Antonio Gramsci: Towards an ethnographic Marxism
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3453
La “cultura” per Gramsci è sempre stata un aspetto importante della lotta politica. Nei Quaderni del Carcere egli insiste sul bisogno di realizzare «un fronte culturale come necessario accanto a quelli meramente economici e meramente politici» (Gramsci 1995: 345). Tuttavia dobbiamo notare che il concetto di cultura presente nei quaderni è piuttosto diverso da quello impiegato nell’antropologia convenzionale (si veda Crehan 2002). Allo stesso tempo, l’approccio di Gramsci alla cultura, e alla sua relazione con la storia, può essere visto come influenzato da una sensibilità etnografica, che è sempre determinata dall’individuare, e dal prendere sul serio, le storie che altri usano per dare senso al loro mondo e per navigare in esso a modo loro . Per chiarire la natura della sensibilità etnografica presente nei quaderni e nelle lettere scritte in prigione, l’articolo compara questa sensibilità con quella di Bronisław Malinowski così come è stata stabilita nella famosa “Introduzione” di Argonauti del pacifico occidentale (che George Stocking ha definito l’atto mitico costitutivo dell’antropologia). L’articolo sostiene che l’approccio etnograficamente informato di Gramsci può aiutare antropologi e altri ricercatori a rintracciare il complicato passaggio tra le strutture materiali che formano gli scenari sociali e politici entro i quali le persone vivono, e le narrazioni con le quali esse vivono. Comprendere ciò costituisce il presupposto fondamentale per ogni movimento politico che si proponga di realizzare un mondo più giusto e più equo.
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                                       2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 133-150




                                                                                 SAGGI

Antonio Gramsci
Towards an ethnographic Marxism
Kate CREHAN
City University of New York



ABSTRACT: “Culture” was always for Gramsci an important aspect of political struggle. In
the Prison Notebooks he insists on the need for «a cultural front alongside the merely
economic and merely political ones» (Gramsci 1995: 345). We should note, however,
that the concept of culture we find in the notebooks is rather different from that of
mainstream anthropology (see Crehan 2002). At the same time Gramsci’s approach to
culture and the relation of culture to history can be seen as informed by an
ethnographic sensibility, which is always determined to seek out, and take seriously,
the narratives others use to make sense of their world and navigate their way through
it. To clarify the nature of the ethnographic sensibility we find in the notebooks and
the letters from prison, the article compares this sensibility to that of Bronislaw
Malinowski as laid down in the famous Introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific
(termed by George Stocking, anthropology’s mythic charter). The article argues that
Gramsci’s ethnographically-informed approach can help anthropologists and others
trace out the complicated passage between the material structures that shape the basic
social and political landscapes within which people live, and the narratives by which
they live. And that understanding this is a crucial foundation for any effective political
movement that would bring about a more just and fair world.

KEYWORDS: GRAMSCI, MARXISM, CULTURAL STRUGGLE, ETHNOGRAPHY, MALINOWSKI.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Kate Crehan
Antonio Gramsci: Towards an ethnographic Marxism
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 133-150.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3453
134                                                                                    KATE CREHAN



      Books and magazines only offer general ideas, sketches (more or less success-
      ful) of general currents in the world’s life, but they cannot give the immediate,
      direct, vivid impression of the lives of Peter, Paul, and John, of single, real indi-
      viduals, and unless one understands them one cannot understand what is being
      universalized and generalized (Gramsci, letter to Tatiana Schucht, 19 Novem-
      ber 1928).

   Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian communist party and one of
the most creative and interesting Marxist theorists of the twentieth century,
was a committed political activist who devoted his life to bringing about
radical social transformation1. At the heart of the famous notebooks he
wrote during his long years of imprisonment by Mussolini’s fascist regime is
a quest to understand the defeat of the Italian left and the deep historical
roots of that defeat. For Mussolini’s prisoner an essential component of any
radical social change was cultural transformation. «[Marxism] in its most
recent stage of development», he wrote: «consists precisely in asserting the
moment of hegemony as essential to its conception of the state and in
attaching “full weight” to the cultural factor, to cultural activity, to the
necessity for a cultural front alongside the merely economic and merely
political ones» (Gramsci 1995: 345).
   I approach Gramsci as an anthropologist. I first read the notebooks in the
1970s as a graduate student preparing for the classic anthropological rite of
passage: extended fieldwork based on participant observation. Although the
prison notebooks were already known in Anglophone Marxist circles, it was
the publication in 1971 of Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith’s
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci that introduced them
to Anglophone anthropology more widely. For many anthropologists the
Italian Marxist’s interest in culture seemed highly relevant to a discipline in
which culture has been such a core concept. But this apparent shared
concern with culture can be deceptive. The concept of culture we find in the
notebooks is not the same concept of culture as that «around which»,
Clifford Geertz argued, «the whole discipline of anthropology arose» (Geertz
1973: 4). In Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology, I explored this difference.
This article, which grew out of my thinking as I was working on a more
recent study, Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives, focusses
on a different question: inhabiting, as they do, cultural worlds structured by
narratives that to an important degree view that world from the vantage
point of the dominant, to what extent do subaltern groups have their own,

1. An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Colloqium of Gramsci Studies
2017, Campinas, Brazil, which will be published as Antonio Gramsci: em busca de um marxismo
etnográfico (Bianchi et al., forthcoming).


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ANTONIO GRAMSCI: TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MARXISM                                             135


alternative understandings – understandings rooted in subaltern experience
that genuinely challenge the prevailing hegemony? To the extent that such
alternative worldviews do exist, albeit in embryonic form, is it possible for
intellectuals who would bring about radical change to gain access to them?
Can progressive intellectuals gain a genuine understanding of subaltern
cultural worlds which are not their cultural worlds?

Accessing subaltern cultural worlds
   In contrast to James Scott (a hugely influential theorist of subaltern
consciousness), Gramsci does not believe that «[e]very subordinate group
creates, out of its ordeal, a “hidden transcript” that represents a critique of
power spoken behind the back of the dominant» (Scott 1990: xii).
   Subalterns may indeed critique power but this critique is fragmentary,
incoherent. It does not represent an effective challenge: «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» (Gramsci
1985: 189); «the lower classes, historically on the defensive, can only achieve
self-awareness via a series of negations, via their consciousness of the
identity and class limits of their enemy; but it is precisely this process which
has not yet come to the surface» (Gramsci 1971: 273).
   For this «self-awareness» to emerge as a coherent and effective political
narrative it is necessary that such «negations» are developed and built upon
by intellectuals, but this requires that those intellectuals have access to the
embryonic fragments of «self-awareness» existing beneath the surface.
   Subaltern groups may have to struggle to achieve coherent
understandings of the realities they face. Nonetheless, and Gramsci insists
on this in many places in the notebooks, it is the fragments of «self-
awareness» that emerge out of subaltern experience that are the ultimate
source of coherent political narratives: «Is it possible that a “formally” new
conception can present itself in a guise other than the crude,
unsophisticated version of the populace?» (Gramsci 1971: 342).
   One form such fragmentary subaltern knowledge takes is common sense
(senso comune). The Italian senso comune, it should be noted, lacks the
positive connotations of the English “common sense”. It is a more neutral
term that refers simply to the beliefs and opinions held in common, or
thought to be held in common, by the mass of the population 2. For Gramsci


2. See Crehan 2016: 43-58 for an extended discussion of Gramsci’s concept of senso comune and the
difference between senso comune and the English term common sense.

                                          2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 133-150
136                                                                                      KATE CREHAN


this assemblage of accepted beliefs is above all «a confused agglomerate»
(Gramsci 1985: 189). It «takes countless different forms. Its most
fundamental characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain
of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and [inconsistent] 3, in
conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose
philosophy it is» (Gramsci 1971: 419).
   Nonetheless, embedded within the chaotic confusion of common sense
there is what Gramsci identifies as buon senso (good sense). For instance,
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». This appeal to use reason rather than blind emotion
constitutes «the healthy nucleus that exists in common sense, the part of it
which can be called “good sense” and which deserves to be made more
unitary and coherent» (Gramsci 1971: 328).
   But how should progressive intellectuals go about discovering the “good
sense” from which genuinely new worldviews emerge? Scott has a
straightforward answer: it is in the spaces «outside the earshot of
powerholders, where the hidden transcript is to be sought». All that is
necessary is to seek out such spaces. For the Sardinian Marxist, who had
spent years organising workers, things are not so simple: dominant
narratives reach deep into the consciousness of subalterns. It is not so easy
to cast off the manacles of hegemony. «Subaltern classes», he argues, «are
subject to the initiatives of the dominant classes, even when they rebel; they
are in a state of anxious defense» (Gramsci 1996: 21).
   Subalterns can never find a space completely outside the earshot of the
powerholders; those powerholders have, as it were, taken up residence
inside their heads. This is an important part of what hegemony means. At
the same time, hegemony is never complete. The contradictions between the
official narratives of the dominant and the actual experience of subalterns
bubble up to the surface and find expression, albeit in embryonic form.
Subaltern good sense is not to be found in separate spaces but rather in the
interstices and cracks of the existing hegemony.
   Mining the submerged nuggets of good sense on which a progressive
social movement can build on is not easy however. It requires that those who
would change society listen to subalterns, take their understandings of the

3. Gramsci writes «inconseguente», translated by Hoare and Nowell Smith as inconsequential. In this
context, inconsistent would be a more accurate translation. I am grateful to the late Frank Rosengarten
for drawing my attention to this mistranslation.


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ANTONIO GRAMSCI: TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MARXISM                                       137


world seriously, and seek out the traces, however fragmentary, subaltern
knowledge has left as it travels through history. In a number of places in the
notebooks Gramsci suggests how we might do this, compiling what we might
call an archive of common sense. An important source is folklore. In folklore,
he argues, we can find evidence «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). Genuinely listening to
subalterns, however, making sense of that evidence to map the cultures they
inhabit, and to decipher the traces they have left in the historical record –
traces that go against the hegemonic grain - is challenging. Discerning good
sense within the babble of common sense demands attentive listeners.
   One of the challenges for an intellectual like Gramsci, a challenge he was
well aware of, was that despite his years of organising workers, his cultural
world remained that of a cultivated intellectual. Popular culture fascinated
him but it was not his culture. One of his letters from prison, for instance,
contains a remembrance of Giacomo Bernolfo, a man who had once been his
bodyguard, who had recently died. Bernolfo was very fond of reciting verses
belonging to what Gramsci describes as «that third rate romantic literature
loved so much by simple people [populo] (along the lines of opera librettos,
which are mostly written in a very peculiar baroque style with disgustingly
pathetic mawkishness, which however seem to be astonishingly appealing)»
(Gramsci 1994, vol 2: 159) Gramsci ends his remembrance like this:
     This memory [of Bernolfo reciting verses to his comrades] is the most vivid
     aspect of his character that insistently comes back to my mind: this gigantic
     man who with sincere passion declaims verses, in bad taste but that express
     robust and impetuous elementary passions, and who stops short and blushes
     when his listener is an “intellectual” even though a friend (Gramsci 1994, vol.
     2: 159).

    This tension between Gramsci’s personal distaste for much popular
culture and his conviction that it contained the seeds of a new, progressive,
revolutionary culture runs through the notebooks. For him to enter
subaltern cultural worlds, even if those subalterns were Italian workers, was
often to enter cultural world that were aesthetically alien to him. And yet he
saw gaining access to those worlds, as crucial to the work of political
organisation. All too often progressive intellectuals assume they know what
subalterns think. If those actually experiencing inequality and oppression
see things differently, then they are suffering from “false consciousness” and
it is the intellectuals’ task to enlighten them.


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138                                                                             KATE CREHAN


  This was never Gramsci’s view. For him, as I have noted, collective subaltern
experience is the ultimate source of new, potentially transformative,
political narratives. Genuinely «organic» intellectuals4 develop and give
coherence to the beginnings of knowledge that emerges out of a group’s
experience, but it is the subaltern group itself that creates its intellectuals:
      A human mass does not “distinguish” itself, does not become independent in
      its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself; and there is no
      organisation without intellectuals, that is without organisers and leaders, in
      other words, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being
      distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people “specialised” in
      conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas. But the process of creating
      intellectuals is long, difficult, full of contradictions, advances and retreats,
      dispersals and regroupings, in which the loyalty of the masses is often sorely
      tried (Gramsci 1971: 334).

   It is important to note here that that the intellectuals a subaltern group
creates as it emerges from subalternity are not necessarily members of that
group by birth. Gramsci, for instance, did not come from a working-class
background. His father was a petty bureaucrat. He himself studied at
university and his own intellectual formation could be seen in certain
respects as that of a traditional intellectual. But he can also be seen as an
organic working-class intellectual, the product of early twentieth-century
political struggle.
   The difficult, but necessary, dialogue between a subaltern group and the
intellectuals to whom it so painfully gives birth, requires that would-be
progressive intellectuals understand that subaltern world, as it were, from
the inside; and understand it both experientially and theoretically. This
raises an epistemological question that was foundational in the development
of twentieth century anthropology: how can those who are not members of a
given world gain an insider’s view of that world, and, crucially, theorise that
view in a way that explains it to other outsiders? It is notable, however, that
while many Anglophone anthropologists have drawn on Gramsci, they have
rarely if ever, concerned themselves with his epistemological arguments.
Rather, they have borrowed theoretical concepts, such as hegemony, or
subaltern5. The interest has been in how this Marxist thinker so concerned
with culture might enrich anthropology, not in how Marxism might be
enriched by ethnography. My focus here, we might say, is not Marxist
ethnography but ethnographic Marxism.

4. See Crehan 2002 for an extended discussion of Gramsci’s often misunderstood concept of the
organic intellectual.
5. In Crehan 2016, I discuss the ways in which various anthropologists, such as Jean and John
Comaroff, have used Gramsci.


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ANTONIO GRAMSCI: TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MARXISM                                  139


   In their reading of Gramsci, anglophone anthropologists, I would argue,
have tended to overlook the profound ethnographic sensibility of the
notebooks, something that struck me from my first reading of them as an
aspiring anthropologist. Let me explain what I mean by this. I define
ethnographic sensibility as a determination to seek out the narratives others
use to make sense of their world and navigate their way through it. It
requires a commitment to treat those narratives with the utmost
seriousness, always attempting to understand them in terms of their own
assumptions and logics. This kind of ethnographic attentiveness has been
central to anthropology as a discipline. And such ethnographic sensibility is
also a leitmotiv of Gramsci’s search for subaltern worldviews in the
notebooks; the kind of leitmotiv for which their author tells us to search
when approaching the work of a major thinker: «search for the Leitmotiv, for
the rhythm of the thought as it develops, should be more important than
that for single casual affirmations and isolated aphorisms» (Gramsci 1971:
383-384).
   To explore the similarities and differences between the ethnographic
sensibility we find in the notebooks and in classic anglophone anthropology
I want to focus on the vision of anthropology laid out in Bronislaw
Malinowski’s Introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific, published in
1922. There is no evidence that Gramsci knew this classic New Guinea
ethnography. The two thinkers, both products of early twentieth century
Europe, were close contemporaries however, Malinowski born in 1884,
Gramsci in 1891.
   The Argonauts’ Introduction was hugely influential. For George Stocking,
anthropology’s foremost historian, it provided «a mythic charter for
[anthropology’s] central ritual [that is, fieldwork]» (Stocking 1992: 57). And
«for almost four decades Malinowski’s mythic charter functioned to sustain
the ethnographic enterprise, helping several generations of aspiring
ethnographers to “get on with the work”» (Stocking 1992: 59). In more
recent years, the degree to which Malinowski lived up to the ideals he laid
out has been called into question, but whatever the realities of this pioneer’s
own fieldwork, the methodological prescriptions laid down in the
Introduction, and still widely taught in introductory anthropology courses,
remain relevant for twenty-first century anthropologists. The Argonauts
Introduction is, we might say, the quintessential expression of the
ethnographic sensibility of anthropology as a discipline.



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140                                                                   KATE CREHAN


The ethnographic sensibility of Bronislaw Malinowski
   Malinowski came to Britain to study anthropology in 1910, after obtaining
a doctorate in Chemistry in his native Poland. He would go on to become one
of the founding fathers of anglophone anthropology. As an “ethnographer”,
Mussolini’s prisoner, writing his notebooks in his cell under the constraints
of the prison regime, with no freedom of movement, and continually subject
to surveillance, may seem to have little in common with the Polish
anthropologist living with all the privileges of his whiteness in his Trobriand
village.
   Both men, however, were committed to exploring worldviews largely
hidden from those in power: in Gramsci’s case, those of subalterns; in
Malinowski’s, those of indigenous peoples living under colonial rule. Each
theorist saw this mapping as difficult and challenging, if for different
reasons, and reflected at length on how it might be achieved. Comparing
their methodological approaches will, I hope, further clarify what I mean by
ethnographic sensibility and suggest why it remains relevant not only for
twenty-first century anthropologists, but for others interested in imagining
a Marxism for our historical moment.
   In the Introduction to Argonauts Malinowski gives anthropologists,
termed by him ethnographers, a clear charge: «the final goal, of which an
Ethnographer should never lose sight, is ... to grasp the native’s point of
view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world» (Malinowski 1922:
25, emphasis in original). To achieve this goal the ethnographer must enter
into a world that is not their own, and come to understand it from the inside.
The methodology Malinowski lays out will, he argues, enable the
ethnographer/anthropologist both to achieve this empathetic
understanding, and record it in a rigorous, scientific fashion. This is the
methodology that would come to be called participant observation.
   The methodological prescriptions to be found in the Argonauts’
Introduction are based on two key principles. The first is that researchers
must share the lives of those they study. For colonial researchers, like
Malinowski, the primary object of study was “the native”. Anthropology, he
writes, reveals «the native as he is; it opens up to its practitioners the
native’s mind» (Malinowski 1922: xv).
   But, if the goal is to discover «the native as he is», practitioners needed to
get a lot closer to those they studied than was customary when Malinowski
began his fieldwork in 1914. A standard way of collecting data at that time
was for individual “native” informants to be summoned by the
anthropologist and questioned, frequently through an interpreter, about


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ANTONIO GRAMSCI: TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MARXISM                                       141


their “culture and traditions”. Often these interviews would take place on
the verandas that were a standard feature of colonial buildings. This was not
a method likely to provide the deep insight the Argonauts’ author sought.
Anthropologists, needed to descend from their verandas and live among
those studied, learning their language, and observing the reality of daily life.
Only by committing themselves to sharing the worlds they observed could
they hope to gain a full understanding of those worlds.
     […] Living in the village with no other business but to follow native life, one
     sees the customs, ceremonies and transactions over and over again, one has
     examples of their beliefs as they are actually lived through, and the full body
     and blood of actual native life fills out soon the skeleton of abstract
     constructions (Malinowski 1922: 18).

   Living amongst the “natives”, however, is only the first step. Having put
oneself in the midst of “native life”, one must then listen and watch
attentively, registering everything that goes on, and, to the extent possible,
participating in that native life. This is the second primary component of
participant observation. Malinowski provides this picture of his own
participation observation among the Trobriand villagers: «soon after I had
established myself, ... I began to take part, in a way, in the village life, to look
forward to the important or festive events, to take personal interest in the
gossip and the developments of the small village occurrences; to wake up
each morning to a day, presenting itself to me more or less as it does to the
native» (1922: 7).
   Anthropologists would thereby put themselves in a position where they
will see life as it is lived, not merely how their informants say it is lived.

The importance of theory
   Opening oneself up to the lived reality of the lives observed, and
recording it in all its dense complexity, is only the beginning however. The
data collected also need to be organised and interpreted. Inevitably there is a
tension here. On the one hand, the researcher needs to keep an open mind,
resisting the temptation to slot what they see and hear into pre-determined
conceptual boxes. On the other, theory is necessary to make sense of the
flood of “facts” generated by participant observation. In a passage that is
worth quoting at length, Malinowski, the former chemist, explains the need
continually to tack back and forth between data and theory:
     Good training in theory, and acquaintance with its latest results, is not
     identical with being burdened with “preconceived ideas”. If a man sets out on
     an expedition, determined to prove certain hypotheses, if he is incapable of


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142                                                                            KATE CREHAN


      changing his views constantly and casting them off ungrudgingly under the
      pressure of evidence, needless to say his work will be worthless. But the more
      problems he brings with him into the field, the more he is in the habit of
      moulding his theories according to facts, and of seeing facts in their bearing
      upon theory, the better he is equipped for the work. Preconceived ideas are
      pernicious in any scientific work, but foreshadowed problems are the main
      endowment of a scientific thinker, and these problems are first revealed to the
      observer by his theoretical studies (1922: 8-9).

   Gramsci, a man who certainly had «a good training in theory», and one
who held himself to the highest intellectual standards, also stresses the
primacy of data. It is «the theoretician’s task», he writes, «to “translate” the
elements of historical life into theoretical language, but not vice versa,
making reality conform to an abstract scheme. Reality will never conform to
an abstract scheme» (1996: 52).
   Prison, as the letters he wrote from prison reveal, exposed Gramsci to a
world that initially was to him perhaps as alien as that of the Trobrianders
initially seemed to Malinowski. In one of the earliest letters written to his
sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, he writes of the non-political prisoners, «the
ordinary detainees whose life I would be unable to describe to you in a few
words: do you remember Kipling’s short story “A Strange Ride” … It
immediately leaped to my mind so much that I thought I was living it»
(Gramsci 1994, vol. 1: 40).
   The Rudyard Kipling story Gramsci has in mind is one of Kipling’s earliest
publications, written when he was nineteen. A nightmarish tale reminiscent
of Edgar Allan Poe, its full title is The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes. The
narrator, Morrowbie Jukes, is a young engineer working in colonial India.
One night while suffering from a fever he mounts his horse and rides wildly
off into the desert night. His horse stumbles and horse and rider are thrown
down a steep cliff to land in a crater from which there is no escape. To his
horror, Jukes discovers the crater houses unfortunates who have been
thrown there after apparently dying, but then reviving as they are about to
be cremated. In the crater they eke out an existence that is scarcely human,
sheltering in rough burrows hollowed out of the sand, kept alive, but barely,
by irregular deliveries of food thrown down to them.
   «When a man felt his death coming on he retreated to his lair and died
there. The body was sometimes dragged out of the hole and thrown on to the
sand, or allowed to rot where it lay» (Kipling 2011: 22). On seeing Jukes in
their midst they cluster round him and laugh: «the ragged crew actually
laughed at me – such laughter as I hope I may never hear again. They cackled,



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ANTONIO GRAMSCI: TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MARXISM                                          143


yelled, whistled, and howled as I walked into their midst, some of them
literally throwing themselves down on the ground in convulsions of unholy
mirth» (Kipling 2011: 18). Thanks to a faithful servant, who tracks him down,
Jukes does eventually escape but remains haunted by his time in this place
where human beings stripped of virtually everything that makes them
human wait to die.
   That this vision of a kind of living hell «immediately leaped» to Gramsci’s
mind on his first contact with the prison’s ordinary detainees, suggests how
alien the world of these prisoners was to him. At the same time Gramsci was
fascinated by the new worlds he discovered in prison, and once he had
overcome his initial culture shock he was a perceptive observer of his fellow
prisoners. Some four months later in another letter to Tatiana, he describes
an entertainment his fellow detainees staged for the celebrity in their midst:
     Men from Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily present a knife-fencing clinic in
     accordance with the rules of the four states of the southern underworld (the
     Sicilian State, the Calabrian State, the Apulian State, and the Neapolitan State):
     Sicilians against Apulians, Apulians against Calabrians, because the hatred
     between these two states is powerful and the clinic even becomes serious and
     bloody. The Apulians are the masters of all of them: unsurpassed knife wielders
     with a technique full of secrets and very lethal, developed in line with all the
     others and in order to outdo them. An old Apulian, age sixty-five, much
     revered, but without “state” recognition, defeats all the champions of the other
     states; then, as the grand finale, he fences with another Apulian, a young man,
     with the most beautiful body and surprisingly agile, a high dignitary whom they
     all obey and for half an hour they demonstrate all the normal techniques of all
     the fencing schools. A truly grandiose and unforgettable spectacle in every way,
     because of the performers and the spectators: a whole subterranean world was
     revealed to me, extremely complicated, with its own life of emotions, of points of
     view, of points of honor, and formidable, iron hierarchies (Gramsci 1994, vol. 1:
     96, emphasis added).

   Note here, the linking of this one-off entertainment to «a whole
subterranean world». The Sardinian Marxist and his Polish contemporary in
the Trobriand Islands are both concerned with collective rather than
individual understandings. «What matters», Gramsci insists, «is not the
opinion of Tom, Dick, and Harry, but the ensemble of opinions that have
become collective and a powerful factor in society» (Gramsci 2007: 347).
Similarly, in the Argonauts Introduction, Malinowski writes «as sociologists,
we are not interested in what A or B may feel qua individuals, in the
accidental course of their own personal experience – we are interested only
in what they feel and think qua members of a given community» (Malinowski
1922: 23).

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Mapping subaltern worlds
   At the same time, Gramsci’s object of study in the notebooks is very
different from that of Malinowski. The visions of the world Gramsci seeks to
map are not those of “natives” living under colonialism, but subalterns
across a wide span of history. And subalternity in the notebooks is a very
broad category. Its inclusivity reflects Gramsci’s refusal to force the rich
specificity of «historical life» into pre-determined theoretical boxes.
Subalternity in the notebooks, as Marcus Green stresses, does not define a
particular form of subordination, such as that of the proletariat. Rather it
embraces a whole range of oppressions and subordination suffered by
different groups. Evidence for this reading is provided by the fact that, as
Green notes, at different points in the notebook devoted to subaltern social
groups, «slaves, peasants, religious groups, women, different races, and the
proletariat» are all termed «subaltern social groups» (Green 2011, 69). For
Gramsci, the concept of subalternity names a general condition of
subordination. We can only know the particular shapes it assumes through
the empirical analysis of particular times and places.
   Gramsci’s interest in subaltern culture and subaltern narratives stems
from his commitment to the struggle for political and social transformation.
Unlike Malinowski, his final goal was not simply to understand how
subalterns view the world, but to understand how they might overcome their
subalternity to become a political force capable of bringing about radical
change. Subalterns who transcend their collective subalternity – Gramsci’s
focus was always on subaltern groups rather than individual subalterns – do
so with the aid of intellectuals, intellectuals whose knowledge is rooted in
specific lived experience, even if they themselves have not come from that
background. Such intellectuals «[work] out and [make] coherent the
principles and the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity»
(Gramsci 1971: 330). This is part of the work of «creating intellectuals»
described in the passage from the notebooks quoted above on p. 138. This
work, however, requires that intellectuals have a genuinely empathetic
understanding of how particular subalterns in particular places at particular
times perceive the reality they inhabit. In other words, they need to possess
an ethnographic sensibility.
   It is this kind of receptivity we find in the notebooks. And it is there from
the beginning. The notebooks were the result of Gramsci’s determination
that while the fascists might have incarcerated his body, they would not
imprison his mind. To combat the psychologically destructive effects of
prison, he set about devising a plan for the kind of systematic, serious study
not possible in the hurly-burly of his political life prior to his arrest. In a


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famous letter he wrote to Tatiana Schucht, a little later than the letters I
have already quoted but still soon after his arrest, he sketched out a series of
topics he planned to study, one of which was The serial novel and popular
taste in literature. This idea had come to him, he explained, «when he read
about the death of the actor-manager of a theatre company whose
performances he had attended. He saw such popular theatre as «the
theatrical counterpart of the serial novel». The report had brought back to
him, «what fun I had all the times I went to see him, because the
performance was twofold: the suspense and unleashed passions, together
with the interventions of the audience of ordinary folk, which was certainly
not the least interesting part of the performance» (Gramsci 1994, vol. 1: 84).
   As with the «knife clinic» put on for his benefit by other prisoners,
Gramsci was always fascinated by anything he saw as providing a window
into the imaginative worlds inhabited by subalterns. The serial novel and
popular taste in literature provided just such a window, and was a topic he
could pursue in prison. If approached in the right spirit, he explained in one
letter, even the apparently poor resource of the prison library can contain
riches. We need to ask of popular novels, «why is this sort of literature
almost always the most read and the most published? what needs does it
satisfy? what aspirations does it answer? what emotions and points of view
are represented in these trashy books for them to be so popular?» (Gramsci
1994, vol. 1: 262).
   Written sources were Gramsci’s raw material. Thanks to his friend and
supporter Piero Sraffa, who paid for an account with a Milan bookshop,
Gramsci was able to order anything not forbidden by the prison censors. This
arrangement allowed him to obtain a wide range of both scholarly and
popular books, journals, magazines and newspapers. The popular
publications were important because they revealed how their audiences
«conceived of the world and life». Whatever he read, whether scholarly,
academic or popular, lowbrow or highbrow, he reads as an ethnographer:
what are the links between this particular work, this particular author, and
the larger context to which the work and the author belong? As an activist,
he has little time for intellectuals who devoted themselves «to creating a
specialized culture among restricted intellectual groups» (Gramsci 1971:
330). His concern is always the relationship between ideas, narratives,
assumptions, and the wider world within which they exist, and the role they
play within that wider world. In reflecting on the appeal of serial novels, for
instance, he repeatedly returns to The Count of Monte Cristo, a runaway best
seller immediately on its publication in the mid-1880s and still a staple of
popular culture:


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      The serial novel is a substitute for (and, at the same time, it stimulates) the
      fantasies of the common man; it really is daydreaming […]. In this case [The
      Count of Monte Cristo], one could say that the fantasies of the people stem from
      a (social) “inferiority complex” that is the source of fantasies about revenge,
      punishing those responsible for their adversities, etc. The Count of Monte Cristo
      contains all the ingredients to induce these flights of fancy and hence to
      administer a narcotic that dulls the sense of pain, etc. (Gramsci 2007: 106).

   To anthropologists, Gramsci’s reflections in the notebooks may fall short
of true ethnography, but they are, I would argue, suffused with an
ethnographic sensibility. Rather than searching for an abstract theoretical
understanding of the forms of power inherent in capitalism, he seeks to
discover, as would an anthropologist, how particular groups in particular
places understand their world. Always he refuses to «make reality conform to
an abstract scheme», just as Malinowski, once he has laid out a general
methodology in his Introduction, does not in the rest of his long
ethnography give us a map of the worldview of some generalised “native”,
but that of the Trobrianders in the early twentieth century.

Conclusion
   Let me conclude with some thoughts on the significance of Gramsci’s
ethnographic sensibility for our historical moment. At a time when so many
of the certainties of an older, more rigid Marxism have been called into
question, Gramsci offers us an open and flexible Marxism which insists that
we need to start not from pre-determined theoretical schemes but from the
complexities of empirical reality. In our globalised and increasingly
automated world, one old certainty that has collapsed is the assumption that
any effective challenge to capitalism would necessarily be led by organised
industrial workers. In recent years the left has increasingly, if belatedly,
come to recognise the importance of gender, race, ethnicity and other forms
of difference in structuring inequality and oppression both in the workplace
and beyond.
   Feminist scholarship, for instance, has revealed the complex links
between paid and unpaid work. The value of Gramsci’s inclusive category
«subaltern» is that it does not pre-determine who counts as subaltern, or
prescribe a “correct” subaltern worldview. Being subaltern can take many
forms. But who in our twenty-first century world of multiple and entangled
inequalities might constitute the collectivities, the historical subjects, with
the power to challenge capitalist hegemony effectively? The notebooks do
not provide an answer to this question, rather they suggest how those
seeking a fairer, more just world might go about finding an answer, offering



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us not a template, but an approach to the mapping of inequality and
subalternity, an approach that is always attentive to the lived realities of
power. Armed with the questions posed by that approach, it is our task as
analysts and activists to explore the empirical landscapes of subalternity in
all their complexity. Only then can we hope to identify potential
collectivities that might effectively challenge twenty-first century
capitalism. Transforming this challenge into reality demands what Gramsci,
in the passage with which I began this essay, called a cultural front.
   In the notebooks, “culture” names shared ways of understanding the
world and inhabiting it. These ways of knowing and being are crucial to the
production and reproduction of subalternity, and it is only through their
transformation that subalterns can escape their subalternity. All cultures,
even if they appear fixed and unchanging, are inherently in a state of flux.
Over time all come into being, change, and pass away. Nonetheless, as
individuals and groups we come to consciousness, and live our lives, as
members of particular cultural worlds. And it is through these cultures,
absorbed largely unconsciously, that we experience, and make sense of, the
realities of inequality of our time and place.
   To those socialised within them, the basic contours of their cultural
worlds, including their hierarchies of power and associated tangles of
common-sense notions, seem beyond question, so obviously real, that it
would be absurd to ask for evidence or proof: this is just the way the world is.
Disparities of wealth and power, for instance, may be thought of as
manifestations of the laws of economics or of divine will; they may be
celebrated or railed against, but to those who inhabit a world structured by
these disparities it is hard to imagine that things could be other than as they
are. A crucial part of any fundamental social change is a cultural
transformation that makes it possible for subalterns to imagine another
reality.
   There need to be, in Gramsci’s words, «new popular beliefs, that is to say,
a new common sense and with it a new culture and a new philosophy which
will be rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and
imperative quality as traditional beliefs» (Gramsci 1971, 424). If those beliefs
and that culture are to take hold, those who would bring about change need
to engage in cultural struggle.
   Interestingly, we find the same stress on the importance of cultural norms
in the best-selling 2014 study of inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First
Century by Thomas Piketty, an explicitly non-Marxist economist. Piketty’s
focus is on quantitative measures of inequality. Nonetheless he makes a


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148                                                                 KATE CREHAN


point of stressing that «[t]he history of inequality is shaped by the way
economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as
well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that
result» (Piketty 2014: 20).
   The struggle over what is believed to be just, and what is not, is precisely
the kind of cultural front for which Gramsci calls. Engaging effectively on
this front, I suggest, requires an ethnographically informed Marxism,
attentive to the empirical complexities of subalternity. This is a Marxism
that does not assume it already has all the answers, a Marxism rooted in
subaltern experience, whose intellectuals are continually in dialogue with
the lived realities of subalternity, continually mapping its complex, and
shifting, diversity, and searching out the fragmentary nuggets of good sense
to be found within the confusion and contradictions of popular common
sense. An ethnographic Marxism is a Marxism that builds on these
embryonic beginnings, developing them into the coherent political
narratives that are an essential part of building mass movements powerful
enough to bring about lasting change.




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 Kate CREHAN is a Professor of Anthropology (Emerita) at the City University of New
 York. She has published extensively on Gramsci, most recently, Gramsci’s Common
 Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives (Duke University Press, 2016), joint winner of
 the 2017 Sormani Prize. Her other books include Gramsci, Culture and
 Anthropology (University of California Press, 2002), Community Art: An
 Anthropological Perspective (Berg, 2011), and The Fractured Community: Landscapes
 of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia (University of California Press, 1997).
 kate.crehan@csi.cuny.edu




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Kate Crehan
Antonio Gramsci: Towards an ethnographic Marxism
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 133-150.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3453
