Gramsci in the Social Sciences: Anthropology. In Commons, 2018-10-19.

The article is devoted to the reception and transformation of Antonio Gramsci’s legacy in anthropological thought from the 1980s to the present. It examines how Gramsci’s observation of popular culture led him to the idea that the difference between folklore and elite culture lies only in the coherence and orderliness of the picture of the world each offers. This difference is reflected in the opposition between the concepts of “good sense” and “common sense.” Gramsci sees the aim of the progressive intellectual as finding lines of least resistance for the emancipatory reshaping of the popular worldview.

The author shows how the Gramscian concept of “hegemony,” mediated mainly by English-language scholars, has become an integral part of the categorical apparatus of anthropology, and sees a problem in the superficial and overly loose interpretation of this concept. Gramsci’s key ideas appear as a response to the challenges that have accompanied anthropology over recent decades: the crisis of determinism, structuralism, and world-systems analysis. As an example, the author cites the work of contemporary anthropologist Kate Crehan, who applied them to analyze two social movements born of the 2008 economic recession: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.