity and plurality give the modern Western State its profundity and power ([13] Gramsci, 1971; [28] Said, 1983). A society's culture determines the norm and abnormal in which are based in the native culture's traditional values ([33] Smrtic, 2010; [3] Burke and Christensen, 2004; [2] Anzaldúa, 1987). As Edward Said describes:
That's why I think culture is so important. It provides a visionary alternative, a distinction between the this-worldliness and the blockage that one sees so much in the world of the everyday, in which we live, which doesn't allow us to see beyond the impossible odds in power and status that are stacked, for example, against Palestinians, and the possibility of dreaming a different dream and seeing an alternative to all this ([32] Said and Barsamian, 2010, pp. 105-106).
Culture is integral to narrative and image production of a group of people. It also produces "desiring maps that exercise a powerful pedagogical force over how people think about themselves and their relationship to others" ([11] Giroux, 2008, p. 118). Use-value, according to [22] Muñoz (1999), "of any narrative of identity that reduces subjectivity to either a social construct model or what has been called an essentialist understanding of the self is especially exhausted" (p. 5). The strongest and most cogent narratives are those of integration and not separation, where people fight to be included into a culture ([29] Said, 1994).
In composing a worldly cultural perception within a historical context:
[...] we will need to emerge from the narrative perspective of US [United States] unilateralism and, as it were, its defensive structures, to consider the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others ([4] Butler, 2004, p. 7).
In the discourse and institution of education, students need to move beyond a monolith of cultural understanding as well as grand narratives in order to understand that their culture is not separate from the world's interaction and history ([12] Giroux, 2005; [29], [31] Said, 1994, 2001). It must be understood that:
[...] we effectively "understand" a foreign culture...