Introduction: Gramsci's Life and
Work
The Multiple Trajectories of
Culture, Power and Resistance
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Culture in Anthropology and in
Gramsci
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Culture is a central organizing concept in anthropology and in Gramsci’s
work.
Culture in anthropology: ‘that complex whole…that includes everything
man learns as a member of society’ (Tylor 1871). Implicit here is of
‘culture’ as shared, homogeneous, and bounded.
Culture in Gramsci is very different: cultures are not homogeneous.
Rather, culture involves meanings that are:
 i. differentially distributed.
 Ii. Can be partial or fragmentary, especially for dominated groups.
 Iii. Is not bounded, i.e. the worldviews and knowledge of dominated
groups are continually impinged on and shaped by the dominant.
 Iv. Is dependent upon shifting constellations of power.
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Gramsci’s Life and Times
Born in 1891 in Sardinia, an island off the Italian coast dominated by peasant agriculture and
shepherding.
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Into a middle-class, but poverty-stricken family whose fortunes declined when the father was
wrongfully convicted of embezzlement.
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Suffered from ill-health as a child, especially TB of the spine that left him hunch-backed.
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Won a scholarship to Turin University in 1991 to study linguistics, Turin being a centre of
automobile manufacturing in the northern industrial heartland of Italy.
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Became heavily involved in socialist politics while in Turin
 1916: abandoned his master’s program to become a full-time political activist.
 1917: unsuccessful insurrection by the Turin workers. Gramsci became secretary of the
Socialist Party.
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1919-20: strike and attempted takeover of Fiat motors by Turin workers, run along soviet
lines, but decentralized. Repression by Italian government.
 1922: Mussolini comes to power backed by industrialists, and southern estate owners, as
well as large sections of the middle class.
 Gramsci in Soviet Union 1921-24. Marries a German expatriate and has two children.
 1924: Gramsci returns to Italy as a parliamentary deputy (M.P.).
 1926: Gramsci arrested, along with 21 members of the PCI.
 1927: Tried and convicted of sedition; prosecutor states the ‘We must stop this brain working
for 20 years’. Gramsci sented to jail for 20 years, 4 months and 5 days.
 1927-1938: Gramsci wrote 30 notebooks on subjects such as Italian history, culture and
politics, intellectuals and popular culture, and Italian nationalism.
7/17/2016  These later became compiled and translated as ‘The Prison Notebooks’.
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Gramsci in relation to Marxism
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Gramsci trained as a linguist and throughout his life retained a major interest in literature and popular
culture.
Read some, but not all, of the writings of Marx.
Agreed with Marx that capitalism produces inequality and differential power relations between
classes. These he defined as hegemonic and subaltern classes. But this was the starting, not the
end point of analyses.
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Important to keep in mind that Gramsci defined neither the dominant or subaltern classes rigidly. Could
include diverse groups which varied according to historical context.
However, he argued that how these power relations between the dominant and subaltern were
expressed in any given country depended to a great extent on historical particularities and the
element of ‘volition’ or ‘agency’. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.
Also, he saw categories as methodological tools, not as absolute givens. Hence, the term ‘peasantry’
had to be locally contextualized: in Italy, for example, there were several peasantries, with one of the
major differences being between agriculturalists in northern and southern Italy.
One of his major aims was to unite the peasants of southern Italy to northern Italian ‘subaltern
groups’, including factory workers and agricultural workers. Great differences in culture and
technology between the two regions.
His cultural and political analyses were aimed at discovering the points of least resistance in the
various fissures created by the fundamental inequalities of capitalism.
Dialogic approach to his writings and theorizing: he always assumed an interlocutor. Believed that for
any change to occur, it had to become ‘popular’, i.e. agreed to by large numbers of people.
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Hegemony and Hegemonies
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What is meant by hegemony has been much argued over because Gramsci
seemed to use it in different ways depending upon the context he was writing
about.
Crehan: sees this not as due to the problems of prison writing, but rather as
characteristic of the concept itself.
Most quoted definition:
1. The spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the population to the
general direction impose don social life by the dominant froups; this consent is
historically caused by the prestige and consequent confidence which the
dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of
production.
This was contrasted to:
2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on
those groups who do not ‘consent either actively or passively. This apparatus is,
however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis
of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed.
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Hegemony as a Shifty Concept
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In the previous passage, Gramsci appears to link hegemony to institutions,
individuals and activities emanating from ‘civil society’, i.e. that part of a
society which is not part of the formal state machinery.
In other passages, however, he speaks about the hegemonic activities and
functions of state agencies themselves.
All these terms, hegemony, state, civil society and coercion are understood
as methodological terms only.
They constitute a knot of tangled power relations. The term hegemony in
itself, only names the problem, i.e. how do certain groups of people come to
have their interests and worldviews defined as worldviews ‘in general’, or as
‘the national will’, ‘the culture of a nation or ethnic group’?
The question of how they do this has to be answered locally.
Assumes that a term like culture, is a product of struggle between
contending groups. Although unlike the liberal view, that assumes that
everyone has an equal say, Gramsci believed that certain groups, due to the
position in production and politics, had a much greater say in defining reality
and culture than the majority.
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