Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937)

Antonio Gramsci is considered one of the foremost Marxist theorists of the 20th century. Though he was not an anthropologist, his work has had a tremendous impact on the field of anthropology, and he was a major influence on social theorists of such stature as Louis Althusser,Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Stuart Hall. He reworked many of classical Marxism's key concepts (for example, ideology, class consciousness, base and superstructure) in ways that opened them up to engagement with anthropological analyses of society, and his concept of hegemony has been particularly key to critical explorations of the intersection of culture and politics. The field of “cultural studies” is rooted largely in interpretations and applications of his ideas.

Born in Sardinia and shaped by a difficult childhood, Gramsci was no armchair theorist, but an activist deeply engaged in political struggles, especially the factory council movement in Turin. As a young man, he abandoned a promising academic career to dedicate himself to journalism. His columns, articles, theater reviews, and translations of labor news from around Europe (especially Russia) were widely read, and he eventually became a leading figure in the Italian Socialist Party and, later, the Italian Communist Party. His political activity became increasingly confrontational after Mussolini's rise to power in1922. He was a member of the Italian Parliament from 1924 until his arrest, along with other Communist Party deputies, in 1926. At his trial, prosecutor Michele Isgrò reportedly declared: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.” Despite suffering severe health problems in prison, Gramsci repeatedly refused to ask for clemency from the fascist government. He was granted conditional freedom in late 1934 (though he continued under constant police surveillance), but he never regained his health and spent his last few years as an invalid, transferring from one hospital to another; these efforts proved futile, and he succumbed to a brain hemorrhage at the age of 46.

Gramsci's most influential writings were produced in prison. Eventually collected as the Quaderni del Carcere,or Prison Notebooks, they were published piecemeal after World War II, and attracted great attention and critical commentary not only in the West but also in the new nations emerging from European colonialism. Paradoxically, the limitations under which Gramsci produced his theoretical formulations are partly what made them such fertile ground for later scholars. In order to escape the vigilance of the prison censors, Gramsci wrote in a purposefully ambiguous style, avoiding explicit references to Marxism-Leninism. The theoretical framework that he sketched out was both concrete and open-ended, inasmuch as his formulations were usually framed within specific historical struggles or political questions, but pregnant with implications that extended beyond the particular case at hand. It is precisely this flexible, nondogmatic quality of his ideas that has allowed them to be engaged by numerous disciplines and applied to a wide range of social themes and contexts.

The Notebooks' content is wide-ranging, but it is Gramsci's concern for integrating political action with organized cultural activity that holds particular relevance for anthropology. Central to Gramsci's vision of political struggle is the notion of hegemony, which he conceived as a social order based on a combination of coercion and consent. Hegemony is totalizing in intent but never total in practice; since it accommodates and incorporates oppositional strains rather than repressing them by brute force, it must be constantly shored up and negotiated, and it often contains the ideological seeds of its own undoing. In order for the dominant sectors of society to construct a hegemonic bloc—a political consensus that incorporates a range of disparate social groups—the interests of the dominated must be articulated to the dominant interest. Since ideology plays a key role in this articulation, it can no longer be viewed as a merely superstructural phenomenon, derivative of economic relationships; rather, it is one of many elements shaping the evolution of political processes. This rejection [Page 1108]of a rigid division between an exclusively determining economic “base” and a determined “superstructure,” in favor of a more dialectic relationship between levels of social activity, distinguishes Gramsci's thought from that of more orthodox Marxists, whom he criticized for their economism and reductionism.

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