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Gramsci's concept of commonsense: a useful concept
foranthropologists?Kate Crehan aa College of Staten Island and the
Graduate CenterPublished online: 22 Feb 2011.
To cite this article: Kate Crehan (2011) Gramsci's concept of
common sense: a usefulconcept for anthropologists?, Journal of
Modern Italian Studies, 16:2, 273-287,
DOI:10.1080/1354571X.2011.542987
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Gramscis concept of common sense: a useful concept
for anthropologists?
Kate Crehan
College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center
Abstract
The article begins with a brief look at the anthropological
notion of culture and someof its ghosts, contrasting this with
Gramscis very different approach. It goes on tolook in detail at
Gramscis concept of common sense, arguing that common sense
astheorized by Gramsci provides anthropologists (whose discipline
is so concernedwith the quotidian) and others, with a useful
theoretical tool with which to mapeveryday life. Gramscis
understanding of common sense encompasses its givenness how it is
both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as an
external reality but also stresses its contradictions, fluidity and
potential for change. To help clarifythe specific character of the
Gramscian notion of common sense, the article comparesit with
another concept that has been widely embraced within anthropology
andelsewhere: Pierre Bourdieus notion of habitus a notion, I argue,
that remains inmany ways tethered to its anthropological
origins.
Keywords
Gramsci, common sense, culture, anthropology, Bourdieu,
habitus.
Common sense . . . the traditional popular conception of the
world what
is unimaginatively called instinct, although it too is in fact a
primitive and
elementary historical acquisition. (Gramsci 1971: 199)
How might Gramscis concept of common sense be useful for
anthropologists?
In English common sense is a term whose meaning tends to be
taken as self-
evident. In one recent anthropological study, for instance, Ann
Stolers (2009)
Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial
Common Sense,
common sense (as the subtitle indicates) is a central category;
and yet nowhere
in the book does Stoler feel it necessary either to define
common sense or to
discuss its character as a theoretical category. The meaning of
common sense in
Gramscis writings, however, is far from self-evident. First,
there is the problem
that the English term common sense is not a simple equivalent to
the Italian
term senso comune. While common sense is a generally positive
term, signifying,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Good sound practical
sense;
combined tact and readiness in dealing with the every-day
affairs of life; general
Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16(2) 2011: 273287
Journal of Modern Italian StudiesISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN
1469-9583 online 2011 Taylor &
Francishttp://www.informaworld.com DOI:
10.1080/1354571X.2011.542987
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sagacity, the Italian term has none of these positive
connotations. Senso comune
refers simply to the beliefs and opinions supposedly shared by
the mass of the
population. And indeed one of the main arguments I want to make
in this essay
is that one of the great virtues of Gramscis concept of common
sense for
anthropologists is precisely its broad, all-inclusive character.
To understand why
this inclusiveness might be so helpful to anthropologists,
however, it is necessary
to go back to the historical origins of one of anthropologys
most fundamental
concepts, the concept of culture, and the lingering effects of
these origins.1
The anthropological view of humankind as comprised of a
diversity of
cultures, each with its own way of life, emerges out of
Romanticism and
nineteenth century narratives of Nationalism. At the heart of
these narratives is
the claim that a nation represents a specific people born of a
specific territory
to which, by virtue of this special kind of belonging, they have
an inalienable
right. Actual nation-states may be quite recent creations in
historical terms and
their boundaries in reality far from fixed, but nations
themselves those
imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson termed them,
underpinning the
concept of the nation state seem almost to inhabit a realm
outside time. They
both loom out of an immemorial past and glide into a limitless
future
(Anderson 1991: 1112). This assumption of a fixity and
permanence rooted in
tradition is one of the major roots of the anthropological
concept of culture.
In line with this way of imagining cultures, there has been a
tendency for
history to be seen as something that happens to cultures, rather
than cultures
being seen as themselves the ever-shifting products of
history.
One strand in the broader discourse of nineteenth-century
Nationalism, as
Andersons use of the term community indicates, is a fundamental
opposition
between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. And this has left its
legacy in anthropology.
The opposition was first formalized by Frederick Tonnies in his
enormously
influential Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Here Tonnies
defines gemeinschaft
as an authentic, usually relatively small, community, which is
woven together by
ties of kinship, and often a common religious affiliation, into
a tight-knit web of
moral cohesion. Gesellschaften, by contrast, are the impersonal,
conflict-ridden
and essentially artificial associations characteristic of the
modern industrial
world. The allure of community an entity more often evoked than
defined
remains powerful. Tellingly, unlike other terms of social
organization, such as
state or society, community is a term that seems, as Raymond
Williams noted,
never to be used unfavourably (Williams 1983).
Let me be clear here: in no way am I suggesting that
contemporary
anthropologists think of the cultural worlds they study in the
Romantic terms
of nineteenth-century Nationalism. My point is, simply, that the
notion of
culture remains marked by its emergence within this context and
that the
anthropological concept of culture continues to be haunted by
the ghost of the
traditional, and the pervasive warm glow of gemeinschaft.
Another significant characteristic of the anthropological notion
of culture is
the assumption that cultures are essentially systems. In an
enormously
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influential formulation, Edward Tylor (1871) defined culture as
that complex
whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom
and any
other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society.
Anthropologists over the years have had very different
understandings of the
precise nature of that complex whole, but running through these
different
understandings tends to be the assumption that, whatever else
they may be,
cultures are in some sense systems. Anthropologists today may no
longer think
of cultures as bounded entities, but certain a priori, if often
implicit,
assumptions that cultures, however conflictual and contradictory
they may be,
are nonetheless systems of one kind or another tend to
linger.
Gramscis concept of culture
Gramsci offers us a very different notion of culture. In part
this is because his
concern with culture stems from quite other roots than those of
anthropology.
The anthropological projects origins can be traced to Europes
expanding
confrontation with new and unfamiliar worlds and a determination
to
dominate these new worlds - but also reflected is the would-be
dominators
awareness that to be successful they needed to understand those
with whom
they were now having to deal. The emergence of anthropology as a
distinct
discipline was rooted in a concern to understand these
unfamiliar others in
their own terms. Anthropologists may often have failed to live
up to this ideal;
but whatever their faults, colonial anthropologists tended to be
more
concerned with the understanding and preservation of the
cultures they
studied rather than their transformation one reason why actual
colonial
administrators often found the work of anthropologists of little
practical use.
Gramscis project, however, was not that of anthropology. He was
a
political activist committed to the revolutionary transformation
of his society, a
transformation that for him necessarily involved radical
cultural change. This is
because the realities of power bring into being cultures of
subordination; the
subordinated come to see the hierarchies of the world they
inhabit as inevitable
and inescapable, the will of God or the law of nature. They may
not like their
subordination, but they cannot see how things could possibly be
other than as
they are. Any revolutionary transformation both brings about and
depends on
the transformation of the existing culture of subordination.
There is no simple
recipe, however, for cultural transformation; it is a complex
historical process in
which there needs to be an active dialogue between intellectuals
and non-
intellectuals. Those who live the harsh realities of
subordination, however
capable they may be of everyday resistance, cannot, in Gramscis
view,
themselves come up with the coherent, effective
counter-narratives necessary if
the existing hegemony is to be overcome. But it is just as true
that intellectuals
cannot themselves devise these narratives unaided. It is their
interaction with
the subordinated and what Gramsci termed their feeling-passion
in other
words the raw experience of oppression that educates the
intellectuals. And it
Gramscis concept of common sense
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is only when there is a genuine dialogue between intellectuals
and non-
intellectuals that an effective political force, a historical
bloc, capable of
transforming society can come into being:
If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation,
between the
leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an
organic
cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and
thence
knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then
and only then
is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there
take place an
exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled,
leaders
[dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which
alone is a social
force with the creation of the historical bloc. (Gramsci 1971:
418)
If they were to have any hope of being effective, in Gramscis
view, Italian
revolutionaries needed to understand the complicated
relationship between
intellectuals and the mass of the population over the course of
the history of their
country, and devise strategies for change that make sense in the
cultural worlds
occupied by the mass of the population. This conviction lies
behind Gramscis
interest in culture and its prominence as a topic in the prison
notebooks.
The prison notebooks themselves were Gramscis response to
his
incarceration. Despite having been condemned in 1928 by
Mussolinis fascist
regime to a twenty-year prison sentence, Gramsci was determined,
as far as
humanly possible, to use his time to study and write. And, not
surprisingly, a
question that runs through the prison notebooks is: What had led
to the defeat
of the left in Italy? And how might that defeat be reversed?
Before his arrest,
Gramsci had a long career as a political journalist, but while
he saw such writing
as important, he also saw it, as he put it in a letter from
prison to his sister-in-
law Tatiana Schucht, as essentially ephemeral: In ten years of
journalism I
wrote enough lines to fill fifteen or twenty volumes of 400
pages each, but they
were written for the day, and in my opinion, were supposed to
die with the
day (Gramsci 1994: 66). Forcibly removed from the immediacy of
the day-to-
day political struggle, Gramsci was determined to devote himself
to a more
rigorous study of the roots of fascisms triumph in Italy and the
failures of the
Left that had led to this triumph. Understanding this required,
in Gramscis
view, an exploration of culture. When and how has culture
changed? When
and how has it persisted? The concept of culture here is best
understood as a
shared way of being and living, which has come into existence as
a result of the
interaction of myriad historical forces, and that remains
subject to history.
Cultures for Gramsci, while they may seem to persist for long
periods of time,
are always also in flux, coming into being, undergoing
transformation, passing
away. Gramsci never assumes that cultures constitute systematic
wholes. The
degree to which a given culture can be seen as some kind of
system is an
empirical question which, like the question of its persistence
or transformation,
can only be answered by careful empirical study.
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Gramscis thinking was very much grounded in Marx and for him, as
for
Marx, the ultimate shaping forces in human history were a
societys basic
economic structures structures defined by how resources are
distributed in
that society. The systematic and persistent inequalities of such
structures give
rise to distinct classes. But while Gramsci saw culture as
fundamentally shaped
by economic forces, he was no crude economic determinist,
stressing, for
instance (Gramsci 1971: 162), Engelss caution that,
According to the materialist conception of history, the
ultimately determin-
ing factor in history is the production and reproduction of real
life. Neither
Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence if somebody
twists this
into saying that the economic factor is the only determining
one, he
transforms the proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd
phrase. (Marx
and Engels 1975: 394, original emphasis)
One way of characterizing Gramscis approach to culture is that
culture is how
the realities of class are lived.2 We all of us come to
consciousness as members of
specific cultural worlds at specific historical moments and we
tend to experience
the particular realities of our cultural world as fixed and
unalterable, no more
than simple reflections of the way the world is. Such realities
as disparities of
wealth and power, for instance, may be thought of as the
manifestation of the
laws of economics or of divine will, and they may be celebrated
or railed against,
but to those whose everyday reality they are, they appear
unchangeable. Only a
fool or a madman would even try. The emblematic figure here is
Don Quixote
charging windmills. To capture the solidity and apparent
naturalness of
cultures in the eyes of those who inhabit them, Gramsci uses the
notion of
common sense, and it is this aspect of Gramscis approach to
culture on which I
focus here.
I want to begin, however, not with Gramsci, but with another
theorist,
whose way of naming the taken-for-granted in everyday life has
been widely
embraced within anthropology. The theorist is Pierre Bourdieu
and the
concept that of habitus. Habitus has seemed to many
anthropologists to offer a
powerful theoretical tool for those wrestling with the problem
of theorizing
everyday life. Here I want to use the notion of habitus to throw
into relief the
character of Gramscis very different concept of common
sense.
Habitus and doxa
The concept of habitus was introduced into sociology by Marcel
Mauss in his
essay Techniques of the body, but it is Bourdieus formulation
(very different
from that of Mauss) with which most anthropologists are
familiar. Although
Bourdieu would come to define himself as a sociologist, he began
his intellectual
career as an anthropologist, and it was empirical
anthropological research that
gave birth to many of his theoretical concepts, including his
elaboration of
Gramscis concept of common sense
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habitus. In A reply to some objections (first presented in the
mid-1980s) he
draws attention to the ethnographic works which are at the
origin of most of
my concepts and takes his critics to task for ignoring, the
anthropological
foundation of a theory of action, or of practice . . . condensed
in the notion of
habitus (Bourdieu 1990a: 107, emphasis added). As he explains,
he developed
the concept of habitus in response to specific questions that
arose for him in the
course of his fieldwork among the Kabyles in Algeria. Notions
that I developed
gradually, such as the notion of habitus, came from the desire
to recall that beside
the express, explicit norm, or the rational calculation, there
are other principles
that generate practices (Bourdieu 1990a: 76). His explication of
habitus in
Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) can be seen as
rooted in the very
anthropological project of attempting to understand the
structuring mechanisms
shaping a way of life (in this case that of the Kabyles), which
those who live it,
simply live, without apparently having any need to be
consciously aware of these
mechanisms. Indeed, as Bourdieu shows and this is as true of
other societies as
it is of the Kabyles sometimes it is important that members of a
culture are not
consciously aware of the rules they are following. Gift giving
is one example he
uses. All societies have their shared understandings of what
constitutes
acceptable and appropriate norms of reciprocity; too close an
examination of
whether particular individuals are observing those norms, or
whether a given
transaction adheres to them, risks bringing the whole edifice of
assumed
disinterested generosity crashing down. With the concept of
habitus Bourdieu
seeks to provide a way of thinking about the all-important but
submerged
mechanisms that orchestrate how the members of a given group go
about their
daily lives. He defines it in Outline of a Theory of Practice as
follows:
The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment
(e.g. the
material conditions of existence characteristic of a class
condition) produce
habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions,
structured structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as
principles of the
generation and structuring of practices and representation which
can be
objectively regulated and regular without in any way being the
product of
obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without
presupposing a
conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations
necessary to
obtain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated
without being the
product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu,
1977: 72,
original emphasis)
Note here that one example of what produces habitus is: the
material
conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition, and
that habitus is
defined as comprising systems of dispositions. I shall come back
to both these
points. The term disposition itself, as Bourdieu explains in a
footnote to this
passage, seems particularly suited to express what is covered by
the concept of
habitus (defined as a system of dispositions). First, because it
conveys the idea
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of the result of an organizing action, with a meaning close to
that of words such as
structure . . . . Second, it also designates a way of being, a
habitual state
(especially of the body) and, in particular, a predisposition,
tendency, propensity, or
inclination (Bourdieu 1977: 214, original emphasis). For
Bourdieu, therefore,
the disposition captures the crucial but unarticulated knowledge
that in the
course of their socialization embeds itself not only in patterns
of thought, but in
the very bodies of individuals. Such dispositions play a
powerful role in
directing their actions, even if they would find it hard to put
such knowledge
into words. This acknowledgement of the importance of embodied
knowledge
often unmediated by language and simply lived, is one of the
strengths of
habitus as a theoretical concept.
In addition to a system of dispositions (a habitus), any
established order is
characterized by what Bourdieu terms doxa: an agreed account of
how the
world works. The more this account is unspoken and taken for
granted, the
more secure that regime of power. Doxa is both unspoken and
essential; in his
much-quoted phrase, what is essential goes without saying
because it comes without
saying . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 167, original emphasis), Bourdieu
also makes a
clear distinction between doxa and opinion:
In class societies, in which the definition of the social world
is at stake in
overt or latent class struggle, the drawing of the line between
the field of
opinion, of that which is explicitly questioned, and the field
of doxa, of that
which is beyond question and which each agent tacitly accords by
the mere
fact of acting in accord with social convention, is itself a
fundamental
objective at stake in that form of class struggle for the
imposition of the
dominant systems of classification. (Bourdieu 1977: 169,
original emphasis)
I want to draw attention to the implicit assumption in this
passage that there
are societies without classes in which doxa rules unchallenged.
Indeed, lurking
here, it seems to me, is something like Levi-Strausss
problematic distinction
between hot and cold societies (see, for instance, Levi-Strauss
1969: 33). In
addition both the dispositions of habitus and doxa are concerned
with ways of
being, habitual states embedded deep within the subjectivity of
individuals,
and as a result they necessarily stress the fixity of certain
ways of being.
It is not coincidental, I would argue, that the anthropological
data that led
Bourdieu to develop the concept of habitus were collected during
his
fieldwork among the Kabyles. This fieldwork was carried out in
the 1950s in
extraordinarily difficult circumstances at a time when the
Algerians were
engaged in an often brutal liberation struggle against the
French colonial state.3
Nonetheless the Kabyles we encounter in Outline of a Theory of
Practice which
builds its theoretical schemas on the basis of Bourdieus Kabyle
data still
follow a traditional pastoralist life. Bourdieus well-known
essay on the Kabyle
house (reprinted in Bourdieu 1990b: 27183) provides a similar
picture of an
unchanging peasant way of life, in which each dwelling is
constructed
Gramscis concept of common sense
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according to the same strict rules that determine the
arrangement of every inch
of living space, down to the storage of each item of household
equipment.
Within the world of the Kabyles, according to this account, any
deviation,
however minor, is unthinkable. It is perhaps not surprising that
a man so
fiercely opposed to French colonialism and so deeply sympathetic
to the
Algerians fighting for their independence should stress the
autonomy of Kabyle
culture and its profound difference from the culture of the
French colonizers.
Something that is not apparent from Bourdieus account of the
Kabyles is that
the Kabylia was in fact a hotbed of Algerian nationalist
struggle.4
It is important to emphasize that, while habitus may focus on
fixity,
Bourdieu does not see it as rigid and unchanging; in certain
respects it is highly
flexible. As a system of dispositions guiding behaviour, this
system of lasting,
transposable dispositions is continually having to adapt to
specific and, in a
sense, unique circumstances:
[I]ntegrating past experiences, [this system] functions at every
moment as a
matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes
possible the
achievement of infinitively diversified tasks, thanks to
analogical transfers
of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems,
and thanks
to the unceasing corrections of the results obtained,
dialectically produced
by those results . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 83, original
emphasis)
Nonetheless this flexibility has its limits. We can see habitus
as something like a
particular language which, while it allows its speakers to come
up with an
infinite number of different utterances, maintains an
essentially unchanging
grammatical structure. This raises the question of more
fundamental change.
How is it possible for this system of dispositions, woven into
the very being of
individuals, to change in fundamental ways? And, since human
history is a story
of transformations, in certain circumstances this must happen.
Significantly, for
Bourdieu, it is not within habitus itself that the seeds of
change lie, but in the
dialectical relationship between a specific habitus and
objective events that
demand a response beyond that of the given habitus:
collective action (e.g. revolutionary action) is constituted in
the dialectical
relationship between, on the one hand, a habitus, understood as
a system of
lasting, transposable dispositions . . . and on the other hand,
an objective event
which exerts its action of conditional stimulation calling for
or demanding a
determinate response. (Bourdieu 1977: 8283, original
emphasis)
This stimulation is conditional because it only acts on
those who are disposed to constitute it as such because they are
endowed
with a determinate type of dispositions (which are amenable to
reduplica-
tion and reinforcement by the awakening of class consciousness,
that is, by
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the direct or indirect possession of a discourse capable of
securing symbolic
mastery of the practically mastered principles of the class
habitus). (Bourdieu
1977: 8283, original emphasis)
Habitus, it would seem, does not contain within itself the
potential
for transformation; there needs to be, as it were, another
habitus waiting
in the wings ready to displace the existing one and take its
place on the stage.
As a theoretical concept, therefore, habitus provides a powerful
account of
how and why cultures persist through time, reproducing
themselves from
generation to generation, but it does not tell with much about
the dynamics of
change. And one of the problems here is Bourdieus insistence on
the systematic
character of habitus. In other words, the different elements of
habitus are
assumed in some sense to constitute a whole. As he defines it in
one of the
passages quoted above, habitus refers to systems of durable,
transposable
dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as
structuring structures,
that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of
practices and representa-
tion . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 72; emphasis added). Given habituss
systematic
character, it makes sense that any fundamental transformation
involves the shift
of one habitus to another, and that the potential for change
comes not from
within habitus itself, but from external events.
In summary, while the concept of habitus provides a persuasive
account of
the power of the taken-for-granted substructure of embodied and
other
knowledges that play such an important role in the shaping of
day-to-day life, it
is less useful as a tool for the analysis of social
transformation. If we want to
understand not only why things stay the same, but also why they
sometimes
change, Gramscis notion of common sense, it seems to me, might
provide a
more fruitful approach, or at the very least, a useful
corrective to the
assumption that cultures necessarily constitute systems of some
kind.
Common sense and good sense
In the prison notebooks Gramsci is centrally concerned with the
dynamics of
social change: how and why has a given change happened, or not
happened;
how might it be brought about in the future? And in thinking
this through he
spends a good deal of time teasing out the complex and
contradictory nature of
common sense, how it both helps reproduce and maintain existing
power
regimes, but can also carry within it the seeds of
transformation. But what
exactly does Gramsci mean by common sense, and why might it be a
useful
analytical concept for anthropologists?
The first point to make is that common sense for Gramsci is
always a
heterogeneous jumble. He describes it like this:
Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in
time
and space . . . it takes countless different forms. Its most
fundamental
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characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the
brain of one
individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and [inconsistent5], in
conformity
with the social and cultural position of those masses whose
philosophy it is.
(Gramsci 1971: 419)
As a result, Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate
conceptions, and
one can find there anything that one likes (Gramsci 1971:
422).
This radically unsystematic concept of common sense, I would
argue, is
useful for anthropologists because it offers them a way of
thinking about the
taken-for-granted cultural worlds of quotidian life free of
certain lingering
assumptions that cling to the term culture. As I have already
argued, the very
term culture in anthropology implies something made up of
different
elements that nonetheless hang together. Remember how for
Bourdieu habitus
is very much a system of dispositions. Gramscis concept of
common sense, by
contrast, insists that while there may be systematic elements
within the
confusion of common sense, such systematic elements can only be
discovered
through careful empirical analysis; they cannot be assumed to
exist a priori. And
this radically open way of approaching quotidian, lived reality,
it seems to me,
provides anthropologists with a useful model. In the space of a
short article, it is
not possible to explore this at length, but I want to begin at
least to sketch out
how Gramscis concept of common sense productive might be
productive for
anthropologists.
Very importantly, it offers anthropologists an approach to the
mapping of
cultural worlds free of the gemeinschaft of Romantic nationalist
narratives. As a
would-be revolutionary, Gramscis concern with the cultural
worlds inhabited
by those of the bottom of the social pyramid was not that of
conventional
anthropology. He was interested in these worlds because he
wanted to bring
about fundamental social change and this, as he saw it,
necessarily involved the
radical transformation of common sense. Achieving this demanded
that
progressive political activists, such as himself, neither
celebrated nor
condemned the world of common sense, but understood it in all
its
contradictory complexity. Gramscis approach here his refusal
either to
romanticize or demonize popular culture and his insistence that
what is claimed
as tradition must always be rigorously scrutinized and unpacked
offers
anthropologists a way of thinking about the communities they
study that
escapes any residual notions of the traditional, authentic
gemeinschaft.
Gramscis careful, analytical attitude to common sense is
illustrated by his
scathing comments on one of the leading Italian intellectuals of
his
time, Giovanni Gentile. Gentile had claimed that philosophy
could be
thought of
as a great effort accomplished by reflective thought to gain
critical certainty
of the truths of common sense and of the naive consciousness, of
those
truths of which it can be said that every man feels them
naturally and which
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constitute the solid structure of the mentality he requires for
everyday life.
(quoted in Gramsci 1971: 422)
For Gramsci this was simply yet another example of the
disordered crudity of
Gentiles thought. Honing in on Gentiles formulation: the truths
of common
sense, Gramsci asks:
And what does a truth of common sense mean? Gentiles philosophy,
for
example, is utterly contrary to common sense, whether one
understands
thereby the nave philosophy of the people, which revolts against
any form of
subjectivist idealism, or whether one understands it to be good
sense and a
contemptuous attitude to the abstruseness, ingenuities and
obscurity of certain
forms of scientific and philosophical exposition. (Gramsci 1971:
42223)
For Gramsci the messy conglomerate that is common sense
precisely because
it is not any kind of systematic whole must be teased apart and
its separate
elements analysed. And this is especially important for those
seeking to change
society The bringing into being of new, genuinely
counter-hegemonic
narratives a crucial part of any social transformation has to
start with the
world inhabited by the mass of the population. And that world is
the world of
common sense: the starting point must always be that common
sense which is
the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be
made
ideologically coherent (Gramsci 1971: 421). As this comment
makes clear,
while Gramsci insists on common senses chaotic and incoherent
character
and incoherence is always negative for Gramsci he is far from
simply negative.
The term he uses for the positive part of common sense is good
sense, which
for him has a meaning closer to the English common sense than
senso comune. In
several Notes he reflects on this good sense dimension of common
sense,
writing in one, for instance:
In what exactly does the merit of what is normally termed common
sense
or good sense consist? Not just in the fact that, if only
implicitly, common
sense applies the principle of causality, but in the much more
limited fact
that in a whole range of judgments common sense identifies the
exact cause,
simple and to hand, and does not let itself be distracted by
fancy quibbles and
pseudo-profound, pseudoscientific metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.
(Gramsci
1971: 348)
In another Note he defines good sense more precisely. Taking the
common
expression being philosophical about it, he notes that, while
this expression
may contain an implicit invitation to resignation and patience,
it can also be
seen as an invitation to people to reflect and to realise fully
that whatever
happens is basically rational and must be confronted as such. It
is specifically this
appeal to use reason rather than blind emotion that is the part
of [common
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sense] which can be called good sense and which deserves to be
made more
unitary and coherent (Gramsci 1971: 328). In general it is the
elements within
common sense that reflect rational thought, however naive and
raw a form this
may take, which for Gramsci constitute good sense.
For Gramsci, we can say, common sense is a multi-stranded,
entwined knot
of, on the one hand, clear sightedness (good sense), which, like
the little boy in
the story, is not fooled by the sophistry of the Emperors
tailors; but, on the
other, blinkered short-sightedness that clings defensively to
the comfortable
and familiar. Common sense is, as he puts it, crudely neophobe
and
conservative (Gramsci 1971: 423). Nonetheless any genuinely
counter
hegemonic narrative has to begin with common sense:
Is it possible that a formally new conception can present itself
in a guise other
than the crude, unsophisticated version of the populace? And yet
the historian,
with the benefit of all necessary perspective, manages to
establish and to
understand the fact that the beginnings of a new world, rough
and jagged
though they always are, are better than the passing away of the
world in its
death-throes and the swan-song that it produces. (Gramsci 1971:
34243)
As this passage indicates, for Gramsci a central task for any
serious
revolutionary is a transformation of popular culture which
builds on the
beginnings of a new world that culture already contains. And it
is this concern
that lies behind Gramscis interest in subordinated peoples
understandings of
their world. He was very from being a disinterested, objective
observer of
popular culture. It is important to stress this point, since
anthropologists who
have drawn on Gramsci in part precisely because of his concern
with culture
have not always paid sufficient attention to this basic
differences between
Gramscis project and theirs. Anthropologists tend to focus on
describing the
cultural worlds they study, and rather than seeking to change
them, have often
argued passionately for their right to exist in their present
form. Gramscis far
from celebratory approach to popular culture comes through very
clearly in his
observations on folklore. While many of the original
nineteenth-century
collectors of folk tales, such as the Grimm brothers, saw these
tales, and folklore
in general, as in some sense an embodiment of the authentic and
ancient nation,
Gramsci certainly did not. He did believe that it was important
to study folklore,
but this was because of the traces of oppositional world views
that could be
found there. By definition subordinated people tend to leave few
traces in the
official historical record, any evidence of their narratives,
therefore, however
fragmentary, is valuable. Folklore should be studied because it
represents:
a conception of the world and life implicit to a large extent in
determinate
(in time and space) strata of society and in opposition (also
for the most part
implicit, mechanical and objective) to official conceptions of
the world (or
in a broader sense, the conceptions of the cultured parts of
historically
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determinate societies) that have succeeded one another in the
historical
process . . .. This conception of the world is not elaborated
and systematic
because, by definition, the people (the sum total of the
instrumental and
subaltern classes of every form of society that has so far
existed) cannot
possess conceptions which are elaborated, systematic and
politically
organized and centralized in their albeit contradictory
development. It is,
rather . . . a confused agglomerate of fragments of all the
conceptions of the
world and of life that have succeeded one another in history. In
fact, it is
only in folklore that one finds surviving evidence, adulterated
and mutilated,
of the majority of these conceptions. (Gramsci 1985: 189)
As this quotation makes clear, Gramscis concern is to understand
the history
of subordinated groups better, not to celebrate or preserve
authentic cultures.
Indeed he argues that individuals need to transcend the cultures
that have
formed them, asking in a passage that reflects his own scorn for
the kind of
Italian provincial culture in which he himself grew up:
[I]s it better to take part in a conception of the world
mechanically imposed
by the external environment, i.e. by one of the many social
groups in which
everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry
into the
conscious world (and this can be ones village or province; it
can have its
origins in the parish and the intellectual activity of the local
priest or
ageing patriarch whose wisdom is law, or in the little old woman
who has
inherited the lore of the witches or the minor intellectual
soured by his own
stupidity and inability to act)? Or, on the other hand, is it
better to work out
consciously and critically ones own conception of the world and
thus, in
connection with the labours of ones own brain, choose ones
sphere of
activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of
the world, be
ones own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from
outside the
moulding of ones personality? (Gramsci 1971: 32334)
Gramscis palpable disdain here for Italian rural society is very
far from the
empathetic identification with those studied which has long been
a hallmark of
anthropology. What the anthropological and the Gramscian project
do share is
a commitment both to taking the cultural worlds in which they
are interested
seriously and to understanding them in their own terms.
Common sense, culture and history
Gramscis concept of common sense also has interesting
implications for how
we think about the relationship between culture and history, a
relationship that
has been much debated within anthropology ever since its
establishment as a
recognized discipline. In recent years there has been much
fruitful collaboration
between anthropologists and historians, and many
anthropologists, such as
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Stoler, do deeply historical work. Nonetheless, within the
discipline a sense
that history is something that happens to cultures has not been
completely
banished.6 Common sense in Gramsci, however, is never opposed to
history in
this way. Rather, it is in the course of history, and as the
result of historical
processes, that common sense emerges. As with the material
debris that
gradually accumulates in any area of human habitation, new ideas
are
continually drifting down to join the existing agglomerate of
common sense.
Some may only remain there momentarily, others for somewhat
longer, while
some manage to embed themselves in seemingly more secure ways.
Common
sense, therefore, is never stable but is continually changing in
piecemeal ways.
The key point here is that common sense is not defined by
whatever systematic
elements it may contain. It should be seen rather as a whole
mass of disparate
beliefs and opinions that have come together over time. In any
given time and
place this common sense provides a heterogeneous bundle of
taken-for-granted
understandings of how the world is that make up the basic
landscape within
which individuals are socialized and chart their individual life
courses.
The analysts task, like that of the archaeologist, is to sort
through this mass of
beliefs and opinions: identifying the very different elements it
contains and the
social realities to which they are linked, exploring just whose
common sense
they are (mens, womens, poor peoples, the better-off, the more
educated, the
less educated, the old, the young, and so on), and mapping out
just what linkages
there are between the different elements. As with material
strata, there are
reasons why some elements persist and some do not, but the
forces acting to
consolidate or destroy are multiple and the results of their
interactions are always
unpredictable. Understanding this process in a given time and
place again
requires empirical analysis of how particular elements of common
sense are
disseminated; for instance, the mechanisms through which
specific individuals
do, or do not, internalize them what indeed does it mean to
internalize them?
To what extent do the different elements hang together? Do
individuals pick
and choose between them?
What Gramscis concept of common sense offers anthropologists, I
would
argue, is a way of thinking about the texture of everyday life
that encompasses
its givenness how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity
and confronts us as
an external and solid reality but that also acknowledges its
contradictions,
fluidity and flexibility. For all its apparent solidity it is
continually being
modified by how actual people in actual places live it. Gramscis
inherently
vague concept of common sense, I would argue, is one from which
the ghost
of the bounded culture, existing outside history a ghost
anthropology has
found hard to banish completely has genuinely been
exorcised.
Notes
1 Crehan (2002) discusses this at greater length.2 Crehan (2002)
examines Gramscis general notion of culture in more detail.
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3 Bourdieu describes the circumstances of his Algerian
fieldwork, Sketch for a Self-Analysis (2008), an account of his
intellectual formation written at the end of his life.
4 See, for instance, McDougall (2008: 88). Edward Said (1989:
223) also noted thisabsence in his article Representing the
colonized: anthropologys interlocutors,writing: Bourdieu, in
Outline of a Theory of Practice, perhaps the most
influentialtheoretical text in anthropology today, . . . makes no
mention of colonialism, Algeria,and so on, even though he writes
about Algeria elsewhere . . . It is the exclusion ofAlgeria from
Bourdieus theorizing and ethnographical reflection in Outline that
isnoteworthy. I am grateful to Aisha Khan for drawing this article
to my attention.
5 Gramsci writes inconsequente, which Hoare and Nowell Smith
translate asinconsequential. In this context inconsistent is a
better translation. I am gratefulto Frank Rosengarten for drawing
my attention to this mistranslation.
6 Marshall Sahlins for one continues to be a fierce defender of
the distinction betweenhistory and culture, as in his 2004
collection of essays, Apologies to Thucydides.
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