Hegemony
Exactly what Gramsci meant by hegemony has been much argued over,1 but what is not in dispute is that it is a concept that Gramsci uses to explore relationships of power and the concrete ways in which these are lived. The realities of power are central to Gramsci's theorization of subaltern culture and consciousness. For him that consciousness could not but be an impoverished and unsystematic one, precisely because of the subaltern's relative powerlessness. Here, in a Note to which I shall...
Intellectuals and the Political Party
As I mentioned in Chapter 4 see pp. 96-7 , a key concept in Gramsci's theorization of the achievement of hegemony by 'fundamental social groups' is that of the political party. It is important here to clarify what Gramsci means by 'party' since once again Gramsci's usage is more inclusive than standard definitions. His Note 'Organisation of National Societies' explains both what he means by party, and how he sees parties as the bearers of particular cultures. In this Note Gramsci uses the term...
Cultures as Bounded Entities
I want now to move on to the assumption that cultures constitute discrete entities, an assumption that necessarily poses the question of where and how these different entities are bounded. It is helpful here to go back to Herder and the origins of the notion of culture as a particular way of life. The crucial shift in meaning initiated by Herder was the notion of cultures rather than culture. Replacing the idea of a single developmental process culminating in the achievement of 'culture' was...
Organization of the Book
The two chapters of Part I provide context. Chapter 2 gives a brief sketch of Gramsci's life and discusses the relationship between his life and his writings, explaining the profoundly political nature of his intellectual project in the prison notebooks. Gramsci, writing in his prison cell, may appear to have been removed from active political life, but for him his intellectual work and his writings in prison were a way of continuing to engage in the political events of his time. His concern in...
What Defines the Intellectual
An intellectual is commonly defined as 'an intellectual being a person possessing or supposed to possess superior powers of intellect' OED . Gramsci's definition runs significantly counter to this. What are the 'maximum' limits of acceptance of the term 'intellectual' Can one find a unitary criterion to characterise equally all the diverse and disparate activities of intellectuals and to distinguish these at the same time and in an essential way from the activities of other social groupings The...
Of Hybrids and Hybridity
Writing Culture, a collection of essays edited by James Clifford and George Marcus published in 1986, is often identified as marking an important change of course in anthropology. After Writing Culture, for many anthropologists it seemed that fieldwork - that central pillar of anthropological methodology - would never look quite the same. Both Clifford and Marcus can be considered major figures in contemporary anthropology but it is Clifford on whom I want to focus here, and in particular on...
Escaping Subalternity
Also relevant here is Gramsci's distinctly critical view of subaltern culture and his insistence that it is something subalterns must escape, which was discussed in Chapter 5. Subaltern culture for Gramsci is by definition confused and incoherent however keen their awareness of local realities of power, those trapped within subaltern culture remain incapable of grasping the larger landscapes of oppression in which they are located. It is the awareness of local, parochial realities that Scott's...
Colonialism and Subalternity
The current popularity of referring to subordinated groups in society as 'subaltern' is largely due to the work of the hugely influential Subaltern Studies group. The Subaltern Studies collective was founded by Ranajit Guha and other Indian historians and social theorists concerned to shift the debate around colonialism, the nationalist struggle and the emergence of modern India. In their view the role of non-elite groups had been sidelined and they castigated historians of India for their...
Creating Culture Creating Intellectuals
The production and reproduction of culture is at the heart of what intellectuals do as a distinct stratum within the dynamic of history. It is they who produce the broad cultural conceptions of the world that underpin particular power regimes, and in the case of the organic intellectuals of an emergent class help to bring into being a new culture. It may well be that the new ideas have their 'origins in mediocre philosophical works', but this does not matter. In Gramsci's view, What matters is...
Subaltern Culture
Subaltern classes are subject to the initiatives of the dominant classes, even when they rebel they are in a state of anxious defense. This chapter focuses on Gramsci's mapping of the cultural worlds inhabited by the subordinate and the subaltern. Gramsci's concern here is to trace out both the power relations that maintain their subordination and the cracks and fissures that could potentially lead to their overcoming it. In other words, what keeps the subaltern subaltern, and how might their...
Organic and Traditional Intellectuals
Gramsci begins his Note 'The Formation of the Intellectuals' with a question 'Are intellectuals an autonomous and independent social group, or does every social group have its own particular specialised category of intellectuals ' To answer this question, which 'is a complex one, because of the variety of forms assumed to date by the real historical process of formation of the different categories of intellectuals' SPN 5 , Gramsci begins by distinguishing between what he sees as the two most...
Explicit and Implicit Conceptions of the World
In a number of Notes Gramsci explores the difference between conceptions of the world which take an explicit, verbal form, and those that while they are not articulated, are implicit in how people act. In the Note 'Relation between science, religion and common sense', from which I have already quoted, Gramsci writes Philosophy in general does not in fact exist. Various philosophies or conceptions of the world exist, and one always makes a choice between them. How is this choice made Is it...
Common Sense and Good Sense
Common sense for Gramsci, as he explains in this passage, occupies a position somewhere between folklore and the knowledge produced by specialists. Every social stratum has its own 'common sense' and its own 'good sense', which are basically the most widespread conception of life and of man. Every philosophical current leaves behind a sedimentation of 'common sense' this is the document of its historical effectiveness. Common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually...
A Complicated Word
All anthropologists would likely agree that culture has been one of the discipline's central concepts. In a much cited essay, 'Thick Description', first published in 1973, Clifford Geertz described culture as the concept 'around which the whole discipline of anthropology arose' Geertz 1973a 4 , a claim many anthropologists would probably accept. At the same time, just how the term culture has been defined has varied hugely. In the 1950s A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckholm collected over a hundred...
Davide Lazzaretti
Lazzaretti was born in 1834 in a remote part of Tuscany. He was a carter by trade and served as a volunteer in the national army in 1860. In 1868 he began a career as a religious visionary, retiring to a cave from which he emerged periodically to prophesy about the coming of a new order of which he was the messiah. He attracted an extensive following which alarmed the local authorities and in 1878 he was shot dead by the Carabinieri as he came down from his mountain to proclaim the...
Culture and the Notion of Tradition
From when it was first expanded to refer to a specific way of life, which as I have stressed happened in a particular historical context, the concept of culture was entwined with an opposition between tradition and modernity. Wolf puts it this way in Envisioning Power 'Revolutionary and Imperial France asserted dominance over Europe in the name of rationalism, secularism, and equality the Germanies responded with traditionalizing and spiritual countermovements in the name of culture' 1999 64 ....
Gramsci and Teleology
Gramsci most certainly did not have a teleological view of human history and had little time for those who did. His dismissive attitude comes out clearly in the prison notebooks, as when he castigates those who oppose on principle any form of political compromise For the conception upon which the aversion is based can only be the iron conviction that there exist objective laws of historical development similar in kind to natural laws, together with a belief in a predetermined teleology like...
Folklore
One of the ways Gramsci approaches the question of subaltern culture, as in the extract from 'Observations on Folklore' quoted above p. 99 , is through the notion of folklore. The category folklore, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as 'The traditional beliefs, legends, and customs, current among the common people the study of these', emerged throughout Europe in the nineteenth century out of the same intellectual and political currents as the modern notion of nationalism. Folklore was...
Hegemony Lite and Gramscis Hegemony
I have argued that culture for Gramsci is, in part, the ways in which class is lived in particular time and places. A crucial dimension of how class is lived is as specific power relations. The concept of hegemony helps us to grasp how power is lived in a given context, and how certain regimes of power - remembering that no regime is uncontested - are produced and reproduced in the day-to-day lives of individuals. Keesing's work on anticolonial struggles in the Solomon islands provides a good...
Structure and Superstructure
In the prison notebooks Gramsci often wrestles with 'the problem of the relations between structure and superstructure', as in the Note 'Analysis of Situations. Relations of Force'. Gramsci argues here that it is important to distinguish between the various 'moments or levels' of 'relations of forces' existing in society. The first level, essentially the level of 'structure', is A relation of social forces which is closely linked to the structure, objective, independent of human will, and which...
Gramsci Now
In general, for these last few months, I have felt more isolated and completely cut off from the life of the world. I read a lot, books and magazines a lot in relation to the intellectual life that one can lead in prison. But I have lost much of the pleasure in reading. Books and magazines only offer general ideas, sketches more or less successful of general currents in the world's life, but they cannot give the immediate, direct, vivid impression of the lives of Peter, Paul, and John, of...
Why Should an Anthropologist Read Gramsci
All too often anthropologists seem to assume, at least implicitly, that when Gramsci refers to culture he means what they mean by culture. Drawing attention to just how different Gramsci's concept of culture is can be a useful way of beginning to defamiliarize what is perhaps an over familiar term in anthropology. Reading Gramsci, and tracing out his complex and sometimes shifting definitions of culture, can offer the attentive anthropological reader a fresh approach to one of the discipline's...
The Informal Logic of Actual Life
That cultures are in some sense patterned wholes has been fundamental to the anthropological notion of culture as 'a way of life', however that may have been understood. Roger Keesing, for instance, in his 1974 Annual Review of Anthropology survey article of current theories of culture in anthropology, argues that the many different, and often conflicting, 'recent rethinkings of culture' can be seen as falling into four broad types cultures as adaptive systems, cultures as cognitive systems,...
Tradition Modernity and Mexican Machismo
For Gramsci subaltern cultures are, by their very condition of emergence, far from being the bounded, discrete entities that, as I argued in Chapter 3, the concept of culture in mainstream anthropology has tended, explicitly or implicitly, to assume. Gutmann's picture of the fractured, incoherent, and sometimes contradictory, bundle of ideas and practices which constitute 'being a man' in Santo Domingo is closer to Gramsci here in its clear rejection of any notion of a distinct entity that we...
Class and Gender
An important strength of Gutmann's study is the attention it pays to gender and the processes by which gendered identities come into being. His account of these processes is rich and nuanced, and contains many insights. Here, however, what I want to focus on is Gutmann's understanding of the relations between gender and class. According to him, what it meant to be a man was changing in Santo Domingo with, for example, many men doing more in the way of domestic tasks, formerly seen as women's...
Raymond Williams Gramsci
While anthropologists who cite Gramsci commonly refer to such well known Gramsci commentators as Laclau and Mouffe, Femia, and Perry Anderson, by far the most influential source on Gramsci for anthropologists has been Raymond Williams. Williams' 1977 Marxism and Literature, particularly the section on hegemony 1977 108-14 , is the text most frequently quoted or cited as a gloss on hegemony.1 Another important figure in the introduction of Gramsci into anthropology is a theorist with close ties...
Culture and Class in the Later Wolf
As I have already stressed, Wolf insists on the importance of history, writing in the Preface to Europe and the People without History 'The insights of anthropology have to be rethought in the light of a new, historically oriented political economy' 1982 ix . He is equally insistent that the old notion of cultures as bounded and fixed must be abandoned, writing in the Afterword 'Once we locate the reality of society in historically changing, imperfectly bounded, multiple and branching social...
Hegemony Lite
The main problem with how the concept of hegemony has been understood within anthropology, I would argue, is that hegemony is taken as referring not to the whole field of power, but only to the domain of beliefs and ideas. In terms of the old Marxist debates over idealist versus materialist accounts of the world, hegemony has become an essentially idealist concept. It is somewhat ironic that the Gramsci introduced into anthropology by Williams should have taken such an idealist turn, given how...
Eric Wolf and the Anthropological Project
Marx, while currently unfashionable, has had a significant, if often hidden and unacknowledged, presence within Anglo-American anthropology throughout most of its history as a modern discipline. But it was only in the aftermath of the upheavals of the 1960s that Marxism emerged from the shadows and became, at least for a few years, highly influential among American and British anthropologists. The work of a number of French Marxist anthropologists, such as Maurice Godelier, Claude Meillassoux...
Two Concepts of Class
Anthropologists, along with other social scientists and historians, have long debated the usefulness, or otherwise, of the concept of class. Nowadays, class is a distinctly unfashionable concept. One common criticism is that the theory of class is an overgeneralizing master narrative which, firstly, crams complicated and varied tapestries of inequality into a series of oversimple, overrigid boxes, and secondly, claims universality, but which has in fact been fashioned from the particularities...