Gramsci, Culture And Anthropology: An Introductory Text (Reading Gramsci)

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Gramsci, Culture and AnthropologyBy Kate Crehan Pluto PressCopyright © 2002 Kate CrehanAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-7453-1677-2ContentsReading Gramsci,Joseph A. Buttigieg, vii,Abbreviations, x,1. Introduction, 1,PART I CONTEXTS,2. Gramsci's Life and Work, 13,3. Anthropology and Culture: Some Assumptions, 36,PART II GRAMSCI ON CULTURE,4. Culture and History, 71,5. Subaltern Culture, 98,6. Intellectuals and the Production of Culture, 128,PART III GRAMSCI AND ANTHROPOLOGY,7. Gramsci Now, 165,Bibliography, 211,Index, 215,CHAPTER 1INTRODUCTIONIf one wants to study a conception of the world that has never been systematically expounded by its author-thinker, detailed work is required, and it has to be conducted with the most scrupulous accuracy and scientific honesty ... The search for the leitmotiv, the rhythm of the thought, more important than single, isolated quotations.(PNII: 137)This book is about the concept of culture in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and the potential relevance of Gramsci's approach to culture for contemporary anthropologists. The basic question it addresses is: what might anthropologists, and others interested in issues of culture, have to gain from reading this early twentieth-century Italian Marxist? Its aim is not so much to answer this question as to provide readers with the information they need to decide for themselves.In the 30 years since the publication of the first major English edition of Gramsci's prison notebooks, Gramsci has become a name much cited by anthropologists. However, as Michel Foucault noted in a 1984 letter to the Gramsci scholar Joseph Buttigieg, Gramsci remains an author who is cited more often than he is genuinely known. Most anthropologists it would seem get their Gramsci second-hand. A key interpreter of Gramsci for anthropologists is Raymond Williams; the section on hegemony in Williams' Marxism and Literature is probably the gloss on this much-argued-over Gramscian term most commonly cited by anthropologists. A reliance on interpreters and secondary sources is understandable given the nature of Gramsci's major work, the prison notebooks. For while these notebooks are without doubt one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Marxism and have given rise to a vast literature, they are also a collection of fragments; a series of individual Notes on related topics, some as short as a few sentences, some article length, that were never organized by Gramsci into a systematic whole. My hope is that this book will help provide a way into Gramsci's writings for those who would like to engage seriously with his thought but are not quite sure where to start.I have chosen to organize this book around the concept of culture, firstly because this complicated and often slippery term is so central both to anthropology and to Gramsci's overall intellectual project, but secondly because what culture means in Gramsci's writings is often very different from what it has commonly meant in anthropology. Exploring this divergence and examining some of its implications is one of the book's major concerns. It is not, however, its only concern: this is also a book about the concept of class. Those who cite Gramsci's writings on culture are not always sufficiently aware that for Gramsci the notion of culture is always inextricably entangled with that of class. Culture for Gramsci is, at least in part, how class realities are lived. As I shall argue in subsequent chapters, an important part of the value of Gramsci's writings on culture is that they provide us with an insightful approach to the whole issue of class and inequality that is undogmatic, nuanced and never economically reductionist.My intention, however, is not to force my particular interpretation of Gramsci on the reader. Rather I have attempted to provide an introduction to Gramsci's writings on culture that, while supplying the necessary context,