10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5282
application/pdf
2239-625X
5282
1
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-28389
Filippo M. Zerilli (eds)
Anuac
Cirese 101: Rereading Antonio Gramsci’s “Observations on Folklore”
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
11
Anniversary Forum
2022-06-26
2022-06-23
2022-07-29
2022-07-29
7-86
1
Filippo M. Zerilli (eds)
2022/06/26
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5282
7
University of Cagliari, Italy
2239-625X
1
86
urn:nbn:it:unica-28389
Cirese 101: Rereading Antonio Gramsci’s “Observations on Folklore”
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/5282/5174
11
                                                 2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 7-86




                                                                      ANNIVERSARY FORUM

Cirese 101
Rileggere le Osservazioni sul folclore di Antonio Gramsci
A cura di
Antonio Maria PUSCEDDU, Filippo M. ZERILLI




Alberto Mario Cirese e Jorge A. González, Universidad de
Colima, Messico, 1986. Photo courtesy of Jorge A. González.


Contributi di
Riccardo CIAVOLELLA, Kate CREHAN, Jorge A. GONZÁLEZ, Giovanni PIZZA, Antonio
Maria PUSCEDDU, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI.


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli (a cura di)
Cirese 101: Rileggere le Osservazioni sul folclore di Antonio Gramsci
2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 7-86.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5282
                                             2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16




                                                              ANNIVERSARY FORUM

AMC 100 + 1
Introduzione

Antonio Maria PUSCEDDU
Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Iscte-IUL
Filippo M. ZERILLI
Università di Cagliari




    Questo forum, che avevamo iniziato a preparare per ricordare la figura e
una parte, influente ma non esaustiva, dell’esteso lavoro di Alberto Mario
Cirese (1921-2011), nel centenario della sua nascita, è slittato ai 100 più uno.
Il forum è costruito attorno al Cirese lettore di Gramsci, con la riproposta del
ben noto saggio Concezioni del mondo, filosofia spontanea e istinto di classe
nelle Osservazioni sul folclore di Antonio Gramsci (Cirese 1976), assieme ad
alcuni brevi confronti critici col testo ciresiano, da parte di attenti lettori
dell’antropologia di Gramsci: Kate Crehan, Riccardo Ciavolella, Giovanni
Pizza. A conclusione, un “saluto al modo antico”, con tanto di colonna sono-
ra (si vedano i link nel testo) di Jorge A. González, che ricorda la figura di Ci-
rese e l’influenza della lettura ciresiana di Gramsci in Messico.
    Più che una commemorazione, dunque, abbiamo cercato di rendere que-
sto forum un’opportunità per rendere disponibile un testo, più volte pubbli-
cato in Italia (l’ultima volta come Cirese 2008a), ma probabilmente meno
noto e di non più facile reperimento in lingue diverse dall’italiano (cfr. Cire-
se 1974a, 1979, 1982). Per questo motivo abbiamo deciso di riproporne la
traduzione inglese (da noi leggermente rivista e aggiornata), pubblicata nel
1982 col titolo Gramsci’s Observations on folklore, nel volume Approaches to


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli
AMC 100 + 1: Introduzione
2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5276
10                                                   ANTONIO MARIA PUSCEDDU, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI


Gramsci, curato da Anne Showstack Sassoon, che ringraziamo per averci dato
il permesso di ripubblicare il testo 1. Ci è sembrato avesse un qualche interes-
se riproporne la traduzione inglese, una lingua oramai ampiamente accessi-
bile a buona parte della comunità scientifica internazionale, con l’esplicito
intento di promuovere e favorire nuove letture e ulteriori percorsi interpre-
tativi, rendendo possibile il dialogo e il confronto tra l’antropologia italiana
e altre tradizioni intellettuali, come da alcuni anni ci proponiamo coltivando
la vocazione internazionale e multilingue di Anuac, rivista della Società ita-
liana di antropologia culturale (SIAC)2.
    Il saggio ciresiano era comparso per la prima volta col titolo Concezioni del
mondo, filosofia spontanea, folclore, nel 1969, nel secondo volume di Gramsci
e la cultura contemporanea, a cura di Pietro Rossi. I due volumi raccoglievano
gli atti del convegno internazionale su Gramsci, tenutosi a Cagliari nell’apri-
le del 1967, a trent’anni esatti dalla morte di Gramsci. Il saggio di Cirese ve-
niva pubblicato nella sezione L’analisi dei fatti letterari e la concezione lingui-
stica, assieme all’unico altro contributo antropologico, quello di Luigi Maria
Lombardi Satriani (1969), Gramsci e il folclore: dal pittoresco alla contestazio-
ne3. Proprio dalla verifica critica della lettura che Lombardi Satriani faceva
delle pagine gramsciane sul folklore (non limitate, nella sua analisi, alle Os-
servazioni sul folclore), ovvero di un contenuto potenzialmente antagonista,
contestatario e di un possibile uso “politico” del folklore, prendeva le mosse
la rigorosa analisi formale di Cirese, secondo l’atteggiamento “analitico-par-
cellare”, che ritagliando una porzione ben definita di realtà esegue tutte le
disamine possibili alla verifica di una data ipotesi. Ci pare degno di nota il
fatto che l’argomento di Lombardi Satriani 4, almeno nelle sue linee generali
e nell’impostazione di fondo, serpeggi, seppure implicitamente, nelle osser-
vazioni critiche di Crehan e Ciavolella all’analisi ciresiana. Sono intanto utili


1. Si tratta peraltro di una delle poche traduzioni in inglese di Cirese, assieme al saggio sulla
storia degli studi demologici italiani (Cirese 1974b) in un dossier monografico curato da Car-
la Bianco (1974) per il Journal of the Folklore Institute. In inglese è disponibile un profilo di
Cirese (Clemente, Testa 1996). Per un elenco completo dei lavori di Cirese tradotti in lingue
diverse dall’italiano (sopratutto spagnolo e francese), rimandiamo all’elenco completo degli
scritti compilato da Eugenio Testa (2011).
2. La prima traduzione inglese integrale delle Osservazioni sul folclore è di poco posteriore
alla traduzione del saggio di Cirese (cfr. Gramsci 1985: 188-195).
3. Mentre lavoravamo alla chiusura di questo forum, abbiamo appreso con profondo ramma-
rico dell’improvvisa scomparsa di Luigi Maria Lombardi Satriani, il 30 maggio 2022. Ci pro-
poniamo di promuovere una riflessione sul contributo importante di questo studioso agli
studi demoetnoatropologici in uno dei prossimi numeri di Anuac.
4. Una traduzione di Lombardi Satriani (1974), sullo stesso tema, veniva inclusa nel già cita-
to dossier monografico (Bianco 1974).


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16
AMC 100 + 1: INTRODUZIONE                                                                11


alcuni elementi di contestualizzazione della lettura gramsciana del folklore
(della sua interpretazione e del suo uso) all’interno degli studi demoetnoan-
tropologici italiani (per usare una formula che ancora conserva la forte trac-
cia di sistemazione ciresiana), in buona parte abbastanza noti in Italia, ma
meno scontati altrove.
   Le Osservazioni sul folclore di Gramsci, che danno il titolo ad uno dei qua-
derni speciali (come appare nell’edizione critica del 1975, a cura di Valentino
Gerratana), il 27 (del 1935), in cui si trovano trascritte e rielaborate note re-
datte all’inizio della riflessione carceraria (1929-30), vengono pubblicate per
la prima volta nel 1950, nel quinto volume dei Quaderni del carcere, Lettera-
tura e vita nazionale, curata da Felice Platone con la supervisione di Palmiro
Togliatti (Gramsci 1950). Quasi immediato il dibattito che si apre tra gli stu-
diosi di folklore, come risulta dal seminario organizzato dalla Fondazione
Istituto Gramsci nel 1951, dal titolo “Gramsci e il folclore”, con relazioni di
Ernesto de Martino, Vittorio Santoli e Paolo Toschi, cui fecero seguito, come
apprendiamo dalla relazione dello stesso Toschi (1951), le comunicazioni di
Emilio Sereni e di Alberto Mario Cirese. Ernesto de Martino, come noto, si
era già in realtà reso protagonista di un celebre dibattito sulla rivista Società,
che traeva origine dalla pubblicazione del lungo saggio Intorno a una storia
del mondo popolare subalterno (De Martino 1949), in cui l’etnologo napoleta-
no riprendeva e rielaborava diversi temi gramsciani, nell’intenso dibattito
politico-culturale dell’immediato dopoguerra. Lo stesso de Martino (1951),
probabilmente nella sua veste più “militante”, avrebbe proposto l’idea del
“folklore progressivo”, se non del tutto derivata da Gramsci (anzi, come sap-
piamo, dalla conoscenza del dibattito interno all’etnografia sovietica; Can-
narsa 1992), di certo legata ad una certa sensibilità politica per la cultura po-
polare, presente nella tradizione comunista (a partire dall’esperienza sovie-
tica del Proletkul’t di ispirazione bogdanoviana; si veda Bermani 2007). La
stessa idea del “folklore progressivo” (“stoltezze”, secondo un Cirese succes-
sivamente “pentito”5), da cui sarebbe germinata una lunga e ancora viva
esperienza politico-culturale intorno al mondo popolare (per esempio, nel-
l’attività dell’Istituto Ernesto de Martino, che vede lo stesso Cirese tra i fon-
datori), si colloca, in qualche modo, sulla stessa linea dell’argomento “politi-
co” avanzato da Lombardi Satriani, poco dopo la scomparsa di de Martino.


5. Così in una nota del 2007 ad un breve articolo intervista comparso su Rinascita Sarda nel
1967, dal titolo redazionale, poco gradito a Cirese, di Folklore come rivolta: “Anch’io, per
qualche momento, caddi nella trappola delle stoltezze di Ernesto De Martino sul ‘folklore
progressivo’ ed ho sulla coscienza cantonate come quella del ‘volgo protagonista’” (cfr. Ci-
rese 2008b: 327). La nota e l’articolo sono reperibili al link: www.etesta.it/materiali/-
2014_2015_AMC_1967_FolkloreRivolta.pdf

                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16
12                                                         ANTONIO MARIA PUSCEDDU, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI


   L’influenza del pensiero di Antonio Gramsci sull’antropologia italiana è
stata – come è noto – particolarmente produttiva e articolata, al punto da
poter essere considerata un tratto distintivo della fase “fondativa” (o ri-fon-
dativa) degli studi italiani di antropologia (o demoantropologia), dal dibatti-
to sul folklore del dopoguerra (Cirese 1972; Clemente, Meoni, Squillacciotti
1976; Alliegro 2011; Satta 2017), sino alla polemica sulle “tendenze autar-
chiche” nell’antropologia culturale italiana (Remotti 1978). In certa misura,
la presenza sotterranea di Gramsci si è mantenuta anche in fasi successive
(siamo oramai negli anni ‘90, dopo l’oblio più o meno silenzioso degli anni
‘80), sia quando le categorie analitiche gramsciane filtravano quasi unica-
mente da tradizioni antropologiche di altri paesi (Pizza 2004; Palumbo
2008), sia infine nel corso di più recenti ritorni, riscoperte e andirivieni, di e
intorno a Gramsci (Tosi Cambini, Frosini 2017) che arriva sino al primo de-
cennio del nuovo secolo con il “Gramsci ritrovato” degli antropologi (Deias,
Boninelli, Testa 2008). Ne fa ugualmente parte, nel segno di un recupero cri-
tico della tradizione demologica italiana, il dibattito sullo statuto degli studi
demologici e sulla loro riconfigurazione attuale (Cirese 1994; Clemente, Mu-
gnaini 2001; Dei 2012; Dei, Fanelli 2015).
   Quella di Alberto Mario Cirese è stata una figura influente, finanche cano-
nica, della assimilazione gramsciana nell’antropologia italiana, probabil-
mente più di Ernesto de Martino, il cui rapporto con Gramsci si è vieppiù
teso a ridimensionare (Pizza 2013). La lettura ciresiana di Gramsci ha eserci-
tato una forte influenza sui modi di intendere e praticare la demoetnoantro-
pologia nel nostro paese, almeno per un buon numero di generazioni di stu-
diosi e di studenti6 (forse in misura maggiore di quanto non esercitassero le
sue ricerche ed elaborazioni sul tema delle invarianze, della parentela e del-
l’informatica). Per questo motivo abbiamo ritenuto opportuno ripubblicare
un saggio particolarmente emblematico nella sua traduzione inglese, con
l’obiettivo di allargare la condivisione di un tassello importante degli svilup-
pi antropologici italiani alla comunità internazionale di studiosi, in un mo-
mento di forte interesse, richiamo e dibattito intorno alla “antropologia” di
Gramsci7.


6. Si pensi alle numerose edizioni e all’uso ampio e diffuso di un testo come Cultura egemo-
nica e culture subalterne (Cirese 1973), la cui unica traduzione disponibile è quella spagnola
(Cirese 1997).
7. In tal senso, sono interessanti alcune delle Postille incluse in Cirese 1976: 110-127, e in
particolare Attività e passività, originalità e degradazione dei fatti folklorici; Istinto di classe, folclo-
re come protesta, folclore di protesta; La “connotazione” come elemento della concezione materiali-
stica dei fatti culturali e come discriminante tra Gramsci e Croce; Gramsci, Tylor e il concetto di cul-
tura.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16
AMC 100 + 1: INTRODUZIONE                                                           13


   In questa prospettiva, abbiamo chiesto a Riccardo Ciavolella e a Giovanni
Pizza – due colleghi che su e con Gramsci hanno costruito una parte impor-
tante dei rispettivi itinerari di studio e ricerca (Ciavolella 2019, 2020; Pizza
2012; 2020) – e a Kate Crehan – brillante e autorevole studiosa del rapporto
tra Gramsci e l’antropologia (Crehan 2002, 2016) – di tornare a riflettere su
quello che può ben dirsi un testo classico della tradizione demoetnoantropo-
logica italiana, provando a immaginare percorsi inesplorati e stimolare lettu-
re inedite. Se nella puntuale contestualizzazione storico-critica di Pizza il
testo di Cirese nella traduzione inglese sembra acquisire una rinnovata lumi-
nosità, il commento di Ciavolella aiuta a svelare aspetti del pensiero di
Gramsci – e in particolare la dimensione della soggettività politica e delle
sue potenzialità trasformative – che la lettura ciresiana lascia in ombra. Kate
Crehan, dal suo canto, rileggendo il saggio di Cirese prova a dipanare il “ban-
dolo del folklore”, oltrepassando il rigore analitico della proposta ciresiana
per recuperare invece il carattere frammentario e non sistematico del pen-
siero di Gramsci e la sua spiccata sensibilità etnografica. Chiude il forum lo
scritto di Jorge A. González (a cui ci siamo peraltro ispirati per il titolo di
questo forum), un ricordo personale che rievoca l’incontro dell’autore con la
traduzione francese del saggio ciresiano (Cirese 1974a), e offre nel contempo
nuovi elementi storici e spunti interpretativi per ricostruire l’attività didatti-
ca di studio e ricerca di Cirese in Messico (Zanotelli 2022).


RIFERIMENTI BIBLIOGRAFICI
Alliegro, Enzo Vinicio, 2011, Antropologia italiana. Storia e storiografia 1869-1975,
      Firenze, Seid.
Bermani, Cesare, 2007, Breve storia del “Proletkul’t” italiano, in Cesare Bermani,
      Gramsci, gli intellettuali e la cultura proletaria, Milano, Colibrì: 121-156.
Bianco, Carla, ed, 1974, Folklore Studies in Italy, numero monografico, Journal of the
      Folklore Institute, 11, 1-2.
Cannarsa, Stefania, 1992, Genesi del concetto di folklore progressivo. Ernesto De
      Martino e l’etnografia sovietica, La Ricerca Folklorica, 25: 81-87.
Ciavolella, Riccardo, 2019, The changing meanings of people’s politics. Gramsci and
      anthropology from the history of subaltern groups to contemporary subject,
      i n Revisiting Gramsci’s Laboratory, Francesca Antonini, Aaron Bernstein,
      Lorenzo Fusaro, Robert Jackson, eds, Leiden, Brill: 266-84.
Ciavolella, Riccardo, 2020, Hegemony and the political subject in anthropology, in
      Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World. Gramscian Concepts for the History of
      Science, Massimiliano Badino, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, eds, Leiden, Brill: 58-79.



                                         2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16
14                                               ANTONIO MARIA PUSCEDDU, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI


Cirese Alberto M., 1969, Concezioni del mondo, filosofia spontanea, folclore, in
      Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi
      gramsciani tenuto a Cagliari il 23-27 aprile 1967, a cura di Pietro Rossi, Roma,
      Editori Riuniti, vol. II: 299-328
Cirese, Alberto Mario, et al., 1972, Folklore e antropologia tra marxismo e storicismo,
      Palermo, Palumbo.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1973, Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne. Rassegna degli
      studi sul mondo popolare tradizionale, Palermo, Palumbo.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1974a, Conceptions du monde, philosophie spontanée, folk-
      lore, Dialectiques, 4, 5: 83-100.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1974b, Folklore in Italy: A historical and systematic profile
      and bibliography, in Folklore Studies in Italy, Carla Bianco, ed, special issue,
      Journal of the Folklore Institute, 11, 1-2: 7-79.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1976, Concezioni del mondo, filosofia spontanea e istinto di
      classe nelle Osservazioni sul folclore di Antonio Gramsci [1969-70], in Alberto
      Mario Cirese, Intellettuali, folklore e istinto di classe. Note su Verga, Deledda,
      Scotellaro, Gramsci, Torino, Einaudi: 65-104.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1979, Intelectuales, folclor, instinto de clase, in Alberto Mario
      Cirese, Ensayos sobre las culturas subalternas, Centro de investigaciones y es-
      tudios superiores en antropología social (CIESAS), Ciudad de México, Cuader-
      nos de la Casa Chata n. 24: 5-23.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1982, Gramsci’s Observations on Folklore, in Approaches to
      Gramsci, Anne Showstakck Sassoon, ed, London, Writers and Readers
      Publishing, Cooperative Society Ltd: 212-247.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1994, Des paysans de Rieti à l’ordinateur. Où en est la démo-
      logie?, intervista a cura di Françoise Loux e Cristina Papa, Ethnologie française,
      25, 3: 484-496.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1997, Cultura hegemónica y culturas subalternas. Reseña de los
      estudios sobre el mundo popular tradicional, traduzione di Manuel Velázquez
      Mejía, Ciudad de México, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 2008a, Concezioni del mondo, filosofia spontanea e istinto di
      classe nelle Osservazioni sul folclore di Antonio Gramsci [1969-70], in Gramsci
      ritrovato, numero monografico, Lares, 74, 2: 467-498.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 2008b, Intervento al seminario Gramsci ritrovato tra Cirese e i
      cultural studies, in Gramsci ritrovato, numero monografico, Lares, 74, 2: 321-
      332.
Clemente, Pietro, Fabio Mugnaini, eds, 2001, Oltre il folklore. Tradizioni popolari e
      antropologia nella societa contemporanea, Roma, Carocci.
Clemente, Pietro, Eugenio Testa, 1996, The European ethnology of Alberto Mario
      Cirese, Europaea, 2, 1: 143-162.
Clemente, Pietro, Maria Luisa Meoni, Massimo Squillacciotti, eds, 1976, Il dibattito
      sul folklore in Italia, Milano, Edizioni di cultura popolare.



2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16
AMC 100 + 1: INTRODUZIONE                                                               15


Crehan, Kate, 2002, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology, London, Pluto Press, [trad.
      it., a cura di Giovanni Pizza, Lecce, Argo, 2010].
Crehan, Kate, 2016, Gramsci’s Common Sense. Inequality and its narratives, Durham-
      London, Duke University Press.
De Martino, Ernesto, 1949, Intorno a una storia del mondo popolare subalterno, So-
      cietà, V, 3: 411-435.
De Martino, Ernesto, 1951, Il folklore progressivo, l’Unità, 26 giugno.
Dei, Fabio, 2011, Gramsci, Cirese e la tradizione demologica italiana, Lares, 77, 3:
      501-518.
Dei, Fabio, 2012, L’antropologia italiana e il destino della lettera D, L’Uomo. Società
      Tradizione Sviluppo, 1-2: 97-114.
Dei, Fabio, Antonio Fanelli, eds, 2015, La demologia come “scienza normale”? Ripen-
      sare Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne, numero monografico, Lares, LXX-
      XI, 2-3.
Deias, Antonio, Giovanni M. Boninelli, Eugenio Testa, eds, 2008, Gramsci ritrovato,
      numero monografico, Lares, 74, 2.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1950, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Torino, Einaudi.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1975, Quaderni del carcere, a cura di Valentino Gerratana, Torino,
      Einaudi.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1985, Selection from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs
      and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, translated by William Boelhower, London,
      Lawrence and Wishart.
Lombardi Satriani, Luigi Maria, 1969, Gramsci e il folclore: dal pittoresco alla conte-
      stazione, in Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea. Atti del convegno internazio-
      nale di studi gramsciani tenuto a Cagliari il 23-27 aprile 1967, a cura di Pietro
      Rossi, Roma, Editori Riuniti, vol. II: 329–338.
Lombardi Satriani, Luigi Maria, 1974, Folklore as culture of contestation, in Folklore
      Studies in Italy, Carla Bianco, ed, special issue, Journal of the Folklore Institute,
      11, 1-2: 99-121.
Palumbo, Berardino, 2008, Intervento alla Tavola rotonda Gramsci tra cultural stu-
      dies e antropologia, in Gramsci ritrovato, numero monografico, Lares, 74, 2:
      303-309.
Pizza, Giovanni, 2004, Antonio Gramsci and medical anthropology now: hegemony,
      agency and transforming persons, AM. Rivista della Società italiana di antropo-
      logia medica, 17-18: 191-204.
Pizza, Giovanni 2013, Gramsci e de Martino. Appunti per una riflessione, Quaderni
      di Teoria Sociale, 13: 77-121.
Pizza, Giovanni, 2020, L’antropologia di Gramsci. Corpo, natura, mutazione, Roma,
      Carocci.
Remotti, Francesco, 1978, Tendenze autarchiche nell’antropologia culturale italia-
      na, Rassegna italiana di sociologia, 19, 2: 183-226.



                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16
16                                               ANTONIO MARIA PUSCEDDU, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI


Satta, Gino, 2017, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and the “re-foundation” of anthropology
      in post-war Italy, i n Gramsci and Anthropology: A “Round Trip”, numero
      monografico, International Gramsci Journal, 2, 3: 239-257.
Testa, Eugenio, a cura di, 2011, Scritti e altri lavori di Alberto Mario Cirese, Firenze,
      Olschki.
Toschi, Paolo, 1951, Dibattito su Gramsci e il folklore, Lares, 17: 53-54.
Tosi Cambini, Sabrina, Fabio Frosini, eds, 2017, Gramsci and Anthropology: A
      “Round Trip”, numero monografico, International Gramsci Journal, 2, 3.
Zanotelli, Francesco, 2022, Cirese en México. Legados fecundos de Gramsci en los
      estudios culturales, Estudios sobre las Culturas Contemporaneas, XXVII, 54:
      179-199.




2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 9-16
                                               2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48




                                                                     ANNIVERSARY FORUM

Gramsci’s Observations on folklore
Conceptions of the world, spontaneous philosophy and class instinct

Alberto Mario CIRESE


This essay was originally published with the title Concezioni del mondo, filosofia
spontanea, folclore [Conceptions of the world, spontaneous philosophy, folklore] in
1969, in the conference proceedings Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea [Gramsci
and contemporary culture], edited by Pietro Rossi (Editori Riuniti). An English
translation was published in 1982, with the title Gramsci’s Observations on folklore,
in the volume Approaches to Gramsci, edited by Anne Showstack Sassoon for Writers
& Readers, London. The present edition reproduces the 1982 English edition, with
minor modifications. We have added the references to the English translation of
Gramsci’s Observations on folklore (SCW 188-195) and to other notes from the Prison
Notebooks (PN2), not yet available when Cirese’s essay was translated. We have
translated the short unnumbered introductory section, omitted in the 1982 edition.
Finally, we have expanded the title, following the version published in the book
Intellettuali, folklore, istinto di classe [Intellectuals, folklore, class instinct]
(Einaudi, 1976). More in general, the text was revised on the basis of the 1976 Italian
edition, Concezioni del mondo, filosofia spontanea e istinto di classe nelle
Osservazioni sul folklore di Antonio Gramsci. We thank Anne Showstack Sassoon for
granting permission to republish the English translation.
                                                                         (a.m.p., f.m.z.)

Gramsci's published writings cited:
LVN = Letteratura e vita nazionale, edited by Felice Platone, Turin, Einaudi, 1950.
PN2 = Prison Notebooks. Volume II, edited and translated by Joseph Buttigieg, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1996.
QC = Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana, Turin, Einaudi, 1975.
SCW = Selections from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-
Smith, translated by William Boelhower, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1985.
SPN = Selections form the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.



This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alberto Mario Cirese
Gramsci’s Observations on folklore: Conceptions of the world, spontaneous philosophy and class instinct
2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 1, Giugno 2022: 17-48.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5277
18                                                                     ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE




   The following notes were written with the limited purpose of checking the
validity of certain past or recent formulations that authorize or deny the
prospect, for Gramsci, of the political use of folklore. These notes then had
in some way to engage with aspects that were far enough remote from the
initial one. Nevertheless, whatever the actual results may be, the basic
intention remained that of understanding the text and reconstructing its
context, without pursuing any endorsement or condemnation.
   Without the possibility of systematically and exhaustively going through
all texts, and to avoid unspecified and intentionally preconceived selections,
I preferred to run the opposite risk, namely that of an excessive restriction of
the text to analyse, and its possible tightening. In fact, I have fundamentally
examined the corpus of Gramscian observations that were assembled by the
editors and published under the title of “Observations on folklore” in Let-
teratura e vita nazionale [LVN 215-221]. It is therefore a group of excerpts
which was created by a will different from that of the author. In the
impossibility of overcoming the diaphragm that still stands between the
manuscript and the printed work, that group of texts, however arbitrary it
may be, constitutes a legitimate unitary object of research, given that for
over twenty years it has acted in this actual constitution and not in any
other, hypothetical and unspecifiable*. Furthermore, even with all its
obvious flaws, this choice has at least the advantage of leaving unaddressed,
and instead of explicitly denouncing, the composition and limits of the text
to which the investigation applies, and of forcing one to justify the moments
and the ways of resorting to pages and passages that are beyond those limits.
   It goes without saying that, also because of the perhaps excessive
delimitation of the text-object, the analysis that follows is configured as an
extremely partial attempt.
   1.0. Looking at Gramsci’s discussion of folklore in the most general terms,
we find: firstly, that he expressly rejects the view that folklore is of no
importance (it should not be thought of “as something strange or peculiar or
colourful”); secondly, that he is no less explicit in claiming that it is
important (though only as an object of study). He not only makes the point
generically (folklore is “something very serious that must be taken

* The book was already in print when the excellent critical edition of the Quaderni edited by
Valentino Gerratana was published.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                19


seriously”), but argues it from the statement that the whole phenomenon of
folklore contains or expresses a “conception of the world and life” which can
be precisely located in socio-cultural terms in relation to other conceptions of
the world (SCW 191, 189).
   This conception of life and the world, as Gramsci makes clear, is
characteristic of certain strata of society, namely the “people”. The people is
taken in the sense of “the sum total of the instrumental and subaltern
classes of every form of society that has so far existed” (SCW 189), and its
conception of the world is not only “different” or “very different” from
official conceptions of the world, but is “in opposition” or “in contradiction”
or “in conflict” with them. Alternatively, “official” conceptions, characteristic
of “the cultured sectors of historically determined societies” or the ruling
strata or the “State” (SCW 190, 189, 188, 190, 193, 188, 190), are, like
“official society” in general, “in competition and conflict” with folklore
(SCW 193, 190).
   All of this leads to the crucial observation that “folklore can only be
understood as a reflection of the conditions of the people’s cultural life”.
This is the reason why “the spirit of folklore studies should be changed, as
well as deepened and extended”. Thus, pure scholarship must give way to
more adequate research-criteria, notably the principle that “the people
themselves are not a homogeneous cultural collectivity but present
numerous and variously combined cultural stratifications” which can be
identified to a certain extent “on the basis of the greater or lesser ‘isolation’”
of “specific historical popular collectivities” (SCW, 190, 191, 189, 195).
   1.1. What Gramsci does then is to validate an object or area of study on the
basis of a definition of the object itself. But, though they do not preclude it in
principle, neither Gramsci’s validation nor his definition add up to an
endorsement either of the view that folklore, or the conception of the world
which it contains or expresses, or the ways in which it goes against official
conceptions of the world are valid in themselves; or of the possibility that
they might be put to valid politico-cultural uses.
   In other words, Gramsci’s statement that folklore is “something very
serious” cannot be applied to the politico-cultural uses that might be made
of folklore. Not only is this statement limited to folklore as an object of
study, but it comes in a context where Gramsci stresses the need to bring
about “the birth of a new culture among the broad popular masses”, i.e. to
do away with “the separation between modern and popular culture or
folklore” (SCW 191).



                                      2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
20                                                                    ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


   All that we can say for the moment is that Gramsci is raising “research
into folklore” from the level of pure scholarship to that of “science or
knowledge” (SCW 191), as well as promoting folklore itself from being a
curiosity to being a conception of the world. And he takes the further step of
locating it socially and culturally “in the framework of a nation and its
culture”: characteristic of the subaltern classes on one hand, and in opposition
to official conceptions on the other.
   And closer examination of these three cardinal features of Gramsci’s
definition of folklore will show that his endorsement cannot be extended to
the politico-cultural sphere.
   1.2. If we now go on to analyze the three key-concepts, at least as far as
they emerge from the passages referred to so far, and try to bring out the
general principle underlying them, we find the following:
   1) Describing both folklore and official, or, more broadly, cultured
intellectual products as conceptions of the world puts them on the same
generic level, but there is still obviously a specific difference. It is indicated
verbally by the distinction, and opposition, between “official” and “popular”.
If we agree, for the sake of clarity, to use the adjective “folkloric” instead of
“popular”, the generic equivalence and the specific difference can be
represented thus:

                                folkloric versus official
                               conception of the world

   This formula is only partially satisfactory, but we can make do with it for
the time being.
   2) As well as the fact that the folkloric conception is in opposition to the
official one, Gramsci explicitly makes the point that: the inverse relation
obviously obtains as well, and that official conceptions of the world are in
competition or conflict with those of folklore.
   What is not clear for the moment is which of the two conceptions is active
and which is passive — a provisional uncertainty which can be represented
equally uncertainly thus:

                     (active or passive) versus (active or passive)
                                      opposition

  3) The socio-cultural location of the two specific kinds of conception of the
world is shown by the use of a series of semantically oppositional pairs.
Generally speaking only one term of each pair is stated explicitly while the


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                     21


other is left implicit, though it is immediately obvious. Here the implicit
term is indicated by an asterisk: subaltern/*hegemonic; instrumental/*non-
instrumental; cultured/*uncultured; ruling/*ruled; dominant/*dominated, etc.
   This series of pairs can be reduced in essence to just two opposites. The
first has to do with the socio-political sphere, the second with the socio-
cultural sphere, social class and intellectual “sector” or category
respectively.
   We can represent the first as follows:

                                subaltern versus hegemonic
   a)
                                         social class

   It does not seem arbitrary to use the term “hegemonic” here, despite its
not appearing explicitly in the pages in question.1
   The second pair could be represented by automatically employing the
term “uncultured” as the implicit opposite of “cultured”. But the resulting
contrast between cultured and *uncultured could give rise to some mis-
understanding. For there are reasonable grounds for believing that in
Gramsci’s view the usual contrast between culture and non-culture is not
exactly the same thing, and does not imply the same judgement, as that
between culture and ignorance, meaning the “complete absence of any form
or kind of culture”. He speaks, as we have seen, of “the conditions of the
people’s cultural life”; he places popular song “in the framework of a nation
and its culture”; he uses the expression “popular culture or folklore”, and so
on. We shall want to return to this point in due course, but, in order not to
prejudge the issue, we should leave open the possibility that the opposition
lies not so much between culture and non-culture as between different kinds
of culture. It therefore seems right to avoid using the term “uncultured”
which we shall replace by the very Gramscian word “simple”. Bearing these
points in mind, we can represent the opposition in the socio-cultural sphere,
as regards intellectual “sector” or category, as follows:

                                 simple versus cultured
   b)
                                  intellectual category



1. Apart from obvious considerations, the term can be inferred without a shadow of doubt
from (SCW 189). Furthermore, it can be seen as a correct equivalent of “ruling” and “domi-
nant”, which are used explicitly in the phrases “governing strata” (SCW 190) and “dominant
class” (SCW 194).

                                          2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
22                                                                      ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE



   1.3. The semantic connections and distinctions so far identified can now
be recapitulated as follows:

      1     conceptions of the world          folkloric vs official
      2     in mutual opposition              (active or passive) vs (active or passive)
            located respectively in:
      3          a) social classes            subaltern vs hegemonic
                 b) intellectual categories   simple vs cultured


  Reading the table vertically, we can see at once that “folkloric” connects
with “subaltern” and “simple”. Neither of these terms go very well with an
“active” position, either in common usage or, still less, in Gramsci’s. By the
same token, the evident connection between “official” and “hegemonic” and
“cultured” does not square with “passive”. In other words, even if Gramsci
were not explicit on the point, the ambiguity still surrounding “opposition”
would have to be resolved by assigning “passiveness” to folklore and
“activeness” to official conceptions. The logic of connective and oppositional
coherence alone then would lead us to the conclusion that the proposition
underlying Gramsci’s considerations takes the following form:

          The folkloric conception            is to    the official conception
     as the subaltern social class            is to    the hegemonic social class
     as the simple intellectual category      is to    the cultured intellectual category
           as passive opposition              is to        active opposition.


   2.0. This conclusion was fairly predictable, but it is confirmed by the
specific points Gramsci makes on the material of folklore itself, the
conception of the world it embodies, and the opposition between both of
these and official conceptions. His points are not merely statements of fact.
Whether they have to do with content or form (by which we understand here
mode of organization or degree of inner coherence), they are decidedly
judgemental in character, and the judgement can very rarely be called
positive. Even if Gramsci occasionally modifies his judgement and assesses
folklore positively in certain respects, it does not seem to alter our
impression that he is being quite deliberately systematic in his devaluation
of folklore (be-ginning with those features which we have listed).


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                    23


   2.1. It is often hard to make out whether Gramsci is talking about folk-
material as such or the conception of the world it expresses, but the
attributes he assigns all point plainly in a negative direction.
   Thus, in a context where the reference is definitely to the material itself,
Gramsci states that there is “nothing more contradictory and fragmentary
than folklore”. Elsewhere, where the reference is less certain, he notes that
“folklore” has stayed “scattered and many-sided”. Referring to the folkloric
or popular conception of the world, Gramsci says that it is “to a large extent
implicit” as well as “unelaborated”, “unsystematic”, and “many-sided” (SCW
190, 189):
      not only because it includes different and juxtaposed elements, but also
      because it is stratified, from the more crude to the less crude - if, indeed,
      one should not speak of 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 (SCW 189).
    The negative judgement, then, affects all aspects of folklore: both the way
in which it is organized and the nature or indeed the content of the elements
which make it up. The way that Gramsci thinks and talks about this material,
whether in general terms or through specific examples, is as something
essentially debased, the spill-over of cultured conceptions. And not only is it
backward in relation to the developments of science and “cultured culture”:
it is even out of touch with the conditions under which the people actually
live.
    In addition to the passages already cited, one might look at those in which
Gramsci underlines folklore’s dependence on the “culture of the dominant
class”, or where he talks about how “certain opinions and scientific
concepts, taken out of context, and more or less distorted, are for ever falling
into the popular domain” where they are “assimilated in strange ways” (SCW
193, 189); or again where the “Ptolemaic conception” – which elsewhere is
assigned to “common sense” (SCW 190; QC 1456; SPN 420) is regarded as
“typical of folklore”; or, finally, where he points out that
      certain conceptions specific to folklore remain even after these conditions
      [of the people’s cultural life] have been (or seem to be) modified or have
      given way to bizarre combinations (SCW 190)

   The “tradition”, in short, is a “mosaic” (SCW 189).
   2.2. Passiveness and backwardness of content are of course simply a
manifestation of the fact that the material is incapable of elaboration or
systemization. With everything connected in this way, what we appear to
have is an entirely homogeneous series of attributes. Whether Gramsci is

                                          2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
24                                                               ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


referring to the material of folklore or its conception of the world, its
content or its form, he always attributes to it qualities that constitute the
weak (or negative, low-value) term of an oppositional pair whose strong (or
positive, high-value) term is reserved more or less explicitly for conceptions
to be found on the side of official society and the ruling strata.
   Looking first at formal qualities, we find explicitly associated with
folklore: contradictoriness, fragmentation, dispersal, multiplicity, implicitness,
non-elaboration, un-systematicness, difference, juxtaposition, stratification,
indigestibility, etc. Explicitly stated qualities such as elaboration, systematicness,
political organization and centralization, organic systemization, etc. are
reserved for non-folk conceptions. But it would obviously not be a distortion
to extend the list to include the negation of the remaining “weak” terms
assigned to folklore (*non-contradictoriness, *non-fragmentation, *non-
multiplicity, i.e. *unity, *non-implicitness, i.e. *explicitness, and so on).
   There are some nuances, but most of these pairs point to the fact that the
manner of ordering collections of cultural phenomena and their respective
conceptions of the world, and the results of that process, are in one case
positive and in the other negative.
   The qualities that refer particularly to the manner in which the process
takes place are elaboration, systematicness, organization, centralization,
organic systemization and the like, and their opposites, whether explicitly
stated or not. If we agree to call the positive and negative poles “organic”
and “unorganic” respectively, and to refer to the ordering-process as
“combination”, the semantic connections and distinctions can then be
schematized as:
                               unorganic versus organic
                                    combination
  Such qualities as fragmentation, dispersal, multiplicity, stratification and
their opposites are concerned on the other hand with the results of the
process. To indicate the two different kinds of internal organization we can
use the terms “fragmentary” and “unitary”, which gives us:
                              fragmentary versus unitary
                                internal organization

   One pair – implicitness/explicitness – is left over, and this we can take as
referring to the mode of expression or manifestation, schematized as:
                                implicit versus explicit
                                 mode of expression



2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                  25


   As regards the material of folklore — in other words what is contained in
its opinions or beliefs or practices — Gramsci emphasizes above all the fact
that it is a debased spill-over. This is obviously in contrast to the original
character of what is produced by “culture”, so that we can represent the
opposition as follows:
                               debased versus original
                                      content

  If we now add these new pairs of attributes to those already identified, we
get the following (simplified) table:

               folkloric              versus    official
               (active or passive)    versus    (active or passive)
               subaltern              versus    hegemonic
               simple                 versus    cultured
               unorganic              versus    organic
               fragmentary            versus    unitary
               implicit               versus    explicit
               debased                versus    original

– which makes it increasingly unlikely that the quality of activeness can be
attributed to folklore.
   2.3. Gramsci has quite different ways of talking about the forms taken by
the opposition between folk and official conceptions, depending on which
of the two aspects of the relation he is considering, and it is these explicit
statements that enable us finally to decide the question of activeness and
passiveness.
   Looked at from the point of view of folklore, the opposition is “for the
most part implicit, mechanical, objective” (SCW 188). But when it is looked
at from the other point of view, it completely changes character and
becomes something active and organized. This is what is implied when
Gramsci asks whether the “elaboration” and “systemization” of Catholicism
wrought by “intellectuals and the Church hierarchy” were not in fact
necessary “to keep folklore scattered and many-sided”. The opposition
appears even more active and organized when Gramsci refers to the state as
an entity which is “not agnostic, but has its own conception of life which it
is its duty to disseminate through education of the popular masses”: this
“educational activity”, as Gramsci observes, “is in competition and conflict
with other explicit or implicit conceptions”, amongst which is folklore
“which, therefore, has to be ‘overcome’” (SCW 190, 191).

                                        2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
26                                                                    ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE



   Thus, from the point of view of folklore the opposition takes the form at
best of resistance. It might be a tenacious resistance, but in kind it is
mechanical, implicit and objective. On the opposite side, one has an
activeness which at the least is involved in “keeping things in check”, but
which has the power to “uproot”, “replace”, “hammer”, and so on (SCW
191).
   2.4. Once again, then, the weak and strong terms are distributed on each
side of a sharp dividing line, with the former linked to folklore and the
latter to official conceptions.
   There are here at least two recognizable semantic distinctions. There is
the opposition between implicit, mechanical and objective, and *explicit,
*non-mechanical, *non-objective; and there is that between the aggressive
character of official conceptions and folklore’s attitude of resistance. The
first obviously has to do with the degree of consciousness or intentionality
involved, and we can represent it by the terms “mechanical versus
intentional” (drawing on other passages in Gramsci, the terms “spontaneity
versus conscious leadership” could be used instead2) The second opposition,
which is concerned with aggressive capabilities and force of expansion, can
be represented by the terms “active” and “passive” as already used.
   It does not seem appropriate to run these two pairs together, so the
connections and distinctions concerning the “opposition” that Gramsci
speaks about require two different schematizations. The first is to do with
consciousness, the second with the capacity to influence on the outside. If we
may agree to use the term “opposition” to link the two poles of
consciousness, we shall have the following schema:


2. SPN 196-197: “Spontaneity and conscious leadership. The term “spontaneity” can be
variously defined, for the phenomenon to which it refers is many-sided. Meanwhile it must
be stressed that “pure” spontaneity does not exist in history: it would come to the same
thing as “pure” mechanicity. In the “most spontaneous” movement it is simply the case that
the elements of “conscious leadership” cannot be checked, have left no reliable document.
It may be said that spontaneity is therefore characteristic of the “history of the subaltern
classes”, and indeed of their most marginal and peripheral elements; these have not
achieved any consciousness of the class “for itself”, and consequently it never occurs to
them that their-history might have some possible importance, that there might be some
value in leaving documentary evidence of it”.
Gramsci goes on: “Hence in such movements there exist multiple elements of ‘conscious
leadership’, but no one of them is predominant or transcends the level of a given social
stratum’s ‘popular science’ — its ‘common sense’ or traditional conception of the world”.
For the continuation of this passage, see Note 3 below.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                    27



                             mechanical versus intentional
                                     opposition

  And if we further agree to use the term “conflict” to link the two poles of
the capacity to influence and expand, the relation will be represented as:

                                  passive versus active
                                        conflict

   In this way we have both confirmed the straightforward hypothesis that
the qualities Gramsci attributes to folklore are homogeneous in a necessarily
negative sense, and resolved the ambiguity surrounding the “opposition”
between the two conceptions. The general proposition underlying his
statements can now be formulated as follows:

         folkloric conception                      is to     official
      as subaltern social class                    is to     hegemonic
      as simple intellectual category              is to     cultured
      as unorganic combination                     is to     organic
      as fragmentary internal organization         is to     unitary
      as implicit mode of expression               is to     explicit
      as debased content                           is to     original
      as mechanical opposition                     is to     intentional
      as passive conflict                          is to     active


   2.5. Everything falls into place, then, but perhaps just a little too neatly.
Presented in this way, the constant attribution of weak or negative terms to
folklore and strong or positive ones to non-folk conceptions has all the
marks of the deliberate systematicity we mentioned before, and can
obviously look suspect. Might it not in fact be a mirage or distortion produced
by the schematization and hence excessive impoverishment of an argument
that in itself is a good deal more mobile and articulated?
   There is no question but that Gramsci’s considerations are richer than the
proposition we have come up with. Apart from anything else, there are a
number of “positive” attributes which we have passed over but which need
to be taken into account, as well as other qualifications and nuances. But
before we go on to consider these, the point must be made that the
systematic quality to which we have drawn attention is explicitly confirmed
by the text as we have examined it so far.

                                          2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
28                                                             ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


   It is Gramsci himself who says that all the negative qualities listed above
must be assigned to folklore, before moving on to an examination of its
concrete manifestations, and perhaps even quite separately from them. This
list of negatives and their attribution to folklore are to be argued by
deduction from the very concept of “people”. If the people consists of all
subaltern and instrumental classes, it follows “by definition”, as Gramsci
writes, that “the people […] cannot possess conceptions which are
elaborated, systematic and politically organized and centralized in their
albeit contradictory development” (SCW 189, Italics added). Elaboration,
systematicness and centralization are in fact expressions of hegemony (even
if not only of hegemony), which is precisely what those classes which are
still subaltern lack.
   So systematic a dichotomizing of the various attributes would seem to be
a real characteristic rather than an arbitrary impoverishment of the text.

   3.0. This being the case — at least so far as we can see — it is fairly obvious
that Gramsci’s treatment of folklore moves along two separate lines, and
that his assessment changes radically as he shifts from one to the other. On
the one hand, he considers folklore as an object of study and as such he
validates it in full. But on the other, he looks at it as a force or factor in real
life and its process of development, and from this point of view he
characterizes it with a long, and so far systematic and unbroken, s cries of
negative, low-value, qualities.
   In other words, folklore is allowed the rank of a conception of the world,
but within this category of phenomena it is placed at a lower level in the
hierarchy than that assigned to the official conceptions from which it is
distinguished and which stand in opposition to it. By definition, it is denied
all the formal qualities of coherence, unity, consciousness, etc., which are
typical of the hegemonic classes and their “official” conceptions. Gramsci’s
esteem goes entirely to the latter, quite independently of the specific
content of the conception in question or what social class it belongs to.
   The upshot is a mixture of tensions and conflicts that border on the edge
of ambiguity. The cultural expressions of the social classes with which
Gramsci solidarizes so clearly at the political level are assessed positively to
the extent that they are to be considered simply as an object of scientific
research — but are judged negatively when it comes to seeing them as
factors in real life and its process of development. Alternately, the cultural
modes of the classes which Gramsci opposes both politically and culturally
are esteemed as permanent “values” and “forces”.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                29


   It is precisely these tensions or ambiguities which give rise to conflicting
interpretations on the question of the political use of folklore. Thus, at one
extreme there is the tendency to shift Gramsci’s positive judgement on
folklore as an object of study onto its potential use in politics, while at the
other we find his negative judgement on the modes and content of folklore
extended to the object of study itself.
   Everything seems to revolve around the real or apparent ambivalence of
the concepts of “subaltern” and “official”. The text seems to allow of two
different interpretations which can be summarized very roughly and
schematically as follows. Depending on how they are affected by the context,
both singly and in relation to each other, the two concepts may take the
form of an opposition either:
   (a)   between “subaltern = the modern proletariat which today is
         historically in the right even if it has attained power only in a few
         cases” (for Gramsci, the USSR) and “official = the modern
         bourgeoisie which today is historically in the wrong even though in
         many cases it still retains power”; or:
   (b)   between “subaltern = those classes, past or future, that are lacking in
         or deprived of historical force” and “official = those classes whose
         hegemony, whether past or future, constitutes real history”.
  It is at this difficult point that we turn for guidance to those of Gramsci’s
observations that we have not yet taken into account.

   4 . 0 . These remaining observations are different from the foregoing
inasmuch as they provide a more or less immediately positive description of
folklore. Few though they are, this is not a reason for discounting their effect
on the systematic distribution of strong and weak terms noted above, and we
should examine them with a certain amount of care. Here to begin with is a
brief list of the relevant points.
    1) Some of folklore’s weak attributes are modified quantitatively by
         Gramsci at the level of general definition. Thus, he writes that the
         folkloric conception “is implicit to a large extent”, and that its
         opposition to official world views is “for the most part implicit,
         mechanical, and objective” (SCW 189, Italics added).
    2) Referring specifically to “morality of the people” — but without making
         it clear whether he is thinking of the conservative conceptions or the
         progressive innovations which he will distinguish between a little later
         on — Gramsci attributes a particular “tenacity” to certain folk-
         convictions: “timperatives exist that are much stronger, more tenacious
         and more effective than those of official ‘morality’” (SCW 190).

                                      2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
30                                                                   ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


     3) Still in the area of morality, and also that of “juridical folklore”,
        Gramsci credits at least some folk-conceptions with the ability to
        “adhere and correspond spontaneously” to actual conditions of life
        and their process of development. Hence it can happen that:
        a) they are not always necessarily just the debased, inert, spill-over
            of dominant conceptions. So much is clear from the passage in
            which he speaks of
               the ensemble of opinions and beliefs concerning one’s ‘own’ rights
               which circulate uninterruptedly among the popular masses and are
               continuously renewed under the pressure of real living conditions
               and the spontaneous comparison between the ways in which the
               various social strata live (SCW 193).
        b) they can sometimes have a progressive value which the analysis of
           cultural stratifications must take account of; thus, Gramsci
           underlines the need to “distinguish between different strata” in
           the sphere of popular morality as well:
               the fossilized ones which reflect conditions of past life and are
               therefore conservative and reactionary, and those which consist of a
               series of innovations, often creative and progressive, determined
               spontaneously by forms and conditions of life which are in the
               process of developing and which are in contradiction to or simply
               different from the morality of the governing strata (SCW 189).
        c) they may achieve a degree of expansive capacity that might throw
           official conceptions back on the defensive; thus, when discussing a
           certain kind of criticism levelled at “so-called natural law”,
           Gramsci notes that, behind its apparent objectives,
               the aim of the controversy is in fact to curb the influence that the
               popular currents of “natural law” may (and in fact do) have, particularly
               on young intellectuals (SCW 193, Italics added).
     4) Speaking about popular song — though there are indications that the
        point might be applied more widely Gramsci acknowledges that, even
        though folklore is generally speaking dependent on official
        conceptions, (i.e. the process of “cultural descent” from elites to
        masses is going on), the people is “itself” able to select according to
        its “own” criteria, these going more or less implicitly against official
        ones. Thus, he makes the point that even though popular songs “are
        written neither by nor for the people”, they have been “taken over by
        it because they conform to its way of thinking and feeling”; they are
        representative of “how it conceives life and the world, in contrast
        with official society”. This makes the phrases Gramsci uses elsewhere
        rather less generic:

2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                          31



           folklore has always been tied to the culture ofthe dominant class and, in
           its own way, has drawn from it the motifs which have then become inserted
           into combinations with the previous traditions (SCW 194, Italics added).

   5.0. It is fairly clear that there are two different ways in which what for the
sake of brevity we shall call these “positive” remarks operate in relation to
those already examined. Either they introduce “new” qualities or aspects, not
previously taken into consideration, or which have not so far come to the
fore; or they modify in a quantitative sense certain qualities already otherwise
attributed. We shall examine these two aspects separately.
   5.1.0. The following act in the first way and introduce “new” qualities: (a)
the point about the particular “tenacity” of some popular conceptions; (b)
the acknowledgement that folklore, at least in certain cases, is able to adhere
“spontaneously” to real conditions of life as they develop; (c) the attribution
of a “progressive” political value to some of the phenomena of folklore.
   We must therefore introduce these new data into our previous table. But
in so doing we have to observe that the positive remarks under examination,
as is clearly stated, concern only some features or elements of folklore, while
the negative characteristics equally clearly concerned the whole of folklore.
This means two things: firstly, that these positive attributions are not to be
placed at the same level as the negative ones already dealt with; and
secondly, that assigning them to folklore does not lead to their negations
being assigned to official conceptions as such, but at most to their affecting
some aspects of the latter.
   Thus, leaving aside the fact that the “tenacity” of popular attitudes is not
always regarded “positively” (since it is also responsible for holding back the
people in a manner deplored by Gramsci 3), the statement “certain popular
moral imperatives are more tenacious than those of official morality” means
only that certain official imperatives are weaker than those of folklore. The


3. In this connection, cf. what Gramsci writes immediately after the passage cited in Note 2
above: “This is precisely what De Man, empirically, counterposes to Marxism; but he does
not realize (apparently) that he is falling into the position of somebody who, after
describing folklore, witchcraft, etc., and showing that these conceptions have sturdy
historical roots and are tenaciously entwined in the psychology of specific popular strata,
believed that he had ‘transcended’ modern science — taking as ‘modern science’ every little
article in the popular scientific journals and periodicals. This is a real case of intellectual
teratology, of which there are other examples: precisely, the admirers of folklore, who
advocate its preservation; the ‘magicalists’ connected with Maeterlinck, who believe it is
necessary to take up anew the thread — snapped by violence — of alchemy and witchcraft,
so that science may be put back onto a course more fertile in discoveries, etc” (SPN 197).

                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
32                                                                 ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


same is true of the capacity to adhere to reality: some popular opinions have
it, but this does not mean that non-folk opinions do not. But were any proof
needed of the particular, non-universal, character of these positive qualities
in folklore, one would only need to look at Gramsci’s acknowledgement of
the “progressive” value of certain popular beliefs or opinions. This
acknowledgement rests on the creation of an explicit contrast between
progressive and reactionary (or conservative) inside folklore itself — requiring,
at most, an identical contrast inside official conceptions.
    If, in short, we go on to fit these “new” qualities into the system of
oppositions we have set up, we find that the latter is “extended” and also
looks different on the page. Thus, if we agree to use the term “effective” for
the capacity to adhere to reality, the table would be extended in the following
(simplified) way:

                             folkloric    versus   official
                                    ...            ...
        (tenacious or not tenacious)      versus   (tenacious or not tenacious)
          (effective or not effective)    versus   (effective or not effective)
         (progressive or reactionary)     versus   (progressive or reactionary)

   Only one of the oppositional pairs to which the extension is added
appears to be affected in any way, and it is the one that concerns “content”.
From the point of view of folklore, content no longer appears as purely
“debased”: it might be “occasionally original”, or even autonomous. This
points forward to those quantitative modifications already mentioned which
we shall be looking at more closely in due course.
   Otherwise, the extension seems to leave the absolute nature of the
oppositions and their distribution intact. The fact that folklore can
sometimes be tenacious, effective and progressive (or rather, more tenacious
etc. than official conceptions sometimes are) neither affects nor limits — if
anything, to some extent it confirms and strengthens — the implicitness of
the mode of expression, the unorganic character of combination, the
fragmentation of internal organization, the passive-ness of the conflict, the
simplicity or elementariness of the intellectual category, or in short the
subaltern position of the social class to which folklore belongs. All that is
affirmed is that the implicit mode of expression does not of itself preclude
the presence of (some) progressive political values, that fragmentation or
unorganicness nevertheless allow room for (some) strata of innovations, and
so on.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                  33


   The real consequence of the new group of oppositions is to be found at a
different level. It is directly linked to the fact which makes it impossible to
infer any positive judgement on folklore as such from what Gramsci wrote,
the fact that the new oppositions tenacious / not tenacious, effective / not
effective, progressive / reactionary do not coincide with the dichotomies
subaltern / hegemonic, un-organic / organic, etc., but are added to them.
   Because of this lack of coincidence, it is both possible and necessary to
rearrange the whole system, no longer taking the opposition between
folkloric and official as the point of reference but rather each of the new
oppositions, most particularly that of an explicitly political kind.
   The result is a complete reshuffling of the semantic connections and
distinctions. What is revealed in the long run is that in Gramsci’s text there
exist implicit terms of conceptual reference which lie beyond the
straightforward opposition between folkloric and official as it has been
presented so far.
   Pedantic though it may be, it could be of some use to represent the
schema constructed in function of the dichotomy between progressive and
reactionary in diagrammatic form. The schema would then offer us not two
but four possible kinds of conceptions of the world. While the vertical
connections between folkloric and subaltern, implicit, unorganic, etc., and
between official and hegemonic, explicit, organic, etc. remain unchanged, the
four kinds would take the following form:

            folkloric and reactionary          official and reactionary
            folkloric and progressive          official and progressive


   5.1.1. One of the most immediately obvious features of this new pattern is
that the concept of “official” is, so to speak, split in two. It is seen as capable
of assuming at least one negative quality (“reactionary”), which interrupts
the long and hitherto unbroken series of positive attributes – or of adding
one further positive quality (“progressive”) to all those preceding.
   The first is hardly surprising, and it is moreover explicitly stated in the
text with Gramsci describing some of the attitudes of the cultured and ruling
strata as “the most narrow-minded conservatism” (SCW 193). This corrective
to Gramsci’s systematic acknowledgement of positive qualities is in any case
perfectly consistent with the obvious gap between his own views and the
“official” conceptions of the time and place in which he is writing and
working. The compatibility between “official” and “progressive”, on the
other hand, might occasion some surprise, particularly since the text under
consideration does not appear to offer any immediate indications or

                                        2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
34                                                            ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


concrete examples of a connection which we have brought out by purely
formal and combinatory means. There is, however, no real reason for
surprise if one reflects that the term “official” is really just a general heading
for a number of highly valued qualities. So as regards its intrinsic qualities,
the expression “official and progressive” can be translated, on the basis of
the connections which we believe we have established, as: “a conception of
the world that is organic, unitary, explicit, original in its contents,
intentional in its opposition to other conceptions and active in its conflict
with them, and finally, progressive”. Which obviously means for Gramsci the
philosophy of praxis, historical materialism, Marxism — the point of view
which he himself takes up. But “official” also means “pertaining to the
cultured sectors and the hegemonic classes”: for Gramsci, both of these
further conditions can be regarded as met only in the Soviet Union, whereas
for the rest of the world only the first is satisfied. Thus it can be seen that,
far from being produced by purely formal means, the combination of
“official and progressive” stands in fact for the goal in view or the model
which is referred to.
    But there is a good deal more. By inserting this new combination, which
in the first instance came about by purely formal means, the static nature of
the opposition between “folkloric” and “official” is decisively broken. The
four-term pattern above has no room either for Marxism as the conception
of the world belonging to social forces that are not yet hegemonic or for
those workers’ parties that are not yet in power. But it is that same pattern
which demands their presence, based as it is on three terms denoting a given
state of affairs and one which designates a goal and a model. The schema
therefore represents a process, an action in time, and thus contains Marxism
as not yet hegemonic, the workers’ parties as not yet in power, or more
precisely the class-struggle. These are present not as terms or factors, but as
mediators or agents which effect the transition from the given state of affairs
to the new situation and transform a “progressive” that is still “folkloric”
(i.e. still subaltern, implicit, fragmentary, etc.) into a definitively “official”
(i.e. fully hegemonic) “progressive”.
    5.1.2. Thus our formal repatterning of the schema in function of the
political assessment explicitly stated by the text has led us to recognize from
within the presence of an underlying context, of unspoken but decisive
conceptual reference-points. It is precisely to the tacit but active presence of
these references that the ambivalence or ambiguity mentioned above has to
be related, for it comes about as the result of repeated, sudden shifts, not
perhaps kept entirely under control, from one level or point of view to
another.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                               35


   a) If the level concerned is that of describing a given state of affairs, and
as long as the factors taken into account are limited to bourgeois official
conceptions on the one hand and folklore as reflecting the cultural life of the
great masses of the people on the other, the oppositional, what one might
almost call alternative, value of the folkloric conception is immediately
apparent, and the way is opened to a recognition of its ability both to
produce its own autonomous culture and to select products handed down
from above for its own, opposite, ends.
   In such cases, the text authorizes us to recognize the folk conception as a
spontaneous form of the “spirit of cleavage”, which Gramsci defines
elsewhere as “the progressive acquisition of consciousness of [the innovatory
class’s] own historical personality”, (PN2 52-53) and to see “progressive” or
“protest” folklore at least as the manifestation of a class-instinct (“instinct”
of course being understood as a “primitive and elementary historical
acquisition”, not a biological phenomenon) (SPN 199).
   b) But this limitation of perspective to the level of pure description and
the straightforward comparison between folklore and bourgeois conceptions
is short-lived. Straight-away, reference to the essential terms comes into
play, the tension opens up between things as they are and the goal in view,
and we move from the area of static description to that of action or process.
At this point, there are at least three sides to the comparison (folklore,
bourgeois conceptions, Marxist conception), and all the decidedly negative
limitations of folklore come to the fore, however progressive it might be in
certain respects and however significant its opposition to the official
conceptions of the bourgeoisie. At the same time, the way is cleared for an
appreciation of all the formal qualities which are possessed by official
conceptions (whether bourgeois or proletarian) and not by folklore in its role
as the cultural expression of social classes that are still subaltern. When it
comes to an appreciation of those formal qualities, Gramsci contrasts
folklore with the Marxist conception of the world, not with bourgeois ones:
what are now in question are class-consciousness and class-struggle, the
Communist Party, proletarian hegemony, in other words, the aims and
agents of a huge transformation of things as they are.
   So it seems that the constant play of light and shadow falling across
Gramsci’s discussions of folklore and official conceptions is to be attributed
to the fact that the beam is cast from a number of different angles. But it is
controlled by a single switch movement towards a goal and adaptation to a
model.



                                     2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
36                                                                        ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


   5.1.3. We cannot, however, ignore the point that in all the criss-crossing
of levels and points of view, one perspective remains constant. This is the
esteem afforded to certain qualities which we shall call intellectual and,
which are the condition and expression of hegemony, by whichever class it is
exercised. These qualities are presented, so to speak, as crossing class-
boundaries: their possession or exercise is conditioned by class, but not their
value, which is permanent. That is why one cannot be sure what hierarchical
order all the terms, explicit and implicit, which the text relates to one
another, should be put in, except for the entirely positive elements at one
extreme (“official and progressive”) and the entirely negative ones at the
other (“folkloric and reactionary”). The order of the middle terms remains
uncertain, since it is impossible to determine whether more value is given to
what is politically positive (which would put “folkloric and progressive”
higher up the scale) or to what is formally positive (in which case it would be
“official and reactionary”).
   There is then a question whether a “progressive” content which is without
formal capacities or intellectual force should not be considered inert, if not
indeed “reactionary”, while formal and intellectual capacities, even though
their content is “reactionary”, should of themselves ultimately be regarded
as “progressive”.
   A solution to this problem might be found if we look back to Gramsci’s
examination of other forces. His interest in folklore as an object of study is
consonant with his desire for “a more cautious and precise assessment of the
forces acting in society”4. Undoubtedly he regards folklore as one of these
forces.

4. PN2 52-53: “Ideological material. A study of how the ideological structure of a ruling class
is actually organized: that is, the material organization meant to preserve, defend, and
develop the theoretical or ideological ‘front’” […].
The press is the most dynamic part of the ideological structure, but not the only one.
Everything that directly or indirectly influences or could influence public opinion belongs to
it: libraries, schools, associations and clubs of various kinds, even architecture, the layout of
streets and their names. The position that the church has maintained in the modern world
cannot be explained without knowledge of the incessant and patient efforts it makes to
ensure the continuous development of its particular sector of this material structure of
ideology. Such a study, conducted seriously, would be quite important: besides providing a
living historical model of such a structure, it would inculcate the habit of assessing the
forces of agency in society with greater caution and precision. What can an innovative class
set against the formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the ruling class? The
spirit of cleavages—that is, the progressive acquisition of the consciousness of one’s
historical identity—a spirit of cleavage that must aim to extend itself from the protagonist
class to the classes that are its potential allies: all of this requires complex ideological work,
the first condition of which is an exact knowledge of the field that must be cleared of its
element of human mass”.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                         37


   We have already seen him paying tribute to the “tenacity” of folklore, and
pursuing this line a little further we would find more explicit statements
elsewhere, as for example when Gramsci writes:
      It is worth recalling the frequent affirmation made by Marx on the “solidity
      of popular beliefs” as a necessary element of a specific situation. What he
      says more or less is “when this way of conceiving things has the force of
      popular beliefs”, etc. Another proposition of Marx is that a popular
      conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of
      the kind, which is extremely significant (SPN 377)5.

   Another example would be his note on the “fanatical granite compactness
of the ‘popular beliefs’ which assume the same energy as ‘material forces’”
(SPN 404).
   These observations might obviously allow us to regard “material forces”
(and hence folklore in so far as it is comparable to material forces) as
“content” and intellectual qualities as “form”, tending thereby “to reinforce
the conception of ‘historic bloc’” (SPN 377). As a consequence we would be
authorized by the text at this point to see the positive aspect of folklore as
residing in the fact that it is a “force” or “energy” which is made the content
of a “form” that takes shape elsewhere, rather than in particular items of
content, however progressive they may be.
   But on the other hand, the whole argument lends itself to over-
simplification. Notwithstanding Gramsci’s declared intention to treat this
      distinction between form and content [as having] purely didactic value,
      since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form
      and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces
      (SPN 377)

   even the dialectical relationship between form and content is broken. The
intellectual form is regarded as pre-existent or at any rate determining,
while, if the material forces are regarded as essential, it is only at the
instrumental level. Their content (as well as the “other” forms which this
content cannot but take on) is completely devoid of interest. In spite of
Gramsci’s statement to the effect that “the demands of cultural contact with
the ‘simple’” must be “continually felt” (and therefore satisfied) (SPN 330f),
the only point of interest in the simple is their material force, with which
contact is made in political action rather than cultural or scientific research.

5. SPN 377. The passage goes on: “The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to rein-
force the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and
ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely di-
dactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and
the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces”.

                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
38                                                                   ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


   5.2.0. So we come to a group of problems which go far beyond the specific
questions which we intended to deal with in these notes: problems concerning
the relation between intellectuals and masses, or between spontaneity and
conscious leadership.
   In fact, Gramsci’s observations on folklore are one aspect of this wider
batch of problems, and reflect the difficulties which arise from them. So much
is clear not only from the direct mentions of “spontaneity” which we have
already come across, but also from the remaining positive comments on
folklore to which we must now turn our attention.
   5.2.1. It has already been mentioned that, as well as introducing “new”
qualities, Gramsci’s positive comments on folklore modify certain previously-
attributed negative qualities in a quantitative sense. A glance back to the
points listed above will suffice to show that this second kind of positive
comment is concerned with what we have agreed to call “mode of expression”,
“contents” and “conflict”, and that they make the association with folklore of
the weak or negative terms in these three cases (implicit, debased, passive)
less absolute. Essentially, what is said is that the folk conception is implicit
though not entirely so; that its contents are debased spill-overs, though not all
of them; and that its conflict with official conceptions is passive, though not
always.
   As a result, there are at least three cases in which the horizontal contrasts
which we thought we could identify change character: being purely
qualitative in kind, they were discontinuous; now they take on the appearance
of a quantitative continuity. It emerges in short that there is a series of inter-
mediate and continuous nuances between “entirely implicit, debased or
passive” and “entirely explicit, original or active”, which can be expressed
verbally with phrases like “on the whole”, “a little more”, “a little less”, etc.,
or with the phrases that Gramsci himself uses, “to a large extent” and “for the
most part”.
   Bearing this in mind, we should modify the purely qualitative
schematizations worked out above in at least three cases. Just to take one
example, instead of
                       implicit versus explicit
     we should put:
                      implicit to a large extent versus implicit to a limited extent

     or
                      implicit to a limited extent versus explicit to a large extent
     or even, so as to include the outer limits:
                      implicit vs implicit to a large extent vs … vs implicit
                      to a limited extent                    vs      explicit.
     And we should do the same for “debased” and “passive”.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                 39


    This revision is by no means a trivial one. It involves a transition from
quality to quantity which is consonant with certain of Gramsci’s general
procedures. But could all the contrasting pairs we have before us be revised
in the same way?
    It would make sense for “simple”, “fragmentary”, “unorganic” and
“mechanical”, but a good deal less so for the contrast between “subaltern”
and “hegemonic”. It is true that, forcing the issue a little, we could conceive
of attenuations or exceptions in this case as well. Using words a little bit
loosely, one could say for example that the proletariat today is a little less
subaltern (or even, looking to the other side of a not precisely defined
dividing-line, a little more hegemonic). Gramsci himself is basically
presenting the dominant classes as a little less (or not entirely) hegemonic
when he talks about the expansive power of certain popular beliefs. But such
expressions have very little rigour about them and simply correspond to a
little stronger, a little weaker, and so on. We know perfectly well in fact that “a
little more power” is not “power”, and that the difference between them is
precisely “revolution”.
    It is in short extremely difficult to recast the qualitative contrast between
“subaltern” and “hegemonic” as a simple continuous gradation of
quantitative steps from “more subaltern” (or perhaps “less hegemonic”) to
“less subaltern” (or “more hegemonic”). But even if we did decide to do it,
and push Gramsci’s text in a “reformist” direction, so to speak, we would
come up against further and not inconsiderable difficulties.
    For even if Gramsci regarded all the qualitative contrasts he presents us
with as quantitative distinctions, the fact remains that by definition, as he
puts it, he systematically and nearly always absolutely assigns negative
qualities to folklore, and almost without exception he expresses himself in
terms of quality and discontinuity (words sometimes betray one’s thought, as
is well known, but also in the sense that they make clear what it really is).
    So we are faced with an alternative. By explicitly introducing a number of
quantitative modifications we would bring about a radical transformation in
the system of qualitative contrasts that seemed to be emerging from the
text. But there are strong arguments against such a transformation: the fact
that it is difficult to give a quantitative sense to the fundamental contrast
between subaltern and hegemonic; Gramsci’s attribution of negative qualities
to folklore and positive ones to official conceptions “by definition”, and his
use of an essentially qualitative terminology. All these factors indicate that
his modifications should be relegated to the conceptual sidelines, and lend
to his positive comments on folklore the banal character of exceptions which
confirm the rule.

                                       2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
40                                                                       ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


   5.2.2. Once again, then, an ambivalence is created, two possible ways of
reading the text.
   One way might be to lay emphasis on the value of the positive comments
and the quantitative modifications. But then we not only run into the
difficulties which have just been mentioned, but also have to face the fact
that folklore is the target of a whole series of negative qualifications which
extend far beyond the terms presented here, and this is not easy to get
round. Quite apart from the numerous remarks scattered through the rest of
Gramsci’s work, there is a rather revealing incongruence in the text of the
Observations itself. Having just given a rigorous definition of folklore,
Gramsci goes on to say that “it could be argued that all religions, even the
most cultured and sophisticated, are ‘folklore’ in relation to modern thought”,
even if there is the “vital difference” that “religions… are, as has been said,
‘elaborated and systematized’ by (religious) intellectuals and the Church
hierarchy” (SCW 189). With this statement, Gramsci goes against his own
definition of folklore as characteristic of the subaltern classes and standing
in opposition to official conceptions, and demonstrates that, in spite of the
rigorous terms he himself has established, the idea that “folklore” actually
means everything that modern thought (with its apex represented by
Marxism) must sweep away is firmly entrenched6.
   One can then resolve this ambivalence in the opposite direction, and the
text gives us considerable authority for so doing. But we then find ourselves
having to pose a much more important question to the text itself. The
reasons for his negative assessment of folklore are clear enough, and at the
same time it is understandable that Gramsci should take a serious interest in
the subject on more than one occasion (not only is he forced to exercise his
powerful intellectual curiosity on a large number of minutiae, but there is
also that element of tenacity that makes folklore important for the purposes
of knowing and transforming reality). But we still have to ask ourselves how
he manages conceptually to define so “indigestible” a “mass of debased
fragments” and debris as a conception of the world, when its essentially un-
organic character is enhanced rather than diminished by the presence of a
few conceptions that are progressive and effective.
6. Another slight divergence from the more rigorous concept comes where Gramsci says that
“common sense” is “philosophical folklore” (SCW 189). But elsewhere Gramsci distinguishes
between “popular” common sense, the common sense of “the more educated strata of
society” and that of “the intellectuals” (cf. SPN 331). I think that this distinction according
to socio-cultural strata or levels should be given more thought than it usually is in discussion
of Gramsci’s concept of common sense. In the first place, it confirms Gramsci’s alertness to
what I have referred to elsewhere as connotation (i.e. the solidarity between cultural
phenomena and social groups). Furthermore, it warns us to be careful not to relate to
common sense as a socially undifferentiated phenomenon what Gramsci relates, or might
relate, specifically to the common sense of the cultured strata or that of the popular strata
(which are in their turn internally socially differentiated): cf. his distinction between
“different” Catholicisms (SPN 420).


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                            41


   6.0. Gramsci’s definition of folklore as a conception of the world draws
together into a single category phenomena that differ widely from each
other, ranging from this indigestible mass to Marxism which he regards as
the only truly “original and integral conception of the world”, the harbinger
of “an historical epoch”, a conception that is incomparably superior to any
non-Marxist official conception, however elevated, and one that will be
superseded only with “the disappearance of political society and the coming
of a regulated society” (SPN 381-382).
   The range covered is so wide that one cannot help asking whether to speak of
folklore as a conception of the world is anything more than a play on words. If
not, then the common element has to be found which allows Gramsci to bring
together under a single conceptual heading phenomena which he himself shows
to be radically divergent from one another because they either have or do not
have certain qualities regarded by him as being of decisive importance
(originality, critical consciousness, organicity, centralization, etc.).
   In short, what is it that makes them alike or brings them together in spite
of such deep (and repeatedly emphasized) intrinsic differences?
   There seem to me two different answers to this question.
   The first answer is explicitly stated by Gramsci, but is the less persuasive.
It is the solution he gives to the wider problem of the relations between
“spontaneous” philosophy and “scientific” philosophy, of which the relation
between un-organic conceptions of the world and critical conceptions are only
a specific example. From it derives the quality of “spontaneity” which Gramsci
explicitly attributes to folklore’s capacity to adhere to reality (SCW 190, 192).
   The second, and in my view, more valid answer is also to be found in
Gramsci, but not in anything he says explicitly. Rather, it is contained in the
very nature of the conceptual operation that he undertook specifically, but
not exclusively, in respect of folklore.
   6.1. The first solution alluded to above consists in the distinction which
he makes (and it is already implicit in the Observations) between “differences
of quality” and “differences of quantity”.
   Discussing the relations between “modern theory” (i.e. Marxism) and “the
‘spontaneous’ feelings of the masses”7, Gramsci asserts that
7. SPN 198-199: “At this point, a fundamental theoretical question is raised: can modern
theory be in opposition to the “spontaneous” feelings of the masses? (“spontaneous” in the
sense that they are not the result of any systematic educational activity on the part of an
already conscious leading group, but have been formed through everyday experience
illuminated by “common sense”, i.e. by the traditional popular conception of the world — what
is unimaginatively called “instinct” although it too is in fact a primitive and elementary
historical acquisition). It cannot be in opposition to them. Between the two there is a
“quantitative” difference of degree, not one of quality. A reciprocal “reduction” so to speak, a
passage from one to the other and vice versa, must be possible. (Recall that Immanuel Kant
believed it important for his philosophical theories to agree with common sense; the same
position can be found in Croce. Recall too Marx’s assertion in The Holy Family that the political
formulae of the French Revolution can be reduced to the principles of classical German
philosophy”.

                                             2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
42                                                                   ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


       there can be no “opposition” between them because “between the two
       there is a “quantitative” difference of degree, not one of quality. A
       reciprocal “reduction” so to speak, a passage from one to the other and vice
       versa, must be possible (SPN 199).

     If one recalls that just before Gramsci had written:
       It may be said that spontaneity is […] characteristic of the “history of the
       subaltern classes”, and indeed of their most marginal and peripheral
       elements, [which] have not achieved any conscious-ness of the class “for
       itself” (SPN 196);
   and bearing in mind the quality of spontaneity attributed to folklore’s
capacity to adhere to reality, and, finally, the identification of the “people”
with all the subaltern classes, it becomes clear that the quantitative
continuity which Gramsci establishes between “modern theory” and
“spontaneous feelings”, between the highest form of consciousness and the
most unconscious experiences, can immediately be transferred to the
relation between folklore at its most fragmented and official conceptions at
their most organic. They are both conceptions of the world because the
difference between them is one of “quantity”, not one of “quality” (SPN 347).
   But the assertion that there is a quantitative continuity between Marxism
and spontaneous feelings (in support of which Gramsci turns first to Kant
and Croce and only subsequently to Marx: SPN 199) is simply a more specific
and clearer application of a far more general principle: “the principle that all
men are ‘philosophers’”: this idea too is not exclusive to Gramsci, and
Gramsci himself regards it as in a certain sense a common sense truth (SPN
323, 330). What this means is that
       between the professional or “technical” philosophers and the rest of
       mankind, the difference is not one of “quality” but only of “quantity” (SPN
       347).

     Admittedly, Gramsci adds at once:
       The term “quantity” is being used here in a special sense, which is not to be
       confused with its meaning in arithmetic, since what it indicates is greater —
       or lesser degrees of “homogeneity”, “coherence”, “logicality”, etc; in other
       words, quantity of qualitative elements (SPN 347, Italics added).
     In Gramsci’s view, the difference is not limited to the fact that the
       philosopher […] “thinks” with greater logical rigour, with greater
       coherence, with more systematic sense than do other men,
     but consists primarily in the fact that



2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                        43


      the professional or technical philosopher […] knows the entire history of
      thought. In other words, he is capable of accounting for the development of
      thought up to his own day and he is in a position where he can take up a
      problem from the point which it has reached after having under-gone every
      previous attempt at a solution.
   For that reason,
      he has the same function in the field of thought that specialists have in
      their various scientific fields.
   Nevertheless, a “qualitative” continuity between “the specialist
philosopher” and “the rest of mankind” appears to be re-established by
virtue of the fact that the philosopher is a specialist in an activity that is
common to everyone, namely thought:
      it is not possible to conceive of any man who is not also a philosopher, who
      doesn’t think, because thought is proper to man as such, or at least to any
      man who is not a pathological cretin (SPN 347).
  These statements are clearly the realization of the programme that
Gramsci sets himself in the study of philosophy and culture.
      It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a
      strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity
      of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic
      philosophers. It must first be shown that all men are “philosophers”, by
      defining the limits and characteristics of the “spontaneous philosophy”
      which is proper to everybody (SPN 323).

  It is worth adding that Gramsci sees this “spontaneous philosophy” (or
what he also calls “common and popular”: SPN 328) as being contained, “not
only in language” and “in common sense and good sense”, but also
      in popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs,
      superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are
      collectively bundled together under the name of “folklore”.

   And finally that he goes on to say that
      everyone is a philosopher, though in his own way and unconsciously, since
      even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in
      “language”, there is contained a specific conception of the world (SPN 323).
   There is then more than enough to establish a direct link between
Gramsci’s concept of “spontaneous philosophy” and his definition of folklore
as a “conception of the world”. Folklore, as Gramsci conceives it, is in fact a
special form of “spontaneous” philosophy; thus, considerations about the
latter could, it would appear in principle, be transferred to the former. On
this basis, Gramsci’s remark elsewhere that “‘pure’ spontaneity does not
exist in history”: it would come to the same thing as “‘pure’ mechanicity”
(SPN 196) may also be applied to the folk conception of the world.

                                           2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
44                                                               ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


   This is further confirmation of the fact that elaborated and critical
conceptions on the one hand and on the other the indigestible mass which
folklore might be defined as can both be placed in the same category because
the difference between them for Gramsci is one not of quality, but only of
quantity of qualitative elements. The “positive” remarks on folklore, like the
modifications to its negative attributes, are the more or less explicit pointer
to this underlying conceptual intention.
   This would seem to be the end of the matter, were it not for the
difficulties we have already outlined in connection with the transformation
of the resolutely qualitative system of characterization attributed by Gramsci
to folklore and folkloric conceptions; and were it not further for the fact that
the specific differences which Gramsci insists on as soon as he has connected
things at a general level are always more radical and decisive than the
affinities.
   In addition to what has already been noted in connection with folklore,
the reader’s attention is drawn to the decisive distinction between
philosophy tout court — which alone is “an intellectual order” — and forms
of spontaneous philosophy such as “religion and common sense”, which
      cannot constitute an intellectual order, because they cannot be reduced to
      unity and coherence even within an individual consciousness, let alone
      collective consciousness (SPN 326).

   6.2. The fact is that in order to maintain a link between the opposite terms
of his repeated swings back and forth from identities to differences and from
quantitative continuity to qualitative discontinuity, as Gramsci wished, he
must be able to call on a precise, and more than purely verbal, criterion of
distinction between qualitative differences (which would break the continuity
he claims) and differences of quantity of qualitative elements (which on the
contrary would not undermine the connection he seeks between the
“specialist” philosopher and the “common” philosopher, “conscious
leadership” and “spontaneity”, intellectuals and “simple people”, or, to use
more current and realistic terms, between leaders and masses, central
committees and the rank-and-file, and so on).
   But in the absence of such a criterion — and it seems to me that it is
absent, at any rate in the uses which more or less frequently we have actually
made of Gramsci’s thought — in its absence, the link is broken; the subtle
and indefinite dividing-line between quality a n d quantity of qualitative
elements is erased; the constantly emphasized specific differences prove far
more decisive than the attribution to a single common genus; to
acknowledge the presence of a conception of the world even in the slightest


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                         45


intellectual activity becomes a game of words without further consequence;
to assert that “all men think” becomes a trivial banality in face of the fact
that some men think well and many think badly, and does not so much as
scratch the surface of the prejudice which Gramsci wanted to destroy.
   All of this would matter very little if all that was involved were a few
marginal questions concerning the debris of folklore. But far larger problems
are involved, problems as important, precisely, as that of “conscious
leadership”. Above all it would not matter were it not that — in the process
of its becoming “the common sense of a [particular] environment”, as is the
fate of “every philosophy” (SPN 330f) — the uneasy balance between
quantitative continuities and qualitative separations was not in fact broken
in favour of the second term. As a result, certain hierarchies of subject-
matter and sectional interests traditional to our culture remain essentially
intact. This is also meant, let me be quite clear, as a note of self-criticism.
   6.3. Nevertheless, the extremely wide range that Gramsci allows to his idea
of conception of the world, the way in which he extends it to include even the
most bizarre, disparate and chance combinations of heterogeneous and
indigestible elements, has an undoubtedly aggressive power in the face of
traditional conceptions, their identification of culture with their own culture
and their reduction of history to the history of the upper reaches of society.
   This aggressiveness — which is active even in spite of other indications of
Gramsci to the contrary — does certainly not originate from the generic
principle that all men think so everyone is a bit of a philosopher. It would in
any case be hard to find in this one principle any criterion whereby one
might assign some form of unity to even the most indigestible masses of
material — something that must be done if we are to distinguish one
conception from another, let alone talk about a conception of the world.
   The fact of the matter is that this aggressive drive springs from Gramsci’s
entire political and theoretical commitment.
   It is this commitment which brings about, for example, certain sudden
and even disquieting ruptures in the carefully weighted balance — whether
of a didactic or a dialectical kind between form and content, intellectuals
and common people, and so on. As an example, take the passage where
Gramsci asks (but only in very indirect relation to folklore):
      Is it possible that a “formally” new conception can present itself in a guise
      other than the crude, unsophisticated version of the populace? (SPN 342)8


8. The passage goes on: “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” (SPN 342-343).

                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
46                                                                          ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


   But another, and very important, part of Gramsci’s political and theoretical
commitment is his tendency to set up a constant relationship between
cultural phenomena and the social groups by which they are conveyed. At
the same time as always being concerned with formal coherence and
organicity, Gramsci pays continual attention to the links between
indigestible masses of material as well as organic philosophies and one or
other of the “many social groups in which everyone is automatically
involved from the moment of his entry into the conscious world” (SPN 323).
Precisely because he is aiming for a “more cautious and precise assessment
of the forces acting in society”, Gramsci does not draw up his observations
on the basis of very general class-distinctions, but provides a working scale-
model, articulated into categories, groups and sub-groups. He makes a
distinction between “the common sense of the more educated strata of
society”, that “of the people” and that of the “intellectuals” (SPN 330f)9; he
emphasizes the fact that
       there is one Catholicism for the peasants, one for the petits bourgeois and
       town workers, one for women and one for intellectuals which is itself
       variegated and disconnected (SPN 420);
     and still more directly he makes the point that
       in acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a
       particular grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the
       same mode of thinking and acting (SPN 324).
   This “grouping” can sometimes consist simply of dispersed and isolated
individuals, whose only link with each other is that of shared conceptions.
However, it can also be a concrete social or socio-cultural group: it “can be
one’s village or province”. Furthermore, though the conception of the world
which holds sway there and is “mechanically” imposed on its members may
be pieced together from other sources, it is born or can be born — whatever
its more distant origins — from a cultural activity which is socially internal
to the group and qualitatively homogeneous with it:

9. Elsewhere Gramsci writes: “Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in
time and space. It is the “folklore” of philosophy, and, like folklore, 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 inconsequential, in conformity with the social
and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is. At those times in history when a
homogeneous social group is brought into being, there comes into being also, in opposition to
common sense, a homogeneous — in other words coherent and systematic — philosophy”
(SPN 419).
On another occasion, Gramsci affirms even more explicitly: “Every social stratum has its
‘common sense’ and its ‘good sense’, which amount in effect to the most wide-spread
conception of life and mankind” (QC 2271).


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
GRAMSCI’S OBSERVATIONS ON FOLKLORE                                                   47


      it can have its origins in the parish and the “intellectual activity” of the
      local priest or aging 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 (SPN 323).
   Thus the use Gramsci makes of the idea of conception of the world, at least
when dealing with “spontaneous” conceptions, is constantly supported by a
dense network of references to concrete social situations, however humble,
whose “way of seeing and acting” is constituted by the cultural formation
with which Gramsci is engaged at the time. Thus, any judgement on the
formal qualities or content of such material is accompanied by the
acknowledgement that, whatever its origins or level, that particular
“combination” of cultural elements is the intellectual heritage of a particular
social group. The group lives it and makes use of it from the inside, without
realizing its contradictoriness, or at any rate not realizing it in the same way
as somebody looking in from the outside. Thus, any combination of cultural
elements which is embodied by an identifiable social group comes to
constitute a kind of “de facto unity”. It can be looked at from the point of
view of the group which recognizes itself in it and so can legitimately be
called a “conception of the world” because, even if it is not so for us, it is for
others. Not for nothing do phrases such as “in its own way” recur in Gramsci.
   Gramsci’s continual linking of cultural phenomena and social groups —
and nowhere more clearly than in the pages on folklore — seems then to
provide the real explanation for the way in which he is able to bring radically
different phenomena under a single conceptual heading, without the
concept itself dissolving. To regard folklore too as a conception of the world
is not a mere play on words precisely to the extent that, if only for a
moment, judgement is suspended on its content and formal qualities, and it
is acknowledged as having a unitary existence for the “people”.
   It is no less true of course that the moment of judgement is essential and
decisive in Gramsci, than it is that the distinction between the two moments
seems to be resolved in favour of the judgement, or rather the condemnation.
For while the ways in which he uses the idea of conception of the world
appear closer (with all due reservations) to the ethno-anthropological
concept of “culture” than to the traditionally selective conception of culture
as an elite-phenomenon, it cannot be forgotten that in a section entitled
Hegemony of western culture over the whole world culture (SPN 416-418),
Gramsci has left us one of the most inward-looking formulations both of the
ethnocentric view of world cultural history and of the limitation of the
European “cultural process” to the elites, to the definite exclusion of
“popular cultures”.

                                         2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
48                                                          ALBERTO MARIO CIRESE


   But to refer to this passage must not in its turn lead us to forget all the
rest, that is to say, what was actually achieved. Above all, it should not lead
us to ignore the tensions, some of them serious, which build up in the course
of the work. It is precisely the need prompted by these tensions to identify
what Gramsci says and how, that enables him to be actively, and not just
historically, present in the field of socio-cultural research today.




2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 17-48
                                             2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 49-53




                                                                ANNIVERSARY FORUM

Gramsci di Cirese
Giovanni PIZZA
Università di Perugia



Contribution to Anniversary Forum: Cirese 101. Rereading Gramsci’s Observations on
Folklore, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli, eds, Anuac, 11, 1, 2022.




   Nel 1982 il saggio di Alberto Mario Cirese Gramsci’s Observations on Fol-
klore chiudeva meritoriamente il libro curato da Anne Showstack Sassoon
Approaches to Gramsci per l’editore londinese Writers and Readers Publi-
shing Cooperative Society, nel quale la celebre studiosa raccoglieva diversi
scrittori gramsciani e gramsciologi, sulle nozioni di Stato e di strategia poli-
tica, sul lavoro e i lavoratori, sulla vita e il linguaggio stesso del pensatore
politico sardo, sulla cultura popolare. Per dirne solo alcuni: da Eric Hobsba-
wm a Pier Paolo Pasolini, da Giuseppe Vacca ad Anne Showstack Sassoon, da
Christine Buci-Gluksmann ad Alberto Mario Cirese al quale, appunto, fu affi-
dato il compito di esaurire da solo la parte finale dedicata alla popular cultu-
re, attraverso la versione inglese del suo celebre articolo italiano. Il saggio
ciresiano dal quale Showstack Sassoon traduceva è quello contenuto in Cire-
se (1976a). Apparso in italiano con diverse Postille (Cirese 1976b), nel volu-
me Einaudi esso aggiornò e portò all’attenzione di molti un intervento che il
maestro dell’antropologia italiana aveva tenuto diversi anni prima a Roma,
nel 1967, e successivamente pubblicato negli Atti del convegno internazio-
nale al quale aveva partecipato (Cirese 1969)1.

1. Si noti che in questa prima edizione il saggio adotta, senza virgolette, la scrittura di “fol-
clore” con la “c”, tipica di Gramsci.



This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Giovanni Pizza
Gramsci di Cirese
2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 49-53.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5278
50                                                                   GIOVANNI PIZZA


    Venne così a comporsi un’antologia di testi di grandi intellettuali tradotti
in inglese il cui dichiarato compito era quello di contribuire alla diffusione
degli studi di Gramsci nel mondo. Una terra tutto sommato allora ancora in-
cognita per molti, stanti le difficoltà di traduzione cui incorrevano, e tuttora
incorrono, i testi italiani. Al punto che Kate Crehan, autrice della prima e
della seconda monografia in inglese su Gramsci e l’antropologia (Crehan
2002, 2016), da New York invitata a Perugia nel 2003 per presentare il suo li-
bro, confessava di essere un “irriducibile anglofona”. Affermazione con la
quale la nota antropologa anglosassone auspicava una traduzione italiana
del suo libro, che successivamente sarebbe stata realizzata (Crehan 2010),
anche per ripristinare nella nostra lingua le numerose citazioni gramsciane
contenute nel testo britannico.
    Nonostante il fatto che il marxismo fosse già in crisi all’avvio degli anni
ottanta del Novecento, l’obiettivo di un’ampia diffusione dell’opera del noto
pensatore politico del secolo scorso fu perseguito abilmente da Showstack
Sassoon, che introdusse i singoli scritti tradotti in inglese in maniera ancora
più comunicativa, accostandoli a una piccola biografia e ad alcune immagini,
nonché producendo, in apertura, un avvio di lessico gramsciano di alcune
pagine. Ella sperava così che i lettori anglofoni, sia tra quelli che non aveva-
no mai conosciuto prima Gramsci sia tra gli specialisti, trovassero utile un
volume collettaneo di traduzioni destinato alla popolarizzazione mondiale di
una valutazione critica del pensiero gramsciano.
    La traduzione di quei testi italiani, quaranta anni fa, svelò inoltre un falso
dilemma, un’illusione che oggi sarebbe interessante esplorare storicamente
ed etnograficamente: quando e perché si pensò in antropologia che Gramsci
ci “tornasse” solo dagli Usa o dall’Inghilterra, dopo il picco aureo degli studi
che corrisponde grosso modo alla prima metà degli anni settanta del Nove-
cento? In Italia, che io sappia, c’è sempre stato un dibattito vasto, anche du-
rante le varie crisi del marxismo e più di quanto si sia disposti a immaginare.
Inoltre, se si tengono presenti anche le altre discipline, che devono poter
dialogare con l’antropologia, le pubblicazioni presentano numerosissimi stu-
di, dagli autori coevi a Gramsci fino alle attuali linee di rilettura.
    Sono tra coloro che “Gramsci lo scoprono ora, al di fuori delle nostre vi-
cende” (Cirese 2008: 351). Non per questo mi colloco tra gli studiosi stranie-
ri: appartengo fortemente alla tradizione italiana, penso che un altro Gram-
sci antropologo sia possibile nel nostro Paese e provo a darne conto (Pizza
2020, 2022). In effetti ho cominciato a leggere Gramsci tardivamente, poco
più di una ventina d’anni fa, con l’avvio degli anni 2000, vivendo poi nel
2001 l’emozione di una scoperta nuova. Contrariamente a quello che accad-
de a Pietro Clemente nel 1968, quando, per una serie di ragioni, “non


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 49-53
GRAMSCI DI CIRESE                                                                 51


l’avev[a] considerato un autore interessante” (Clemente 2008: 337). L’anti-
gramscianesimo iniziale di Clemente non si era verificato con Carlo Tullio
Altan e Tullio Seppilli, che alla prima lettura percepirono un Gramsci folgo-
rante e attuale, attivando un itinerario antropologico parallelo, a carattere
marxiano, testimoniato poi con i loro scritti (Pizza 2020: cap. 2).
    Certo sono finiti oggi i tempi in cui Ernesto de Martino e Cirese, ponendo-
si sul crinale tra politica e cultura, sulle colonne di riviste e quotidiani ali-
mentarono quel “dibattito sul folklore” che durò lunghi decenni, coinvolgen-
do diversi antropologi tra i quali altri maestri del calibro di Luigi Maria Lom-
bardi Satriani o di Alfonso Maria di Nola. Eppure, quella perdurante contro-
versia fu ampiamente ricostruita dai primi allievi e collaboratori di Cirese, di
Clara Gallini, di Seppilli, in diversi volumi, costituendo una manna anche per
le attuali riletture antropologiche delle opere del sardo. Per esempio, è sulla
base della storiografia lucida e sintetica di Fabio Dei (2011; 2018) che si può
riuscire oggi a rileggere il saggio originale di Cirese in dialogo con Giorgio
Baratta (2007). Proprio come riassumeva Baratta, in un intervento a quel col-
loquio a Nuoro al quale l’allora presidente dell’International Gramsci Society
– Italia si riferiva, Dei individuava “un elemento di debolezza nell’analisi di
Cirese, che si può riassumere con la denuncia di una visione un po’ chiusa,
eccessivamente disciplinare o sociologistica, delle ‘diversità culturali’” (Ba-
ratta 2007: 145), laddove dal punto di vista di Baratta essa “mantiene una va-
lidità per così dire assoluta” (ivi).
    Personalmente tendo a concordare maggiormente con Dei quando dice
che “la sociologia della letteratura non viene tracciata da Gramsci secondo
una logica dicotomica, ma come un campo di sottili distinzioni, con molte-
plici sfumature e chiaroscuri” (Dei 2011: 508), in lotta tra loro, aggiungo io.
    Invero a me pare che in inglese Cirese diventi vieppiù interessante. Sem-
bra perdere un po’ di quel carattere contrappositivo e dicotomico relativo
alle opposizioni di un modo di ragionare strutturalistico da lui adottato nel-
l’esaminare Gramsci. Secondo me, e su questo ha ragione Dei, Cirese era ani-
mato da una volontà di legittimazione della “demologia”, una scienza nascen-
te in Italia, cioè lo studio sistemico, strutturale e formalmente rigoroso della
“visione del mondo” subalterna. D’altronde per Gramsci mettere insieme
folklore e senso comune era un’esigenza fondamentale: per fare emergere i
subalterni dai “margini della storia” e le due nozioni certo potevano anche
variare, sia nel giudizio che se ne dava sia nella loro stessa forma di vita rea-
le.
    Non si tratta però di un’ambiguità degli oggetti in sé, quanto di un dina-
mismo dialettico che, di là dalle opposizioni, tende a caratterizzare, credo, il
pensiero di Antonio Gramsci.

                                      2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 49-53
52                                                                                GIOVANNI PIZZA


   In inglese Cirese vede alleggerirsi l’estenuante ricerca di contrasti e oppo-
sizioni che lo conduce a produrre schemi sintetici e formali di lettura di
Gramsci sul folklore, anzi sul folclore (con la c, come scriveva la parola il sar-
do), e guadagna in chiarezza sia dalla traduzione sia dall’introduzione al suo
scritto.
   Showstack Sassoon (1982: 212) introduce la versione inglese del saggio ci-
resiano con numerose domande pertinenti, riportiamone alcune:
       But how then could the hegemony of the working class be based on popular
       ideologies? What was the relationship between beliefs held in an apparently
       spontaneous way and a conscious revolutionary leadership? What is the
       relationship between popular ideas and a coherent philosophy? These are some
       of the questions addressed by Alberto Maria Cireseʼs analysis of Gramsci’s
       notes on folklore. According to Cirese, Gramsci is able both to criticize the
       limitations of popular ideology and to maintain a solidarity with those classes
       which are at the moment subaltern because he takes the ideology of the mass
       of the population as the starting point /or a transformation of things as they
       are.

   Sarebbe vieppiù interessante oggi non indugiare sul Cirese di quegli anni
progressivi, quanto su quello degli ultimi decenni della sua vita, allorché,
mutando paradigma e riprendendo con lieve sarcasmo una domanda di Eu-
genio Testa sull’“esaurimento della spinta propulsiva” di Gramsci, considerò
svuotata quella vena di ispirazione anche sulla scorta delle riflessioni svolte
da Pietro Clemente nel medesimo contesto (Cirese 2008: 344). Affermazioni
che, talora, tendono a contrastare lo stesso suo amore per l’argomento e a
riecheggiare l’ultimo Claude Lévi-Strauss che denuncia il declino dei tempi.
   Eppure, a mio avviso, Gramsci non muore se si ricomincia la ricerca dalla
fine del saggio di Cirese, proprio quando dopo un’analisi formale delle dico-
tomie gramsciane (rappresentate dalle barre, dalle polarizzazioni, dai versus,
che, numerosi, caratterizzano i suoi schemi analitici) egli afferma:
       Above all, it should not lead us to ignore the tensions, some of them serious,
       which build up in the course of the work. It is precisely the need prompted by
       these tensions to identify what Gramsci says and how, that enables him to be
       actively, and not just historically, present in the field of socio-cultural research
       today (Cirese 1982: 244-245).

     Vale a dire che Gramsci e Cirese ancora lottano insieme a noi.




2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 49-53
GRAMSCI DI CIRESE                                                                         53


RIFERIMENTI BIBLIOGRAFICI
Baratta, Giorgio, 2007, Antonio Gramsci in contrappunto. Dialoghi col presente, Roma,
      Carocci.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1969, Concezioni del mondo, filosofia spontanea, folclore, in
      Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi
      gramsciani tenuto a Cagliari il 23-27 aprile 1967, a cura di Pietro Rossi, Roma,
      Editori Riuniti: 299-328.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1976a, Concezioni del mondo, filosofia, spontanea e istinto
      di classe nelle Osservazioni sul folclore di Antonio Gramsci [1969-70], in Id.,
      Intellettuali, folklore, istinto di classe. Note su Verga, Deledda, Scotellaro, Gram-
      sci, Torino, Einaudi: 65-104.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1976b, Postille, in Id., Intellettuali, folklore, istinto di classe.
      Note su Verga, Deledda, Scotellaro, Gramsci, Torino, Einaudi: 105-127 [1. Tono
      psicologico e contaminazioni sociologiche: circolazione culturale, indirizzi stori-
      co-filologici e linea De Sanctis- Croce-Gramsci. 2. Attività e passività, originalità
      e degradazione dei fatti folklorici. 3. Istinto di classe, folclore come protesta, fol-
      clore di protesta. 4. La “connotazione” come elemento della concezione materiali-
      stica dei fatti culturali e come discriminante tra Gramsci e Croce. 5. Gramsci, Ty-
      lor e il concetto di cultura].
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1982, Gramsci’s Observations on Folklore, in Approaches to
      Gramsci, Anne Showstack Sassoon, ed, London, Writers and Readers: 212-247.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 2008, Interventi al seminario Gramsci tra Cirese e i cultural
      studies, in Gramsci ritrovato, a cura di Antonio Deias, Giovanni Mimmo Boni-
      nelli, Eugenio Testa, Lares, 74, 2: 321-415 .
Clemente, Pietro, 2008, Intervento al seminario Gramsci tra Cirese e i cultural stu-
      dies, in Gramsci ritrovato, a cura di Antonio Deias, Giovanni Mimmo Boninelli,
      Eugenio Testa, Lares, 74, 2: 335-343.
Crehan, Kate, 2002, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology, London, Pluto Press (trad.
      it. a cura di Giovanni Pizza, Lecce, Argo, 2010).
Crehan, Kate, 2016, Gramsci’s Common Sense. Inequality and Its Narratives,
      DurhamLondon, Duke University Press.
Dei, Fabio, 2011, Gramsci, Cirese e la tradizione demologica italiana, in Prove d’orche-
      stra. Giorgio Baratta e Gramsci fra modernità e contemporaneità, a cura di Anto-
      nio Deias, numero monografico di Lares, 77, 3: 501-518.
Dei, Fabio, 2018, Cultura popolare in Italia. Da Gramsci all’Unesco, Bologna, Il
      Mulino.
Pizza, Giovanni, 2020, L’antropologia di Gramsci. Corpo, natura, mutazione, Roma,
      Carocci.
Pizza, Giovanni, 2022, Gramsci antropologo (e la cultura anglosassone), in Gramsci
      in inglese. Joseph Buttigieg e la traduzione del prigioniero, a cura di Salvatore
      Cingari, Enrico Terrinoni, Milano, Mimesis: 265-291.
Showstack Sassoon, Anne, ed, 1982, Approaches to Gramsci, London, Writers &
      Readers.

                                           2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 49-53
                                         2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64




                                                         ANNIVERSARY FORUM

Gramsci’s folklore bundle
Kate CREHAN
City University of New York



Contribution to Anniversary Forum: Cirese 101. Rereading Gramsci’s Observations on
Folklore, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli, eds, Anuac, 11, 1, 2022.




   In the years after the publication of the Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971) introduced
Gramsci’s writings to a wide Anglophone audience, the Sardinian Marxist
was eagerly embraced by many would-be progressive, Anglophone
anthropologists. Here, it seemed, was an intellectually rigorous left theorist
with a serious interest in “culture”, a Marxist who argued that “Folklore
must not be considered an eccentricity, an oddity or a picturesque element,
but as something which is serious and is to be taken seriously” (Gramsci
1971: 191). These anthropologists’ knowledge of Gramsci frequently derived
more from Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature rather than the
notebooks themselves. This perhaps helps explain why they often
overlooked the notebooks’ critical, indeed sometimes downright hostile,
assessment of peasant culture and folklore, as when Gramsci writes
scornfully of conceptions of the world shaped by “the little old woman who
has inherited the lore of the witches” (Gramsci 1971: 323). One of Alberto
Cirese’s aims in Gramsci’s Observations on Folklore, is to make sense of
Gramsci’s apparently contradictory attitude to folklore.



This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Kate Crehan
Gramsci’s folklore bundle
2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5279
56                                                                   KATE CREHAN


The definition of folklore
   “Folklore” is certainly a shifting category in the notebooks. To understand
these shifts, a passage quoted by Cirese is helpful. Gramsci writes of “the
entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of
acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of
‘folklore’”(Cirese 1982: 240)1. Note that the always careful and precise
author of the notebooks describes this heterogeneous collection as “bundled
together under the name of ‘folklore’”. In other words, he treats the concept
“folklore” not as some actually existing, coherent whole, but rather as a way
of labelling a disparate range of beliefs and behaviours – a bundling together
that leaves open the possibility that they may not constitute a single entity.
This is very characteristic of Gramsci, who rarely met an abstract concept
without immediately calling it into question. As, for example, when he
writes in Some Aspects of the Southern Question (an essay he was working on
just before his imprisonment), “the peasant question is historically
determined in Italy; it is not the ‘peasant and agrarian question in
general’”(Gramsci 1978: 443). Similarly, in the notebooks we find him
castigating the novelist Francesco Perri for ignoring historical particularities
in his 1928 novel Emigranti in which “historical distinctions, essential for
understanding and depicting the life of the peasant, are wiped out, and the
confused whole is reflected in a rough and brutal way” (Gramsci 1985: 305).
In Gramsci’s view, Perri has “lump[ed] together pell-mell all the generic
motifs that in reality have very distinct temporal and spatial characteristics”
(Gramsci 1985: 306).
   At the same time, Gramsci recognises the need for broad concepts.
Aspects of the Southern Question, for instance, ends with his insistence that
Italian intellectuals from the North and the South need to understand that
“only two social forces are essentially national and bearers of the future: the
proletariat and the peasants” (Gramsci 1978: 462). The point is that the
world we seek to map with our concepts is an ever-shifting mass of entangled
relationships moving through history. The content of our categories have to
shift depending on the questions we are trying to answer, and the particular
realities and relationships involved.
   Over the years, the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions inherent
in the shifting, fluid nature of Gramsci’s concepts have led a number of
scholars to attempt to tidy up, as it were, what they see as the notebooks’
disorder – a disorder often attributed to the difficult conditions under which
they were written. In an essay originally published in the 1970s, which would

1. See Gramsci 1971: 323.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
GRAMSCI’S FOLKLORE BUNDLE                                                               57


become one of the most influential essays on Gramsci in the Anglophone
world, Perry Anderson argues that not only did Gramsci have “to produce his
concepts within the archaic and inadequate apparatus of Croce or
Machiavelli”, he
      wrote in prison, under atrocious conditions, with a fascist censor scrutinizing
      everything that he produced. The involuntary disguise that inherited language
      so often imposes on a pioneer was thus super-imposed by a voluntary one
      which Gramsci assumed to evade his jailors (Anderson 2017: 30)2.

   The result, according to Anderson, is a text characterised by “spaces,
ellipses, contradictions, disorders, allusions, repetitions. The reconstruction
of the hidden order within these hieroglyphs remains to be done. [...] A
systematic work of recovery is needed to discover what Gramsci wrote in the
true, obliterated text of his thought” (Anderson 2017: 30).
   Cirese, also writing in the 1970s, is more in tune with Gramsci’s fluid and
flexible thought than Anderson, noting that “the specific differences which
Gramsci insists on as soon as he has connected things at a general level are
almost more radical and decisive than the affinities” (Cirese 1982: 240)
Nonetheless, he shares Anderson’s desire to bring order to the notebooks.
His aim is to “bring out the general principles underlying” what he terms
“the three cardinal features of Gramsci’s definition of folklore”, namely that
folklore represents “a conception of the world” that is “characteristic of the
subaltern classes”, and that is “in opposition to official conceptions” (Cirese
1982: 215). One problem with this, or any attempt to fix Gramsci’s under-
standing of folklore in any definitive way is that “folklore” in the notebooks
is such a shifting creature that it is difficult to identify any consistent
principles beyond a lack of rigour and coherence: “there is nothing more
contradictory and fragmentary than folklore” (Gramsci 1985: 194). And while
folklore as a “conception of the world” is primarily associated in the
notebooks with subaltern groups, those “social strata which are untouched
by modern thought” (Gramsci 1992: 186), this resolutely secular thinker also
writes: “all religions, even the most refined and sophisticated, are ‘folklore’
in relation to modern thought” (Gramsci 1985: 190). Further evidence of the
instability of Gramsci’s concept is that having linked folklore to those
“untouched by modern thought”, he goes on to claim: “Even modern
thought and science furnish elements to folklore, in that certain scientific
statements and certain opinions, torn from their context, fall into the
popular domain and are ‘arranged’ within the mosaic of tradition” (Gramsci
1992: 187).

2. See Green 2011 for an argument that the role of censorship in shaping the notebooks has
been exaggerated.

                                           2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
58                                                                                 KATE CREHAN


   In his article Cirese cites these passages indicative of the fluidity of
“folklore” for Gramsci. At the same time he remains committed to his
project of systematising the Sardinian Marxist’s understanding of this
protean entity. But perhaps the very project of seeking a coherent and stable
theoretical entity goes against the grain of the thinker we find in the
notebooks – a thinker whose aim was not to create an armature of stable and
rigorous theoretical concepts but to understand the particular, and
ultimately unique, ways history unfolds in a given time and place? When we
read the notebooks, maybe it is more productive to focus on the twists and
turns of his thinking as their author moves from one topic to another, and
the ways in which the meanings of concepts like folklore, the state, and civil
society shift as they are deployed to analyse different historical realities?
Joseph Buttigieg argues forcefully for just such an approach in his 1994
article, Philology and Politics: Returning to the Text of Antonio Gramsci’s
Prison Notebooks, writing “the study of Gramsci’s thought in the corpus of
the Quaderni [...] enables us to understand the extent to which Gramsci’s
thought is alive and unified precisely through its fragmentariness” (Buttigieg
1994: 117, Buttigieg’s emphasis).

The importance of folklore
   Like all of us, Gramsci was a product of his historical moment. While he
explicitly rejected any simple teleological narrative3, he also saw human
history as progressive. The outcome of the struggle between contending
forces in society might be inherently unpredictable, the shape of the future
unknown, nonetheless, human society was moving forward. Take, for
instance, this passage in the notebooks:
      We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass
      or collective man. The question is this: of what historical type is the
      conformism, the mass humanity to which one belongs? When one’s conception
      of the world is not critical and coherent but disjointed and episodic, one
      belongs simultaneously to a multiplicity of mass human groups. The
      personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and
      principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of
      history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be
      that of a human race united the world over. To criticise one’s own conception
      of the world means therefore to make it a coherent unity and to raise it to the
      level reached by the most advanced thought in the world (Gramsci 1971: 324).




3. See Crehan 2002: 76-80, for Gramsci’s rejection of a teleological historical narrative.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
GRAMSCI’S FOLKLORE BUNDLE                                                               59


   It is worth noting the stress that Gramsci places on the need to adopt a
critical attitude to whatever “conformism” we happen to have acquired in
the course of our socialization – in large part because he recognises the
power of the “conformisms” that possess us through an unconscious
osmosis.
   Conceptions of the world shaped by the kind of “folklore” (folclore)
familiar to Gramsci from his Sardinian childhood, were conformisms that
needed to be critiqued. This is a very different attitude to that of Italian
folklorists of the time, who (to quote from a survey essay Cirese wrote for the
American Journal of the Folklore Institute) believed in
      the existence of a “people” representing the “spirit of the nation,” the
      complete authenticity of popular culture as opposed to the falsity of “foreign”
      political institutions, the absolute “spontaneity” of the products of the
      “popular spirit” and above all of the popular poems and songs, and the
      “artificiality” of literary artistic poetry (Cirese 1974: 14).

   Such romanticism was totally rejected by Gramsci, who saw it as casting a
sentimental veil over the harsh realities of the lives lived by most Italian
peasants, a harshness stemming from the economic and political realities of
post-unification Italy. As someone with close personal experience of rural
Sardinia, he saw “folklore” not as some pure, “authentic” representation of
the “spirit of the nation”, but as a collection of heterogeneous fragments
that were in general retrograde. The primary value of these fragments, as he
wrote in a note, which is at the heart of Cirese’s article, lay in the rare
evidence they provide of “all the conceptions of the world and of life that
have succeeded one another in history” (Gramsci 1985: 189). This evidence,
however, is “adulterated and mutilated”. Not, it should be stressed, that
Gramsci thought that somewhere behind these mutilated fragments lay an
unmutilated, coherent conception of the world:
      The conception of the world [underlying folklore] is not elaborated and
      systematized 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
      (Gramsci 1985: 189).

   So why does this co-founder of the Italian Communist Party nonetheless
insist that folklore is “something which is very serious and to be taken
seriously” (Gramsci 1985: 191)? One reason, as Cirese notes, is Gramsci’s
belief in the importance of education. If they are to be effective, educators
need to understand the world, or worlds, inhabited by their pupils. This
means that the study of folklore should be included in the teaching training
provided by the state:

                                           2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
60                                                                              KATE CREHAN



      the state is not agnostic but has its own conception of life and has the duty of
      spreading it by educating the national masses. But this formative activity,
      which is expressed particularly in the education system [...] does not work on a
      blank slate. In reality, the state competes with and contradicts other explicit
      and implicit conceptions, and folklore is not among the least significant and
      tenacious of these; hence it must be “overcome”. For the teacher, then, to
      know “folklore” means to know what other conceptions of the world and life
      are actually active in the intellectual and moral formation of young people, in
      order to uproot them and replace them with conceptions which are deemed to
      be superior (Gramsci 1985: 191).

   The idea that “folklore” should be studied in order to “uproot” and
“replace” it is probably not one shared by many anthropologists, but it was
undoubtedly a key reason for Gramsci’s interest, although not, I would
argue, the only one.
   As a political activist shaped by the struggles of the early decades of the
twentieth century, Gramsci saw the industrial working-class as the primary
source of social transformation. For him, “the Northern urban force” was
primary among “the fundamental motor forces of Italian history”, the
“locomotive” that when combined with the “most advantageous” alliance of
the other major forces (the Southern rural force; the Northern-Central rural
force; the rural force of Sicily; and Sardinia) is capable of creating “a ‘train’
to move through history as fast as possible” (Gramsci 1971: 98). As Gramsci’s
scare quotes indicate, the metaphor of the train is not exact. There is no
already-laid-down rail track, nor are the different carriages driven forward
by the “locomotive” mechanical entities, but rather fractious collections of
sentient beings with their own ideas of where the train is, or should be,
headed. Notably, of the five “fundamental motor forces of Italian history”
mentioned by Gramsci, four are rural. In Italy, as he wrote in Aspects of the
Southern Question, the proletariat had to join forces with the peasants:
together they were the “bearers of the future” (Gramsci 1978: 462).
   Crucially, for this co-founder of the Italian communist party, there was no
pre-determined road to that future, already mapped out by Marxism:
Marxism, he wrote, was an unfinished project, “a new culture in incubation,
which will develop with the development of social relations” (Gramsci 1971:
398). Tellingly, he endorses Rosa Luxemburg when she writes of
      the impossibility of treating certain questions of the philosophy of praxis
      [Gramsci’s usual way of referring to Marxism] in so far as they have not yet
      become actual for the course of history in general or that of a given social
      grouping (Gramsci 1971: 403-404, Gramsci’s emphasis).



2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
GRAMSCI’S FOLKLORE BUNDLE                                                                61


    In the Italy of the inter-war years with its large rural population,
progressives were doomed to failure if they treated peasants simply as an
undifferentiated, and backward-looking mass who must blindly follow the
lead of the working-class “locomotive”. Progressives needed to engage with
the peasant masses and win their support, a process that begins with a
genuine attempt to understand them in all their contradictory
heterogeneity. Folklore provided vital evidence, albeit “mutilated and
adulterated”, of how peasants saw the worlds they inhabited. “Folklore”,
Gramsci writes, “can be understood only as a reflection of the conditions of
life of the people, although folklore frequently persists even after those
conditions have been modified in bizarre combinations” (Gramsci 1992:
187).
    Peasant “conceptions of the world” in the notebooks may be characterised
as not only fragmentary but generally reactionary, but this is not always the
case. Within the contradictory heterogeneity of “folklore” Gramsci sees
progressive as well as reactionary elements. For instance, contained within
the popular forms of Catholicism prevalent among peasants – defined by
Gramsci as part of the folklore bundle – are “[i]mperatives [...] that are much
stronger, more tenacious and more effective than those of official ‘morality’”
It is necessary, however, to
      distinguish various strata: the fossilized ones which reflect conditions of past
      life and are therefore conservative and reactionary, and those which consist of
      a series of innovations, often creative and progressive, determined
      spontaneously by forms and conditions of life which are in the process of
      developing and which are in contradiction to or simply different from the
      morality of the governing strata (Gramsci 1985: 190).

   Folklore for Gramsci emerged out of the realities of peasant life. One of
the crucial insights of Cirese’s article is his stress on Gramsci’s “political and
theoretical commitment” to the “relationship between cultural phenomena
and the social groups by which they are conveyed” (Cirese 1982: 242).
   An example of Gramsci’s interest in the complex and heterogeneous
threads to be found in the “folklore bundle”, and their links to specific
historical realities, is his note on the nineteenth-century millenarian,
peasant revolutionary Davide Lazzaretti (Gramsci 1996: 18-20) 4. His new
Republic, Lazzaretti declared, would “not be the republic of 1848” but “the
Kingdom of God, the Law of Justice that has succeeded the law of Grace”
Other commentators had linked Lazzaretti’s millenarian vision to atavistic
memories of 14th century legends. Gramsci, however, saw it as a phenomenon

4. All subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from this note.

                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
62                                                                    KATE CREHAN


related to its particular historical moment, connecting it both to the
influence of an anti-monarchical priest, Onorio Taramelli (described by
Gramsci as “a man of fine intelligence and wide learning”), and the peasant
rebel’s “desire to differentiate himself from 1848, which had not left good
memories among the peasants in Tuscany”. In short, who peasants are, what
they believe, and the political movements to which they are attracted, can
only be discovered through empirical investigation.
   An effective, oppositional conception of the world that views the world
from the vantage point of those subordinated by the existing capitalist order,
and that challenges its hegemony in a serious way, has to be rooted in
subaltern experience, and speak to that experience. Subaltern narratives
emerge initially as incoherent fragments, the “rough and jagged” embryonic
“beginnings of a new world” (Gramsci 1971: 343). This is inevitable given
that subaltern groups – even urban ones – inhabit a world saturated with
narratives of the world that view things from the vantage point of the
dominant. Nevertheless, these “rough and jagged” beginnings are the
foundation of that new world: “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). In other
words, there is no already-present, counter-hegemony waiting in the wings.
The work of transforming the embryonic “beginnings of a new world” into
coherent and effective political narratives is done by intellectuals. Not
intellectuals as traditionally understood, but the organic intellectuals a
subaltern group itself creates as it emerges from subalternity (see, for
instance, Gramsci 1971: 334-335).
   While Gramsci had no doubt that the primary force with the potential to
drive history forward was the industrial working-class, he was equally clear
that in the Italy of his day with its large rural population, progressives had to
pay attention to peasants and take their understandings of their lived
experience seriously. The “creative and progressive innovations” generated
by peasants needed to be incorporated into the progressive narrative. A
famous letter Gramsci wrote to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht soon after
his arrest is relevant here. In the letter he lays out his study plans while
imprisoned, mentioning four main topics: the history of Italian intellectuals;
comparative linguistics; Pirandello; and the serial novel and popular taste in
literature. For him, as he explains to Tatiana, “there is a certain
homogeneity among these four subjects: the creative spirit of the people in
its diverse stages and degrees of development is in equal measure at their
base” (Gramsci 1994: 84). The “creative spirit of the people” , I suggest, was
also present for Gramsci in folklore. Following that creative spirit through

2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
GRAMSCI’S FOLKLORE BUNDLE                                                                   63


time and space, however, demanded flexibility in the concepts used to
capture it, and it is this flexibility that explains many of the notebooks’
“spaces, ellipses, contradictions, disorders, allusions, repetitions” so
frowned on by Anderson (2017: 30).
   In the case of folklore, maybe it is more productive to accept the unstable,
protean character of the relationship between “folklore” and “peasants”, the
specific nature of which can only be determined through careful, empirical
investigation of the specific context, rather than attempting to identify some
clear and constant, underlying “general principles” (Cirese 1982: 215)? As
Gramsci writes in a note quoted by Buttigieg in his 1994 article:
      If it is necessary, in the perennial ebb and flow of events, to establish concepts,
      without which reality would be incomprehensible, it is also necessary – indeed
      it is indispensable – to establish and to bear in mind that mutable reality and
      concept of reality must be historically understood as inseparably bound
      together, even though they are logically distinguishable ([QC, 1241] quoted in
      Buttigieg 1994: 120).



REFERENCES
Anderson, Perry, 2017 [1976-1977], The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, London and
      New York, Verso.
Buttigieg, Joseph A., 1994, Philology and Politics: Returning to the Text of Antonio
      Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Boundary 2, 21, 2 (Summer 1994): 98-138.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1974, Folklore in Italy: A Historical and Systematic Profile
      and Bibliography, Journal of the Folklore Institute, 11, 1-2 (Jun-Aug 1974),
      Special Issue: Folklore Studies in Italy: 7-79.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 1982, Gramsci’s Observations on Folklore, in Approaches to
      Gramsci, Anne Showstack Sassoon, ed, London, Writers and Readers
      Publishing, Cooperative Society Ltd: 212-247.
Crehan, Kate, 2002, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology, Berkeley, University of
      California Press.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1971, Antonio Gramsci: Selections from the Prison Notebooks,
      Quintin Hoare, Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds, London, Lawrence and Wishart.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1978, Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings 1921-
      1926, translated and edited by Quintin Hoare, London, Lawrence and Wishart.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1985, Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings, David
      Forgacs, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds, London, Lawrence and Wishart.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1992, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, volume I, Joseph
      Buttigieg, ed, New York, Columbia University Press.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1994, Letters from Prison: Antonio Gramsci, volume 1, Frank
      Rosengarten, ed, translated by Ray Rosenthal, New York, Columbia University
      Press.

                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
64                                                                    KATE CREHAN


Gramsci, Antonio, 1996, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, volume II, Joseph
      Buttigieg, ed, New York, Columbia University Press.
Green, Marcus, 2011, Rethinking the Subaltern and the Question of Censorship in
      Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Postcolonial Studies, 14, 4: 387-404.
Williams, Raymond, 1977, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press.




2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 55-64
                                              2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74




                                                                ANNIVERSARY FORUM

Farsi soggetto politico
Considerazioni sul tradursi del folklore in politica

Riccardo CIAVOLELLA
CNRS / École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris


Contribution to Anniversary Forum: Cirese 101. Rereading Gramsci’s Observations on
Folklore, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli, eds, Anuac, 11, 1, 2022.




   Tra le tante affinità che si sono cercate tra il pensiero gramsciano e l’an-
tropologia (Crehan 2010; Pizza 2020) vorrei qui proporre di aggiungerne
una: costituiscono entrambi delle pratiche teoriche (o delle teorie pratiche)
capaci di sottoporre sé stesse alla propria interpretazione. In questo c’è ben
di più del semplice carattere riflessivo o di una vocazione all’auto-analisi.
Entrambi considerano ogni concezione del mondo e ogni gesto del pensiero
– e dunque anche sé stessi – non un prodotto isolato e assoluto dello spirito,
quanto un prodotto storico, intendendo con ciò non solo la loro iscrizione in
un tempo dato, ma anche e soprattutto il loro legame con l’insieme dei rap-
porti sociali.
   È noto che Gramsci considerasse in questa prospettiva la filosofia della
praxis – formula con la quale nominava e al tempo stesso espandeva la teoria
del marxismo – come una concezione del mondo capace di spiegare sé stes-
sa. In altri termini lo ricorda anche Cirese (2008a: 485): il marxismo per
Gramsci era una concezione del mondo che si rende necessaria politicamente
– e non meccanicamente – in un conflitto per l’egemonia, storicamente de-
terminato, tra subalterni e classi dirigenti e per risolvere, a favore dei primi,
la loro dialettica tra concezioni del mondo disorganiche e disgreganti da una


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Riccardo Ciavolella
Farsi soggetto politico: Considerazioni sul tradursi del folklore in politica
2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5280
66                                                                      RICCARDO CIAVOLELLA


parte e concezioni del mondo “ufficiali” e conservatrici dall’altra. È nel rap-
porto con quest’idea di superamento dell’esistente che Cirese identifica però
una distinzione, non sempre netta ma presente – perlomeno per quanto ri-
guarda l’epoca del suo scritto –, tra la filosofia della praxis nella versione
gramsciana e l’antropologia: la concezione politica di Gramsci si distingue-
rebbe dalla concezione antropologica nella misura in cui porrebbe sempre in
avanti l’intenzione della trasformazione del reale, mentre la seconda potreb-
be in teoria accontentarsi (ma sappiamo che spesso non lo fa) dell’intenzio-
ne di descriverlo, muovendosi “sul piano della constatazione dei fatti” (Cire-
se 2008a: 485). Su questa questione dell’intenzionalità tornerò nel corso del-
la disamina, poiché credo che sia centrale per intendere il modo in cui Cirese
ha provato a tramutare Gramsci in una fonte della disciplina antropologica:
il suo saggio è un tentativo di trasformare alcuni concetti gramsciani in vere
e proprie definizioni d’ordine antropologico, ma così facendo l’autore si ritro-
va inevitabilmente a fare i conti con la parte che di Gramsci rimane irriduci-
bile a quest’operazione, ossia la sua riflessione sul passaggio dallo stato di
fatto alla politica della trasformazione.
    Per cominciare, mi sembra utile ribadire che, pur tenendo conto di una di-
stinzione tra antropologia e pensiero gramsciano sulla base del peso diffe-
rente dato all’intenzionalità (da accogliere provvisoriamente come
ipotetica), entrambi iscrivono sé stessi nella storia. In questo senso, la forza
del pensiero gramsciano, che ne spiega peraltro la sua capacità a riproporsi
come chiave di lettura in tempi e in contesti culturali differenti 1, sta nel fatto
che i suoi concetti – da quello di subalternità a quello di egemonia, da quello
di società civile a quello di intellettuale organico – non descrivono delle realtà
atemporali, ma si declinano ogni volta in modi particolari. Gramsci li formu-
lò cercando di riflettere su un’epoca specifica – quella dell’entrata delle mas-
se nella storia e della loro trasformazione in “popolo” – e in un contesto so-
cio-politico particolare – quello della lotta per l’emancipazione dei subalter-
ni sotto il fascismo e più largamente all’interno del processo di formazione
nazionale italiano e del suo inquadramento in un capitalismo ormai globale.
Ma per fare ciò, non smetteva di riflettere su cosa potesse significare appli-
care quei concetti ad altri contesti: cosa significava, ad esempio, essere su-
balterno nell’Antichità con l’istituzione della schiavitù o nel Medioevo co-
munale? E in uno stato di formazione recente come l’Italia, dove il processo
di modernizzazione capitalistica è frazionato e ineguale, cosa significa esse-
re subalterno e cosa significa creare egemonia?


1. Tra le varie iniziative e pubblicazioni su questo tema vedasi la più recente, il convegno
Gramsci nel mondo di oggi della International Gramsci Society (IGS) a Cagliari nel 2021.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
FARSI SOGGETTO POLITICO                                                            67


    Per pensare ciò, Gramsci sviluppava un altro concetto, quello di traducibi-
lità (suggeritogli anche dalla sua formazione universitaria in studi linguisti-
ci) (Cospito 2017), che un po’ sorprendentemente è perlopiù sfuggito all’in-
terpretazione antropologica di Gramsci, anche se lo stesso Cirese ha avuto
modo di insistere sull’importanza della linguistica nel pensiero gramsciano,
a partire dai commenti che ne fece in proposito Vittorio Santoli (Cirese
2008b: 324). Per Gramsci l’atto di tradurre un’idea o una pratica – affinché
sia dunque traducibile – richiede inevitabilmente una perdita di significato
originario e un nuovo innesto nella nuova realtà; per questo costituisce un
esercizio d’interpretazione ben diverso dalla semplice identificazione di ana-
logie tra contesti differenti. La sua idea di traduzione partiva chiaramente da
considerazioni di tipo linguistico per estendersi progressivamente verso
un’idea di traduzione di concetti, poi a quella di traduzione – nel senso eti-
mologico di “trasporto” – di esperienze politiche (cos’è stata la Rivoluzione
in Russia e cosa sarebbe una rivoluzione in Occidente?), fino a un’idea di tra-
duzione che ingloba tutte le altre: la traduzione catartica (Q 13) dallo stato
determinato della soggettività (la fase economico-corporativa) verso una sog-
gettività storica (la fase etico-politica) e dunque dalla subalternità a una nuo-
va egemonia dell’emancipazione.
    È in questo senso che il pensiero gramsciano ingloba sé stesso: esso pre-
vede già di essere tradotto secondo i contesti. Questa vocazione alla tradu-
zione, certamente, spiega anche perché il pensiero di Gramsci sia sempre
strattonato tra usi sperimentali nel contemporaneo e in contesti molteplici
(senza considerare addirittura un vero e proprio travisamento colpevole,
come nel caso della sua appropriazione da parte di ideologie di destra) e ri-
torni ad analisi filologiche. Queste tendenze, per lungo tempo divergenti,
sembrano oggi trovare luoghi di sintesi negli incontri tra gli studi gramscia-
ni, soprattutto italiani, e gli studies internazionali, in cui, a mio parere, l’an-
tropologia italiana ha certamente un ruolo primordiale da giocare, tanto per
la sua capacità di dialogare con la filologia di Gramsci, quanto per la sua vo-
cazione disciplinare per una comparazione che, come la traduzione gramscia-
na, non identifica semplicemente analogie, ma apre a una sorta di pensiero
del multiverso umano che va oltre l’universalismo e il relativismo. Le tensio-
ni tra una postura filologica nell’interpretazione e una postura innovativa
nell’uso di Gramsci è pur sempre presente nell’antropologia italiana stessa:
se nel saggio in questione Cirese si poneva chiaramente come traduttore dei
concetti gramsciani in antropologia, in altre occasioni rimproverava all’Er-

                                       2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
68                                                                       RICCARDO CIAVOLELLA


nesto de Martino del periodo gramsciano del dopoguerra di aver innestato ar-
tificialmente su una postura che si voleva ispirata a Gramsci un concetto di
“folklore progressivo” che in Gramsci non si trovava (Cirese 2008b: 324)2.
    Venendo dunque alle celebri considerazioni di Cirese (2008a) sulle Osser-
vazioni sul folklore del Gramsci carcerario, si potrebbe dire, sulla base di
quanto detto, che l’operazione dell’antropologo assomigli molto, essa stessa,
a una traduzione dei concetti gramsciani di concezione del mondo, filosofia
spontanea e soprattutto folklore in concetti antropologici. L’operazione ri-
chiede però a Cirese di sviluppare la sua analisi in due tempi distinti: una
prima fase nella quale i concetti gramsciani vengono descritti, interpretati e
reinnestati come concetti operativi per lo studio della cultura in senso antro-
pologico, insistendo come noto sulla prospettiva dei dislivelli interni di cultu-
ra; e una seconda fase dove, chiedendosi se quanto presentato non sia trop-
po schematico (“i conti tornano, ma forse in modo troppo perfetto”, p. 477),
Cirese si confronta, sempre dal punto di vista dell’antropologo, con quella
parte del pensiero gramsciano che sembra sfuggire all’analisi antropologica:
la parte dell’intenzionalità politica, della produzione di una concezione del
mondo nuova, del rapporto tra spontaneità e direzione consapevole e dunque
tra masse e intellettuali, della traduzione o passaggio, come detto, dai dati
reali – quelli della subalternità espressa ad esempio dal folklore storicamen-
te significativo ma inoperante – alla politica. Questa duplicità di fasi della di-
samina ciresiana si incrocia con un’altra, già messa in luce da Fabio Dei
(2011: 502): quella tra una fase in cui Cirese cerca in un Gramsci teorico della
cultura una legittimazione dell’antropologia come studio della cultura, e più
particolarmente della cultura popolare; e una fase in cui Cirese riflette su
un’apparente ambiguità di un Gramsci teorico politico nei confronti del fol-
klore, tra la critica per “l’insieme di frammenti indigesti” e la restituzione ad
esso di una dignità e di un significato storici e politici.
    Per questa ragione, come altri ritengo che la riflessione di Cirese possa es-
sere considerata, in una prospettiva storica sull’incontro dell’antropologia
con il pensiero gramsciano, come il punto focale nell’articolazione del dibat-
tito, un’articolazione intesa sia in senso temporale che in senso geografico:


2. Non ho qui lo spazio per addentrarmi nella questione, ma dalla ricerca che sto effettuan-
do sulle tracce del campo etnografico di de Martino in Romagna all’alba degli anni ‘50, risul-
ta chiaro quanto l’antropologo napoletano fosse stato influenzato dal fatto che, all’epoca, in
Romagna sorgeva una cultura popolare di tipo nuovo, legata alla nuova classe sociale dei
braccianti, slegati e spesso politicamente antagonisti della vecchia mezzadria legata a un
folklore “tradizionale”.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
FARSI SOGGETTO POLITICO                                                                   69


tra quanto fu fatto e detto in Italia prima dell’articolo di Cirese (penso allo
sviluppo della demologia italiana, agli stessi scritti gramsciani e ai lavori di
de Martino e in particolare quelli sul folklore progressivo) e quanto è stato
detto, fatto e scritto in Italia e soprattutto sul piano internazionale dall’an-
tropologia politica, con un uso – talvolta molto disinvolto – dei concetti
gramsciani. L’antropologia si è spesso ritrovata impelagata negli stessi di-
lemmi che sottolineava Cirese: ma Gramsci era un cantore delle forme subal-
terne di resistenza e delle concezioni del mondo popolari o ne era un ferven-
te critico?
   Non essendo io un esegeta né uno specialista della figura e dell’opera di
Cirese, quanto piuttosto un antropologo che tenta di tradurre i concetti
gramsciani, per affrontare questi temi procederò prendendo in prestito lo
stratagemma che fu di Palumbo (2008 : 303) per parlare del suo avvicina-
mento a Gramsci a partire da un’antropologia che ne era in parte estranea,
ossia esplicitando brevemente il mio posizionamento e dando così al lettore
qualche elemento per comprendere il punto di vista di chi scrive. Il mio inte-
resse per l’antropologia e per Gramsci è nato in contemporanea, durante i
miei studi universitari in Scienze internazionali e diplomatiche a cavallo del
millennio, quand’era in gestazione, perfino nella provincia bolognese-roma-
gnola, il cosiddetto movimento globale per “un altro mondo possibile”. Inte-
ressato alle forme terzomondiste e postcoloniali di una politica d’emancipa-
zione, mi sembrava che Gramsci e l’antropologia potessero entrambi offrire
elementi per pensare il qui e l’altrove, ancora una volta, non nei termini di
un’analogia, ma insieme: cos’aveva a che fare la lotta del Sud del mondo con
la provincia italiana? Una volta scoperta la “vocazione autentica” per l’an-
tropologia, mi ritrovai in dottorato in co-tutela tra Milano-Bicocca e l’EHESS
di Parigi, due contesti dove si parlava poco di Gramsci ma dove si lasciava
certamente la libertà di farlo, e dove soprattutto si sviluppava un’antropolo-
gia del contemporaneo – a Parigi soprattutto nel solco di Balandier – che
non rinunciava al rigore etnografico e alla profondità storico-etnologica pur
aprendosi alla sperimentazione metodologica e dei linguaggi, con un’apertu-
ra critica alle diverse correnti internazionali 3. Al di là della traduzione di al-
cuni concetti gramsciani per lo studio etnografico, storico-etnologico ed em-
pirico di alcune realtà in Africa ed Europa, dal punto di vista epistemologico
il mio itinerario di ricerca si è sviluppato in un periodo in cui l’incontro tra
l’antropologia e Gramsci si faceva soprattutto in seno all’antropologia politi-


3. Fu poi quest’apertura internazionale che, dopo avermi condotto a Gramsci e all’Africa,
per loro tramite sono stato “riportato” all’antropologia italiana, interessandomi in partico-
lare al periodo più politico di Ernesto de Martino tra Resistenza e letture gramsciane.

                                           2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
70                                                              RICCARDO CIAVOLELLA


ca internazionale, non solo sotto l’influsso degli studi postcoloniali, ma an-
che e soprattutto di una riflessione propriamente antropologica attorno al
tema, in senso generale, della “resistenza” e dell’“infrapolitica” e sulle forme
popolari o subalterne di azione, mobilitazione o enunciazione politica. A
mio parere, quell’antropologia politica è rimasta ingarbugliata in un’inter-
pretazione dicotomica del Gramsci politico – quella tra un Gramsci “alterna-
tivo”, del “contropotere” e della resistenza contro l’egemonia e un Gramsci
invece leninista, dirigista ed egemonico –; un’interpretazione che sul piano
teorico si è tradotta, nella teoria critica e nelle scienze umane e sociali, in
un’opposizione tra un Gramsci teorico della struttura del potere e di un
Gramsci teorico delle forme subalterne del politico o addirittura antesignano
dell’agency. Questa lettura biunivoca di Gramsci – che è legata intimamente
a quanto criticato da Kate Crehan a proposito della versione lite del concetto
di egemonia (Crehan 2010, vedasi anche Palumbo 2008) – è probabilmente
legata al fatto che, nell’antropologia internazionale, Gramsci è spesso stato
letto alla stregua di un autore post-strutturalista nella dialettica
struttura/azione o potere/contropotere. Come ho cercato di spiegare altrove
(Ciavolella 2019a; 2019b; 2020a), ciò non ha permesso di identificare l’ele-
mento centrale della riflessione di Gramsci a proposito delle dialettiche tra
subalternità ed egemonia, spontaneità e direzione, o altro: che il suo interes-
se non era quello di descrivere i due termini della dialettica come “stati”, ma
di intendere i processi storici che rendono possibile o meno il passaggio da
uno stato, o meglio una fase, a un’altra. Questo corrisponde, a mio avviso, ad
una particolare antropologia di Gramsci, nel senso di una particolare conce-
zione dell’essere umano nella storia: quella dell’uomo come soggetto storico
o, detto altrimenti – ma con senso equivalente, di soggetto politico (Ciavolel-
la 2020b). Ciò significa certo restituire dignità storica alle forme popolari del-
la cultura, in modi simili a quelli che fecero dire a de Martino che “il mondo
magico” è già storia. Ma significa anche molto di più: che ogni gruppo è po-
tenzialmente in grado di entrare nella storia dell’emancipazione, anche se
tutto ciò è tutt’altro che scontato.
   Tornando al saggio di Cirese, ci si potrebbe chiedere se questa concezione
gramsciana dell’uomo come soggetto storico non sia una concezione pretta-
mente politica, da intendersi operativamente come mezzo di lotta per la mo-
bilitazione delle classi subalterne per la trasformazione del reale, e non sia
dunque un concetto utilizzabile scientificamente dall’antropologia, come a
voler identificare una verità, certo, ma nella quale la disciplina non può ad-
dentrarsi se non al prezzo di diventare altra cosa, essa stessa pura politica. Il
mio punto di vista, credo sia ormai chiaro, è differente: l’antropologia, decli-
nata appunto dall’aggettivo “politica”, può assumere quella particolare con-

2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
FARSI SOGGETTO POLITICO                                                           71


cezione antropologica dell’uomo come soggetto politico, senza per questo
significare per forza una politicizzazione militante (che resta una scelta della
persona, anche in funzione dei contesti di studio e di coinvolgimento). Sul
piano epistemologico, ciò significa analizzare le situazioni etnografiche nel
loro spessore storico, intendendo con ciò non soltanto una profondità tem-
porale e una sedimentazione di fatti, ma appunto le condizioni e le possibili-
tà nelle quali può – o non può – effettuarsi quel passaggio – che come dice
bene Cirese è qualitativo – dalla subalternità alla soggettività politica. D’al-
tronde, lo stesso Gramsci aveva definito – quasi in un atto fondante di una
sociologia storico-politica – dei criteri metodologici per lo studio delle classi
subalterne – nel famoso Quaderno 25 sulla storia dei gruppi subalterni che
sfugge purtroppo all’analisi ciresiana – con i quali si tenta di comprendere
come ricostituire una storia frammentaria della partecipazione dei subalterni
alla storia stessa.
   È dunque da una prospettiva che mette al centro quest’idea di storicità e
di soggettività politica che mi sembra di poter ora tornare a un’ultima disa-
mina critica del saggio di Cirese. Nello stesso modo in cui il carattere inno-
vativo dell’interpretazione ciresiana sia da apprezzare in relazione al suo
tempo (la fine degli anni ‘60), ogni interpretazione delle considerazioni
gramsciane sul folklore e sulla cultura dovrebbe partire dal riposizionarle
nell’epoca e nelle sollecitazioni del presente che fu di Gramsci – operazione
che, ricordo, è il primo passo per poter effettuare in seguito una traduzione
dei concetti gramsciani per studiare altri tempi e altri luoghi. Questo però
non è nelle preoccupazioni di Cirese, quantomeno nel saggio in questione,
dove le riflessioni di Gramsci sul folklore sono in un certo senso ipostatizza-
te e tradotte in definizioni d’ordine antropologico, non senza qualche eccesso
schematico. Come ha avuto modo di affermare Fabio Dei, Gramsci aveva in
mente specifiche concezioni del folklore, quelle degli studi positivistici delle
culture popolari di inizio Novecento; e quest’analisi critica serviva sia a com-
prendere come i mondi conservatori, borghesi o premarxisti avessero inter-
pretato lo spirito delle masse subalterne, sia per trovare nuovi mezzi per
comprenderli e innestarli sulla produzione di una nuova concezione del
mondo per la loro emancipazione. Qualsiasi riflessione esauriente sul rap-
porto tra antropologia e Gramsci, quindi, dovrebbe includere un’analisi di
come egli si posizionò criticamente contro gli albori delle discipline positivi-
stiche: dalla critica dell’antropologia lombrosiana, certo, fino anche alla cri-
tica della sociologia di Henri de Man sull’adattamento migliorista dei prole-
tari al loro sfruttamento, passando dalla critica – già presente ne La questio-
ne meridionale del 1926 – di antropologi come Alfredo Niceforo, il quale, da
siciliano, giustificava il sottosviluppo del Meridione su basi razziali. Da que-

                                      2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
72                                                                RICCARDO CIAVOLELLA


sto punto di vista, Gramsci faceva qualcosa – come nell’analisi del movimen-
to di Davide Lazzaretti – che gli antropologi hanno tentato di fare spesso dal
secondo dopoguerra in poi (penso alle analisi di Peter Worsley e Max Gluk-
man sul movimento Mau Mau) (Ciavolella 2016): sottrarre l’analisi dell’espe-
rienza subalterna al discorso “ufficiale”, che tende ad identificare le ragioni
della subalternità in una devianza iscritta naturalmente o culturalmente nei
subalterni, per spiegarne invece le ragioni politiche.
   L’assenza di un’analisi storicizzante della riflessione gramsciana non per-
mette, a Cirese, non soltanto di capirne le ragioni e le sollecitazioni del suo
presente, ma nemmeno di cogliere i modi in cui i significati di folklore o di
subalternità, ad esempio, si traducano in tempi e in luoghi differenti. Per fare
un rapido salto nel presente, ad esempio, sarebbe forse possibile considerare
che i discorsi “ufficiali” delle élite liberali siano dominanti, ma sarebbe diffi-
cile considerare la diffusione di fake news e di teorie complottiste come feno-
meni dal carattere puramente disorganico, siccome essi si fanno sempre più
senso comune (Crehan 2016). Questo non solo perché le società contempora-
nee siano essenzialmente diverse da quelle del passato, con quella “trasfor-
mazione antropologica” identificata da Pasolini col consumismo che si è ge-
neralizzata nello spazio globale e nello spazio mediatico per rimescolare le
carte dell’alto e del basso della cultura; ma anche perché la storia, come
Gramsci insegna, è fatta di fasi, di cicli e soprattutto di crisi: di crisi dell’ege-
monia.
   È su questo punto che mi sembra di poter identificare due problemi fon-
damentali nell’interpretazione ciresiana di Gramsci e che trovano la loro ori-
gine in quella ipostatizzazione dei concetti in definizioni. Prima di tutto, mi
sembra che questo lavoro di sistemazione proceda attraverso una serie di
ipotesi su equivalenze formali che trovano il loro comune denominatore nel-
l’opposizione tra alto e basso della società. Ciò permette certamente di met-
tere in risalto – contro ogni presupposto della vecchia antropologia nel tro-
vare omogeneità interne a culture intese come isole della storia – la dialetti-
ca insita all’approccio gramsciano allo studio di tutte le sfere della vita so-
ciale: folklore/cultura ufficiale nella sfera culturale; proletari/borghesia nella
sfera socio-economica; subalternità/egemonia nella sfera politica. L’opera-
zione, tuttavia, ha come effetto di creare equivalenze formali tra tali diffe-
renti sfere: Cirese pensa al rapporto tra queste nei termini dell’analogia e
non in quelli della traduzione, secondo i quali invece, in una prospettiva
gramsciana, cultura, economia e politica sono interrelati organicamente, ma
non per questo tra loro omogenei o isomorfi. In una prospettiva che supera
sia il meccanicismo di un materialismo volgare, sia lo storicismo prettamen-
te idealista, il loro rapporto è un rapporto storico, nel quale la dimensione

2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
FARSI SOGGETTO POLITICO                                                              73


politica funge da motore propriamente umano di articolazione tra le condi-
zioni storiche, strutturali se vogliamo, che limitano la libertà umana e l’im-
peto volontaristico e libertario. In questa dimensione propriamente politica,
che è al contempo embedded nel resto delle dimensioni sociali e relativamen-
te autonoma rispetto ad esse, si situa un punto nevralgico della formulazio-
ne gramsciana che non mi sembra colto da Cirese: le condizioni di subalter-
nità ed egemonia possono sembrare consolidate e inscalfibili come dura pie-
tra, eppure sono prodotti storici che possono essere modificati. La subalter-
nità, ricordiamolo, non è solo un eufemismo per parlare di proletari, ma
identifica una posizione politica e non per forza una condizione di classe:
quella dei gruppi che “subiscono l’iniziativa delle classi dominanti”. E l’ege-
monia, lungi da quell’idea di “discorso dominante” o “struttura del Potere”
al quale ci hanno convinto di pensare i post-strutturalisti, è un successo sto-
rico, ma per questo relativo a un tempo e a un contesto dato, nel quale alcuni
gruppi sociali riescono a produrre un’articolazione organica tra cultura, eco-
nomica e politica attorno ai propri interessi. Per tornare, in conclusione, al-
l’interpretazione di Cirese incentrata sugli aspetti culturali e solo sussidia-
riamente sugli aspetti politici, considerare la dialettica subalternità/egemo-
nia come un riflesso dell’opposizione tra folklore e cultura ufficiale significa
non darsi la possibilità di vedere che anche la cultura ufficiale, ciclicamente,
perde il proprio carattere egemonico (e in tal caso gli intellettuali una volta
organici diventano tradizionali) e l’egemonia può entrare in crisi (venendo
surrogata magari da forme di demagogia deleteria, da rivoluzioni passive o da
forme violente di dominio) e aprire quel periodo di interregno, che si paventa
tanto al giorno d’oggi, nel quale nascono i mostri. Ma dal quale bisogna pur
partire per costruire il domani.


RIFERIMENTI BIBLIOGRAFICI
Ciavolella, Riccardo, 2016, L’émancipation des subalternes par la “culture popu-
     laire”. La pensée gramscienne et l’anthropologie pour appréhender l’Italie de
     l’après-guerre et le Tiers monde en voie de décolonisation (1948-1960), Mé-
     langes de l’École française de Rome - Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contem-
     poraines, 128, 2. http://journals.openedition.org/mefrim/2947.
Ciavolella, Riccardo, 2019a, The changing meanings of people’s politics. Gramsci
     and anthropology from the history of subaltern groups to contemporary
     subject, in Revisiting Gramsci’s Laboratory, Francesca Antonini, Aaron
     Bernstein, Lorenzo Fusaro, Robert Jackson, eds, Leiden, Brill: 266-284.
Ciavolella, Riccardo, 2019b, Gramsci, l’antropologia e la “politica del popolo”, in Ege-
     monia e modernità in Gramsci, Fabio Frosini, ed, Roma, Viella.


                                         2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
74                                                                  RICCARDO CIAVOLELLA


Ciavolella, Riccardo, 2020a, Les deux Gramsci de l’anthropologie politique. Autour
      du débat sur domination et émancipation, Condition humaine / Conditions po-
      litiques, 1. https://revues.mshparisnord.fr/chcp/index.php?id=109.
Ciavolella, Riccardo, 2020b, Hegemony and the political subject in anthropology, in
      Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World. Gramscian Concepts for the History of
      Science, Massimiliano Badino, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, eds, Leiden, Brill: 58-79.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 2008a, Concezioni del mondo, filosofia spontanea e istinto di
      classe nelle Osservazioni sul folclore di Antonio Gramsci [1969-70], Lares, 74,
      2: 467-498.
Cirese, Alberto Mario, 2008b, Interventi al seminario Gramsci ritrovato tra Cirese e i
      cultural studies, in Gramsci ritrovato, numero monografico, Lares, 74, 2: 321-
      332.
Cospito, Giuseppe, 2017, Traducibilità dei linguaggi scientifici e filosofia della pra-
      xis, Filosofia italiana, 2: 47-65.
Crehan, Kate, 2010 [2002], Gramsci, cultura e antropologia, Lecce, Argo.
Crehan, Kate, 2016, Gramsci’s Common Sense. Inequality and its narratives, Duke
      University Press.
Dei, Fabio, 2011, Gramsci, Cirese e la tradizione demologica italiana, Lares, 77, 3:
      501-518.
Deias, Antonio, Giovanni M. Boninelli, Eugenio Testa, eds, 2008, Gramsci ritrovato.
      numero monografico, Lares, 74, 2: 247-416.
Palumbo, Berardino, 2008, Intervento alla Tavola rotonda Gramsci tra cultural
      studies e antropologia, in Gramsci ritrovato, numero monografico, Lares, 74, 2:
      303-309.
Pizza, Giovanni, 2020, L’antropologia di Gramsci. Corpo, natura, mutazione, Roma,
      Carocci.




2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 65-74
                                           2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86




                                                             ANNIVERSARY FORUM

Cirese 101
Notas mexicanas con “un saludo al modo antiguo”
Jorge A. GONZÁLEZ
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México


Contribution to Anniversary Forum: Cirese 101. Rereading Gramsci’s Observations on
Folklore, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli, eds, Anuac, 11, 1, 2022.


    En este breve texto1 expondré en forma de fichas de trabajo que en vez de
analíticas serán más cercanas al registro biográfico de algunos de los puntos
centrales de mi experiencia académica y personal con Alberto Cirese, con
motivo de su aniversario 101. En el núcleo argumentativo está la influencia
de su obra en mi propia trayectoria académica. Además de un riguroso cien-
tífico, Cirese tenía una especial sensibilidad por las formas narrativas popu-
lares cantadas, en particular por el corrido mexicano y otras formas de can-
ciones. Por esta razón, a lo largo del texto irán desplegándose algunas me-
morias sonoras significativas.
Primer contacto: 1976
   Un día cualquiera, dentro de una sesión de asesoría con Gilberto Giménez
en la universidad, sin la menor piedad para un estudiante, salí bajo el brazo
con la revista francesa Dialectiques 4/5 dedicado por entero a Gramsci en la
que tenía que leer un texto: “Conceptions du monde, philosophie spontanée,
folklore” de un tal Alberto M. Cirese (1974). Como pude y con la inapreciable
ayuda de Catherine Héau, poco a poco comencé a entrar en la lectura de
Gramsci visto y trabajado desde la óptica de Cirese. Mi primer contacto con
su obra fue en francés académico.
1. Agradezco a Antonio M. Pusceddu y a Francesco Zanotelli la invitación y la paciencia en
la espera de esta breve y episódica colaboración. La revista Estudios sobre las Culturas Con-
temporáneas prepara un número especial sobre la influencia del pensamiento y la obra de
Cirese en México y América Latina.


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Jorge A. González
Cirese 101: Notas mexicanas con “un saludo al modo antiguo”
2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5281
76                                                                        JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ


   La particular posición gramsciana de Cirese sobre la cultura popular, cayó
como agua fresca en medio de la aridez de una discusión de larga data en
México que tocaba no solo cuestiones conceptuales, sino prácticas y políticas
emanadas directamente del movimiento revolucionario de una guerra que
duró más de una década en casi todo el país y que al romper la continuidad
cultural de la Colonia española y del durísimo siglo XIX, en el que después de
la independencia de España, México tuvo que sortear dos “emperadores”, in-
vasiones de los Estados Unidos de América y de Francia, la pérdida de más de
la mitad del territorio y la debacle económica del momento, la revolución
triunfante se planteó la creación de una “nueva raza”, ni española, ni indíge-
na, ni negra sino de su evolución mezclada.
   Una mestizofilia (Stern 2000) por encima de cualquier diferencia y rezago
sociocultural para “desindianizar” y desafricanizar lo más pronto posible
esta nueva nación. Las políticas públicas se orientaron entonces a la confec-
ción de una inédita e imaginada Cultura Nacional por encima de las múlti-
ples “culturas” étnicas que a su modo habían resistido siglos enteros de
esclavitud, miseria, despojo y visibilización negativa que perdura hasta hoy
en esta primera veintena del siglo XXI2.

                                        Mercedes Sosa
                                      Cinco siglos igual
                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG6ux4ErAoM


   Diversas nociones se entrecruzaban y oponían en ese trance: ¿Cultura Na-
cional o culturas étnicas? ¿culturas populares o subalternas? ¿Cultura de cla-
se o cultura de masas?
   De un lado, románticos que suspiraban por la “verdadera” expresión del
pueblo, del otro lado los modernos deslumbrados por las posibilidades de la
cultura de masas, la de los llamados “medios de comunicación”. Estas divi-
siones también marcaban la especialización de las profesiones, de los estu-
dios. Cada uno con su dominio, su objeto y su método.
   Los antropólogos, al estudio de los pueblos indígenas. Los comunicólogos,
a los efectos de la televisión, la radio, la prensa y el cine; los sociólogos a la
lucha de clases como advenimiento del socialismo, los anticuarios recupera-
ban materiales “verdaderos” de la cultura campesina condenada a la extin-

2. Para el inicio de los años veinte del siglo pasado había decenas de “pequeñas” naciones
indígenas y comunidades afrodescendientes con lenguas propias, concepciones del mundo
operantes y comportamientos culturales que, para bien supremo del progreso, deberían
enorgullecernos (por su imperial pasado, en el caso de los indígenas), pero disolverse en el
presente.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
CIRESE 101                                                                                77


ción. Y además de esta diversidad de enfoques, la posibilidad de entrecruzar-
se de modo metodológico o teórico estaba de inicio desactivada: cada uno en
su propia y segura islita.
   Es en ese momento de finales de los años setenta en el que Cirese es traí -
do a México por iniciativa de Gilberto Giménez junto con Guillermo Bonfil a
ofrecer un seminario sobre su trabajo y enfocado al estudio de las culturas
populares.
   Cirese se titulaba en el mismo año en que yo nacía al otro lado del mar y
en el que se publican en Italia los Quaderni. Cuando llega a México en el ve-
rano de 1979 a hacer un seminario intensivo de un mes de duración, yo había
hecho un primer estudio de campo en un pueblo campesino en el que mi ob-
jetivo era describir y comprender las formas locales de comunicación y su re-
lación con las formas industriales moduladas por enormes industrias espe-
cializadas en la edición de visibilidad pública. Ese trabajo tuve la osadía de
dejarlo sobre su mesa en La Sapienza en 1977, al no encontrarlo personal-
mente en esa ocasión3.

Segundo contacto: verano de 1979
   Yo terminaba la investigación de campo para mi disertación de maestría
en sociología en las montañas de Veracruz y conocí personalmente a Cirese
en su primera visita a México.
   El efecto fue intenso. A la claridad y rigor lógico de sus textos que cada
vez conocía mejor, se agregaba una erudita, jocosa y vívida manera de hacer
sus lecciones. Siempre aprecié su sentido humano, su sensibilidad hacia los
otros, su humor y diáfana claridad en las exposiciones que daba y en las pre-
guntas que respondía. Cirese tenía la calidad para establecer relaciones de
empatía con colegas de todas las profesiones y con toda clase de personas.
   Ese seminario de 1979 en el Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superio-
res en Antropología Social (CIESAS) fue determinante en mi necesidad de
profundizar en la obra de Gramsci y de Cirese, quien amablemente me ofre-
ció “patrocinio científico” en el desarrollo de lo que pudiera requerir.
   Ello comenzó con el comentario de aquella disertación de licenciatura que
dejé en Roma. Su respuesta, siempre con interés y humor, parafraseando a
Lenin, fue que mi trabajo era “un paso adelante y dos atrás”. Orientado por
Giménez, que había utilizado la semiótica de Greimas dentro de la perspecti-
va etnosociológica con la que estudió procesos de religiosidad popular en


3. Ese trabajo fue publicado como Dominación cultural, expresión artística, promoción popular
(Gonzalez 1980).

                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
78                                                                JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ


México (Giménez, 2013), yo había usado esquemas actanciales para el análi-
sis de varias obras de teatro que mediante un largo proceso de investigación-
acción realizamos con jóvenes campesinos. Supe de su amistad con el mismo
Greimas establecida en la estancia que realizó con Levi-Strauss en el Musée
de l'Homme en París y de las críticas que a su modelo le había formulado di -
rectamente Cirese, artillado con una lógica formal muy rigurosa. “El carré
semiótique de mi querido amigo Greimas, no es ni cuadrado, ni es semiótico”,
decía muy serio y de ahí pasaba a explicar detalladamente las razones de su
argumentación.
   De repente, sin más, un joven (yo) que iniciaba apenas su carrera conver-
saba con un académico en plenitud que conocía personal y críticamente a
muchos autores de los que yo leía. Otro de sus comentarios resultó de magna
importancia a lo largo de toda mi formación: “Cuando encuentres en tu tra-
bajo un nudo que no sabes cómo resolver, siempre muéstralo al lector y evita
el pasticcio. Esa frase suya me la he aplicado personalmente como norma y la
he recomendado a decenas de mis estudiantes.
   De Cirese puedo decir que aprendí que el trabajo académico es un servicio,
por lo que debe ser hecho de primera calidad y para poder hacerlo, se requie-
re cultivar diversas virtudes, entre ellas, la humildad, la escucha atenta, la ri-
gurosidad, la disciplina y la pasión por conocer lo desconocido, lo escondido
y por hurgar en algunos de los enigmas que nos tejen.

                                       Irma Serrano
                                  Goza, goza, mariposa
                           www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFKZPydoZVA



Tercer contacto: 1981, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco
(UAM-X)
   Fue precisamente en 1979, por una invitación de Antonio Paoli, que co-
mencé mi carrera como profesor-investigador con dedicación completa en la
carrera de comunicación. En ella prevalecía un decidido giro semiológico
francés que privilegiaba el análisis del discurso, las relaciones de poder y la
producción de mensajes alternativos.
   Mi propuesta se centró en balancear esa perspectiva semiológica y econó-
mica con el estudio de la producción cotidiana de la hegemonía en las zonas
que por lo general no habían sido trabajadas en los estudios mexicanos y
para ello nadie mejor que la visión marxista de Gramsci y la visión lógico-de-
mo-antropológica de Cirese.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
CIRESE 101                                                                          79




   Por esos tiempos formé y coordiné un área de investigación que llevó el
nombre de “Comunicación, Hegemonía y Culturas Subalternas” 4. Difícilmen-
te se podría negar la impronta gramsciana y ciresiana. Para reforzar el traba-
jo, invité a Cirese a dar un seminario de todo un mes en esa universidad. A él
acudieron estudiosos de varias partes del país, no solo antropólogos. A dife-
rencia del Seminario de 1979, en esta ocasión lo que le pedí a Cirese fue que
desarrollara con amplitud su concepción de desniveles de cultura y la concep-
tualización de la hegemonía en Gramsci, concepto que después de mis dos
primeras investigaciones académicas, se volvió el centro de mi trabajo. Debo
decir que ese segundo seminario me permitió conversar, discutir y polemizar
con una amplia red de colegas que me dio una visión del campo y amplió mi
capital social en el campo de los estudiosos de la cultura en México.
   Es 1981 el año en que me gradué de maestría. Mi trabajo, asesorado otra
vez por Giménez, tuvo tres ejes conceptuales y una construcción metodoló-
gica bien definida. El estudio de la cultura de campesinos mestizos e indíge-
nas de una zona muy alejada y asilada con técnicas etnográficas lo había en-
carado conceptualmente desde tres ejes: los desniveles internos de cultura
(Cirese), la formación del habitus de clase (Bourdieu) y las lógicas de produc-
ción del valor (Fossaert).
   Como dicho texto tenía una genealogía del concepto de cultura que
aprendí directamente de Giménez, la UAM-X la publicó en los Cuadernos del
TICOM y se usaba como material de trabajo para los estudiantes. Posterior-
mente la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Campus Mexicali lo pu-
blicó como libro (González 1990)5.
   Así, las enseñanzas de Cirese comenzaron a ser estudiadas en México,
pero no en las escuelas de antropología o sociología, sino en las de comuni-
cación. El texto fue muy bien recibido, y siguiendo los consejos de Cirese, a
pesar de haber mostrado mis lagunas, comprendí que lo que de verdad me
había propuesto, es decir, aportar elementos para comprender cómo se con-
struye la hegemonía en esa zona tan aislada social y geográficamente, no lo
logré. Después al revisar críticamente mi trabajo de la sierra, comprendí que
la relación social de hegemonía tenía que construirse no en lo que separa a
las culturas, sino en lo que pueden compartir. La propuesta de Cirese sobre


4. La carrera de comunicación de la UAM-X fue diseñada como una excepción a las demás
carreras de la disciplina. Se pretendía formar estrategas de la comunicación.
5. Ese mismo texto fue traducido al portugués (Gonzalez 2016).

                                        2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
80                                                                          JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ


las “formaciones culturales transclasistas o elementalmente humanas” me
daba una dirección muy relevante. De ahí salió mi propuesta de los Frentes
Culturales6 como una categoría teórica y metodológica para estudiar la con-
strucción de la hegemonía más cerca de la vida cotidiana, que le debe mucho
a Cirese y su interpretación de Gramsci al estudio de lo popular en las cultu-
ras.


                                         Lalo González
                                El corrido de Gumaro Sotero
                            www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUaLnAMSNCg




Cuarto contacto: 1982
   Una vez pasado el efecto de aquel seminario intensivo con Cirese y con la
nueva red de relaciones que se generó a partir del seminario de 1981 y otros
contactos que aportó Guillermo Bonfil, desde esa área de investigación en la
UAM-X convocamos en julio de 1982 a un encuentro internacional de discu-
sión que me permitió traer de Italia a Pietro Clemente (Siena), Amalia Signo-
relli (Napoli) y de nuevo a Cirese (Roma) para conversar con otros académi-
cos. En ese mismo año, la Ciudad de México fue sede del X Congreso Mundial
de Sociología de la International Sociological Association (ISA) donde fui en-
cargado de organizar una mesa temática sobre las Culturas Populares. Ahí
presenté por primera vez los rudimentos de la propuesta de los Frentes Cul-
turales7.
   El efecto se multiplicó y poco a poco la lectura ciresiana de las ideas de
Gramsci comenzaron a dialogar con otras perspectivas desde la comunica-
ción, la educación, la sociología y otras disciplinas. La exploración crítica de
estas se construyó como el filón gramsciano en los estudios no solo políticos
o de análisis de coyuntura, sino en los estudios sobre la cultura y la comuni-
cación tuvo una recepción especialmente importante en Brasil (Marques de

6. Esa fue la idea que organizó mi trabajo para estudiar el doctorado. Todo estaba listo para
ser parte de la primera generación de la apertura de este grado en Roma con Cirese, pero por
diversas cuestiones no se abrió en ahí sino en el sur de Italia. Regresé de Roma y me inscribí
en la Universidad Iberoamericana, que aceptó la tutoría teórica de Cirese y la tutoría meto-
dológica de Rolando García (González 2018: 303-305).
7. Una síntesis de mi tesis sobre las ferias urbanas como Frentes Culturales (González 1991)
fue premiada en el 1st. Worldwide Competition for Young Sociologists, organizado por Da-
niel Bertaux en el XII Congreso de la ISA en Madrid, 1990.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
CIRESE 101                                                                               81


Melo y Fernándes 2013). Sin embargo, no conozco traducciones de alguna
obra de Cirese al portugués. Las ideas de Gramsci circulaban en el sur del
continente, especialmente en Argentina donde los usos de Gramsci (Portan-
tiero 1977) estuvieron muy cercanos a la militancia política y resistencia en
los tiempos de la Operación Cóndor y las dictaduras en el cono sur de Améri-
ca y el Gramsci de la renovación del interés por el estudio de la hegemonía
son dos ejemplos de las diversas lecturas de su obra 8. La construcción de la
hegemonía tendría que hacerse (y se ha hecho en la historia) sobre formas
simbólicas en las que puedan reconocerse diferentes clases sociales.
   En la marea posmodernista y la declarada defunción de los grandes di-
scursos, la reflexión de Cirese sobre Gramsci y Croce respecto a la poesía po-
pular resultó central. La perspectiva marxista de Gramsci era capaz de enri-
quecerse con la propuesta de Croce. Al contrario, la propuesta del llamado
Papa Laico, revienta por completo si le incorporamos la relación entre cultu-
ra y clases sociales. La teoría de Gramsci es más potente.
   Al mismo tiempo, la obra de Cirese alerta contra el “pansemiotismo”, del
que a partir de su concepto de fabrilidad, signicidad y lo elementalmente hu-
mano hace, en mi opinión, una demoledora crítica a esas derivaciones de la
lectura de Levi-Strauss. Muchas lecciones en la mesa. La perspectiva marxi-
sta y gramsciana de las clases sociales no se deja diluir entre las formas com-
plejas para expresar sentimientos complejos, pero hay que investigarla. Del
otro lado, la perspectiva semiótica tiene pertinencia en la especificidad del
análisis, no se puede separar de su componente material: también hay que
documentarla, analizarla y discutirla detalladamente.



                                  La Dinastía de Tuzantla
                                  El campesino y el sol9
                           www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiPBKygbtG4




8. Mi primera traducción de un texto de Cirese dentro del campo académico de la comunica-
ción, fue publicado en 1983 como pieza central de un dossier sobre las culturas populares en
el número 10 de la revista Comunicación y Cultura, dirigida por Héctor Schmucler y Armand
Mattelart y editada por la UAM-X: “Cultura obrera, cultura popular y lo “elementalmente
humano”.
9. Esta versión se basa en la original que se cantaba poco antes de la revolución mexicana,
con una letra ajustada, pero conserva el mismo sentido que la que le encantaba escuchar a
Cirese.

                                           2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
82                                                                                   JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ


Quinto contacto: 1986 El Programa Cultura de la Universidad de Colima
   A finales de 1983 fui a vivir con mi pequeña y joven familia a Colima, en
parte para estudiar en el terreno la Feria de Colima (ciudad capital del estado
del mismo nombre en el occidente de México) y en parte para armar otro
proyecto de vida familiar y académica. Renuncié a mi posición definitiva en
la UAM-X y entré a la Universidad de Colima para fundar, junto con Jesús
Galindo y otros colegas, el Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, dentro del
cual coordiné el Programa de Estudios sobre las Culturas Contemporáneas
(Programa Cultura).
   A diferencia de la situación de la Ciudad de México, en Colima había que
hacer prácticamente todo. Iniciamos 1985 un programa de seminarios con
invitados internacionales con los que queríamos contrastar nuestras ideas:
Miquel Moragas i Spa (catalán), José Marques de Melo (brasileño), Graham
Murdock (inglés), Jesús Martín (español-colombiano), Mabel Piccini (argen-
tina) y Robert Fossaert (francés). Al mismo tiempo negociaba con Cirese una
estancia más prolongada donde después de mucho tiempo volviera a hacer
trabajo de campo (Fig. 1).




FIG.1: Cuaderno de campo de Cirese en Suchitlán       FIG.2: Programa sobre el calendario maya que Cirese
(Comala, Colima), verano de 1986. Photo courtesy of   desarrolló en Comala, 1986. Photo courtesy of Jorge
Jorge A. González.                                    A. González.




2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
CIRESE 101                                                                                 83


   Para 1986 Cirese vino con Liliana Serafini a vivir a Comala y ambos traba-
jaron incasablemente en el archivo parroquial de Suchitlán, uno de los lla-
mados “pueblos de indios” a ocho kilómetros al norte de Comala. El material
recuperado sirvió para alimentar los datos para su modelo informático de
análisis del parentesco (Fig. 2).
   Alguna conferencia dio en la carrera de Comunicación de la Universidad
de Colima, pero la mayor parte del tiempo lo invirtió en el trabajo de campo,
asesorías sobre las cuestiones que yo trabajaba y la convivencia familiar que
le fascinaba y nutría.
   Su asesoría en el estudio de la relación de las telenovelas mexicanas con la
sociedad fue determinante por su claridad y efectividad haciendo etnografía
de las situaciones en que las familias ven dichos melodramas 10. Así podemos
ver que la presencia de Cirese en áreas completamente ajenas a su idea y su
obra anterior, comenzaron a tener vida. También desde 1986 que fundamos
Estudios sobre las Culturas Contemporáneas la traducción de textos de Cirese
difundieron su pensamiento en el área de influencia de nuestra revista11.
   Su obra pensada para el campo de la antropología cultural italiana comen-
zó a circular y a difundirse poco a poco en otras áreas, especialmente en las
de comunicación. Por una parte, eso fue una ventaja, pero al mismo tiempo
una limitación debido a la relativa poca consistencia de un campo de estu-
dios al que le cuesta mucho trabajar textos con el rigor que Cirese realizaba
los suyos y que además durante décadas se ha regido por una pulsión por ha-
cer estudios de casi cualquier cosa, a partir de modas académicas volátiles
que en mi opinión le ha impedido consolidar una teoría científica de los pro-
cesos de transformación de los objetos en el dominio de la comunicación so-
cial (ver González 1997).
   Tal vez este rasgo ha silenciado la productiva y original aportación de Ci-
rese hacia otros campos. Mi concepción de los Frentes culturales y su evolu-
ción hacia la investigación y desarrollo de cibercultur@ (González 2019) 12,

10. La relación con Italia y una beca que conseguimos con el gobierno mexicano hizo posible
la estancia académica de Fabio Mugnaini, discípulo de Pietro Clemente y Piergiorgio Solinas
en Colima. Con Fabio publicamos un texto a partir de lo que Cirese llamaba jocosamente el
“hegemonómetro” que nos sirvió para la etnografía de hogares de diversas ciudades de Mé-
xico (Mugnaini, González 1986). El uso de dicho protocolo estuvo detrás del primer premio
nacional de tesis en toda la historia de la Universidad de Colima y el estudio realizado por
tres estudiantes de comunicación, fue publicado como (Covarrubias Cuéllar, Bautista y Uribe
1994).
11. Nuestra revista ha publicado traducciones de cuatro textos de Cirese desde 1986 y su cir-
culación cubre toda América Latina, España, Portugal, Estados Unidos de América y más re-
cientemente en formato digital, China. Descargables en: www.redalyc.org/revista.oa?id=316.
12. Esta obra ha sido publicada en 2007 en Argentina y fue traducida al portugués en 2012.
En ella hay 21 referencias directas a siete obras distintas de Cirese. Sin embargo, no veo que
se haya percibido su importancia teórica en Iberoamérica.

                                            2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
84                                                               JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ


entendida en el mundo anglosajón como “cultural governance” (Tufte, 2017:
106-123) es impensable sin su obra. A pesar de las traducciones y referencias
constantes a su legado, me parece que la obra de Cirese se ha relegado al si-
lencio en un campo al que mucho le ayudaría conocerle.

                                    Atahualpa Yupanqui
                                Le tengo rabia al silencio
                           www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5lUqqE7RX8




Sexta: de salida
   Después de su estancia de campo en Comala, me metí de lleno a coordinar
la investigación sobre la relación entre la sociedad mexicana y el melodrama
televisivo. Ese proyecto realizado por una red de varias instituciones y ciuda-
des del país se llevó seis años completos. La colaboración estrecha con Cirese
bajó el ritmo y siempre que podía, pasaba a saludarle a su casa de Piazza Ca-
pri 11. Cuando viene a Toluca en 1987 estábamos en pleno proceso de campo
y prácticamente no tuvimos contacto. Después por cuestiones de concursos y
alguna dolencia agravada con la edad, le impidieron regresar a México.
   Todo el diseño del Sistema Nacional de Información Cultural (SNIC) que
realicé en 1991 a petición de Guillermo Bonfil para el Consejo Nacional para
la Cultura y las Artes de México siempre tuvo como alter la rigurosa pasión
lógica con la que nuestro profesor enfrentaba los retos. En julio de ese mis-
mo año, unas horas después de que conversamos por teléfono sobre los
avances en las metas de la producción de los sistemas y los discos compactos
que por convenio se firmaron con la Universidad de Colima para el SNIC,
Bonfil muere en un desafortunado accidente. Yo había sido invitado a la Uni-
versidad Complutense de Madrid para realizar un año sabático en 1992. Esto
me sirvió para poder escribir ex post facto el marco metodológico que desar-
rollamos para las tres grandes fases del proyecto del Melodrama Televisivo.
   A mi regreso a México, es en 1993 cuando con muchas dificultades reto-
mamos el módulo de información básica del SNIC y comenzamos el trabajo
de investigación sobre la Formación de las ofertas culturales y sus públicos
en México. El objetivo era formar, capacitar y desarrollar una red nacional de
investigación básica sobre la cultura en México que pudiera nutrir el SNIC y
pudiera ser usado para documentar la toma de decisiones en políticas cultu-
rales. La producción de esa investigación involucró la coordinación de más
de 150 colegas en 10 ciudades de México durante un año.


2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
CIRESE 101                                                                                   85


   Para tal empresa, tuve como asesores a un pequeño grupo de especialistas
con los que discutí y mejoré el proyecto y sus partes: Paul Thompson (Essex),
Daniel Bertaux (CNRS), Pierre Bourdieu (College de France), Eugenia Meyer
(UNAM), Elizabeth Jelín (UBA) y por supuesto, Alberto Cirese de Roma. En el
proyecto más ambicioso y complejo que realicé, Alberto siempre estuvo cer-
ca para escuchar, comentar, recomendar, prevenir.
   Lo vi algunas veces más en su casa, ya bastante disminuido de salud, pero
siempre lúcido y memorioso de los agradables momentos que vivió en Méxi-
co.
   Cirese, desde que apareció en mi vida académica en aquel texto en fran-
cés, cumplió cabalmente su ofrecimiento de procurarme “patrocinio científi-
co” (agrego, permanente) en mi carrera. Lo recuerdo muy bien, su voz, su
eterno cigarrillo en la mano, su delicada y amorosa relación con mi familia,
sus ojos vivaces y llenos de energía.
   Su humor y su caminar con su inseparable bolsa al lado, que se fue encor-
vando cada vez más con el paso del tiempo y el golpe de los accidentes y en-
fermedades.
   Por eso me gusta recordar lo que él mismo le escribió a Vittorio Lanternari:
      In questa tarda vigilia, e breve, che ci resta, caro Vittorio, ci dà forza la onesta
      coscienza dei doveri che abbiamo sentito come nostri, e ci tiene uniti il
      rinnovarsi tra noi del tuo caro saluto al modo antico. Alberto (Lombardozzi &
      Mariotti, 2008: 299)

   Alberto Cirese, querido Alberto, que tomó esta profesión como un servicio
y lo cumplió con alegría, con calidad y con reconocimiento.
   Y “para que la pena no parezca tanto pena”, como dicen los payadores,
cierro con una de las canciones que más le gustaba que cantara.
   Siempre me la pedía. Siempre se la cantaba. Como al modo antiguo.


                                      Atahualpa Yupanqui
                                            El alazán
                             www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtRYttkAH7A




                                             2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
86                                                                      JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ




BIBLIOGRAFÍA
Cirese, A. M., 1974, Conceptions du monde, philosophie spontanée, folklore, Dia-
      lectiques, 4, 5: 83-100.
Covarrubias Cuéllar, K. Y., A. Bautista, B. A. Uribe, 1994, Cuéntame en qué se quedó.
      La telenovela como fenómeno social, México, Editorial Trillas / Federación Lati-
      noamericana de Asociaciones de Facultades de Comunicación Social.
Giménez, G., 2013, Cultura popular y religión en el Anahuac, Aguascalientes, Univer-
      sidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes.
González, J. A., 1980, Dominación cultural. Expresión artística y promoción popular,
      México, EILA.
González, J. A., 1990, Sociología de las culturas subalternas, Mexicali, Universidad
      Autónoma de Baja California.
González, J. A., 1991, Juego peligroso. Ferias, memorias urbanas y frentes
      culturales, Diálogos de la Comunicación, 23: 11-46.
González, J. A., 1997, La voluntad de tejer. Análisis cultural, frentes culturales y
      redes de futuro, Estudios sobre las Culturas Contemporáneas, III, 5: 129-150.
González, J. A., 2016, Sociologia das clases subalternas, Curitiba, Appris Editora.
González, J. A., ed, 2018, ¡No está muerto quien pelea! Homenaje a la obra de Rolando
      García Boutigue, México, CEIICH-UNAM.
González, J. A., 2019, Entre cultura(s) y cibercultur@(s). Incursiones y otros derroteros
      no lineales, México, CEIICH-UNAM, primera edición electrónica.
Lombardozzi, A., L. Mariotti, eds, 2008, Antropologia e dinamica culturale. Studi in
      onore di Vittorio Lanternari, Napoli, Liguori.
Marques de Melo, J., G. Fernandes, 2013, Metamorfose da Folkcomunicação: Antolo-
      gia Brasileira, São Paulo, Editae.
Mugnaini, F., J. A. González, 1986, Para un protocolo de observación etnográfica de
      los usos diferenciales y los modos de ver las telenovelas, Estudios sobre las
      Culturas Contemporáneas, 1, 1: 149-175.
Portantiero, J. C., 1977, Los usos de Gramsci, México, Cuadernos de Pasado y Presen-
      te, 1977.
Stern, A., 2000, Mestizofilia, biotipología y eugenesia en el México postrevoluciona-
      rio. Hacia una historia de la ciencia y el Estado, 1920-1960, Relaciones. Estu-
      dios de historia y sociedad, 21, 81, COLMICH.




2022 | ANUAC. VOL. 11, N° 1, GIUGNO 2022: 75-86
