Contribution of Raymond Williams to Cultural Studies

As much as they have done some reductionist readings of Gramsci, critical studies like those of Scott, and also those of some representatives of the school of subaltern studies (Ranajit Guha as maximum exponent) in similar lines, have contributed from ethnographic points of view some interesting contributions for enrich this thought. We emphasize two contributions in principle. In the first place, the indication that some categories of the political in Gramsci are tied to Western philosophy and therefore can not be transferred to other social and cultural contexts; and second, the criticism of gradualist forms of consciousness and the importance given to its explicit forms. Against this vision, they argue the need to observe various practices in the interstices of power as forms of resistance that would be central to the emergence of collective action5.

The influence of Gramsci in anthropology, mainly mediated by certain reductionist readings, takes away the possibility that a deeper vision of his thought could grant us to rehearse processes of interpretation of social reality that articulates different dimensions. The definitions of the author, although a-systematic as the form of his writing, move away from the dominant definitions, in terms of Crehan (2002), of culture in anthropology. Both in his youth writings and in the “Cuadernos de la Jail” circulate definitions that articulate the notion of culture with that of social class, the understanding of subaltern culture as unsystematic and incoherent, the recovery of folklore as conceptions of the world opposed to the official vision6. In all these readings Gramsci’s concern is not culture itself but power; seeks to investigate how class relations are lived. And through the term hegemony, tries to study how the relations of power and resistance become body and discourse. That is why it is wrong to propose an idealistic separation from the ideological plane of practice.

These interpretations of culture can enrich ethnographic studies. Gramsci invites us to put the magnifying glass on the invisible practices of the subaltern sectors. It does so not only with the heuristic intention of interpreting it in its cultural codes or with the ethical-political intention of exalting, vindicating or making visible its practices and resistances. The central objective by which it approaches the analysis of culture is to realize a more complete understanding of power relations as they are experienced by men and women in a certain time and context. These power relations are shaped by the objective fact that there are those who possess the means of production and the springs of state power, that is, those who define social life, and those who are dispossessed of that capacity. Gramsci’s concern is not only theoretical but political: he asks about the possibility that those people who share the situation of inequality can become a collective subject, a popular national will capable of transforming the entire social system.

Now, returning to the articulation with anthropology, what does this discipline have to contribute to a Marxist subjectivist or culturalist perspective? We consider that there are at least three levels in which you can make a central contribution to the study of reality. In the first place, in the articulation between culture and power, we are invited to draw the focus from the categories constructed by Western political philosophy, to understand that rationality and progress are not universal categories but that their interpretation varies according to cultures. Gramsci’s emphasis on the centrality of class relations at any time and place, and collective action linked to the organizational forms of the European labor world, leave little room for interpreting other inequalities that articulated with the class play a central role in other countries (for example the ethnic, gender, colonial issue) and other forms of collective action.

Secondly, anthropology contributes to a more comprehensive reading of the State, understanding the productive character of the ritual on which its construction is based. It is not possible to understand the dimensions of authority that emerge around this figure if we only understand it as the monopoly of force or the place where the dominant classes articulate their interests. There is a whole series of ritual practices, ceremonies, traditions on the basis of which this specific type of social relationship, power relationship, is built. Clifford Geertz (1980) and Marshall Sahlins (1977) have made strong contributions in this regard, developing the rituals around the State not as an illusion or a lie but as the very form in which this is historically constructed.