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Kate Crehan
Anuac
Gramsci’s folklore bundle
Text.Serial.Journal
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11
Anniversary Forum
2022-06-26
2022-06-23
2022-07-29
2022-07-29
55-64
1
Kate Crehan
2022/06/26
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5279
55
City University of New York, Stati Uniti
2239-625X
1
64
urn:nbn:it:unica-28393
Gramsci’s folklore bundle
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11
                                         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
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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.


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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.

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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.


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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:

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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).



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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.

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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

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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
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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,
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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
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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
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64                                                                    KATE CREHAN


Gramsci, Antonio, 1996, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, volume II, Joseph
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Green, Marcus, 2011, Rethinking the Subaltern and the Question of Censorship in
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Williams, Raymond, 1977, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press.




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