Contribution of Raymond Williams to Cultural Studies

The centrality of culture in both Gramsci and Thompson and Williams in the realization of Marxist analyzes of reality challenges us to think about the relationship of their ideas with the discipline to which culture is assigned as an object of study. We are talking about anthropology. What influences of Gramsci do we find in anthropological studies? What role do the perspectives developed by Williams and Thompson play in the kind of reading that anthropology did of Gramsci? What do you have to contribute the Gramscian look to anthropology? What does anthropology have to contribute to a Marxism of a culturalist or subjectivist nature? But what readings of Gramsci have circulated in anthropology? Some recent studies (Crehan, 2002; Cravolella, 2014) provide a critical review of the way in which anthropologists have incorporated this author. They pose as key the interpretations of Raymond Williams and James C. Scott in the readings that have been made by the Italian author. Both authors, from two different perspectives, would have contributed to a reading that would reduce Gramsci to a theory of hegemony, and in turn, to a merely ideological reading of it.

As we noted earlier, Gramsci’s influence on Williams’s studies is explicitly identified in the chapter on hegemony in Marxism and Literature (1977). This chapter is the most frequently cited when talking about hegemony in anthropological studies (See Brow, 1988, Fox, 1989, Gill, 1993, Lagos, 1993, Linger, 1993, Woost, 1993). In it, he defines hegemony as “a vivid system of meanings and values ​​- fundamental and constitutive – that insofar as they are experienced as practices seem to confirm each other” (1977: 131). According to Crehan (2002), there is an overvaluation of the dimension of thoughts and beliefs in this explanation of hegemony. Although it defines it as a system of ideas that is confirmed reciprocally in practice, in the lived social process, the distribution of material resources and the use of force are invisible as constitutive elements of hegemony (which, on the contrary , in Gramsci are key).

While tracking other writings of Williams we can understand that adheres to a comprehensive vision of hegemony and culture, this section emphasizes these aspects. The only explicit appearance of Gramsci in his texts is reduced to the question of hegemony and to Williams’ interpretations of what Gramsci wanted to say about it, since there is no direct quotation from the “Cuadernos de la Cárcel” or other writings of Gramsci. Perhaps it responds to a deep ignorance of his work, or merely to the theoretical objective of a book as comprehensive as Marxism and Literature; What is certain is that it constitutes a problematic issue, taking into account the influence that Williams’s reading exerted on anthropology. Following this text, many anthropologists have taken a concept of hegemony centered on ideology, without problematizing that the conception of culture that sustains it in Gramsci and Williams is radically different from the dominant one in this discipline under the aforementioned parameters.

James Scott (2000), meanwhile, lashes out with a harsh critique of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, interpreting what the Italian intellectual poses as such is a theory of the construction of a full consensus of the dominant sectors (Crovolella , 2014). The problem, according to Scott (2000), is that the theories of hegemony and false consciousness remain on the level of public discourse, in which we can effectively find the ideological imposition of the dominant sectors and the acceptance of the dominated. But for him there is another plane of a hidden discursivity, which is developed in the autonomous spaces of the subaltern sectors and expressed in gestures, rumors, jokes, myths, through which the dominated dare to imagine another order and mock of “those from above”. The level of public discourse is that of the strategic appearances of both elites and subordinates.