Crehan argues that anthropologists should read Gramsci because his concept of culture properly understood calls into question a number of basic assumptions that inform “the anthropological concept of culture,” one characterized by two tendencies:
[F]irstly, a tendency to treat [indigenous cultures] as bounded wholes that could be understood in isolation from the larger political, economic and social contexts, such as those of various colonial encounters, within which they were embedded and secondly, a tendency to celebrate and even romanticize them. (3, 4)
She argues that Gramsci’s usefulness for anthropologists ” thus derives from his insistence that ultimately the most important question is that of power.”(6) For Crehan, it is imperative to analyze power with the aid of the Marxian concept of class “and Gramsci’s writings on culture can help anthropologists. . .think freshly about class, currently a rather unfashionable way of theorizing inequality” (3).
It doesn’t take a reader outside of anthropology long to see the relevance of this book. The debates over culture and class have been hashed out (often fruitlessly) across disciplines –within Marxism and between Marxism and the various posts–in debates over class reductionism, base and superstructure, nationalism, the causal roles of “race, class and gender.”
Crehan’s book offers one of the better defenses of class analysis, but that it does so in the field of anthropology makes it of greater value to those, like me, outside the field. If class analysis is to be defended well, it needs to be defended not just in areas where it appears to have patent explanatory power-its ability to explain U.S. foreign policy for example-but in areas where it appears weak. And there is little doubt that one of the strongest challenges to Marxism has come from those who defend the autonomy of indigenous cultures. The reasons are complex of course, but a central reason is bound up with the close relation between the defense of indigenous cultures and the postmodern challenge. Crehan shows that Marxism, in order to take on the challenge of the anthropologist’s “culture,” should rethink its attachment to one of its central conceptual distinctions: base and superstructure.
While Crehan rejects economic reductionism, something common to both critics and defenders of Marxism, she employs Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to defend the primacy of class for explaining inequality. In doing so, she distinguishes Gramsci’s concept from its liberal and post-Marxist appropriations, which she calls “hegemony lite” (172). Crehan maps “the complex contours of culture, class and inequality” by sharpening not deconstructing the category of class. She pulls this off not, as is often the case, by insisting on the correctness of the base/superstructure distinction but by dissolving it. Most of this review will be devoted to an admiring elaboration of this mapping.
My criticisms of the book center on Crehan’s failure to interrogate Gramsci’s historicism. This is a serious omission because the affiliated epistemological problems threaten to undermine the defense of class to which Crehan is rightly committed.
In her excellent discussion of the anthropological concept of culture, Crehan shows how it came to be motivated by progressive politics, one based in respect for indigenous cultures. The respect accorded to the culture of “the other” flowed from “its” autonomy, or rather the anthropologist’s “western” conception of it, one deriving in part from the enlightenment notion of self determination (rights) and the romantic nationalist opposition to this same enlightenment, reinterpreted as a defense of tradition against modernity’s imperialist rationalism. Romantic nationalism claims the right of self determination based on community autonomy against the right of self-determination based on reason, a-historical and abstract principles of right.
Crehan describes how this notion of autonomy became fused with the idea of culture as a bounded whole. It is as if the moral imperative to respect others, understood here as “other” cultures or “difference,” requires a causal thesis–autonomy as respect morphing into the autonomy of cultural explanation. It is easy enough to see how the modernity/tradition opposition transforms into the class/culture (base/superstructure) opposition, with the second term resisting the imperialism of the first. What has made this transition virtually automatic for some, I would note, is the view that Marxism, however critical its potential, is itself but another incarnation of Eurocentrism. That indigenism is itself indebted to romantic nationalism is just one of the many ironies here.
Crehan asserts that the anthropological concept is mistaken, and mystifies the internal and external heterogeneity of these indigenous communities, heterogeneities marked by conflict and contradiction. But she is not interested in countering the concept of culture with the post-Marxist emphasis on hybridity and border crossing. In fact, she shows convincingly how “hybridity” itself does not displace the problematic bounded whole concept so much as retain its traces, the concept functioning perhaps to cover over this very retention. Even if “hybridity” is employed precisely to counter organicist concepts of culture as something that matures and develops as an endogenous process, the concept is, she notes, “rooted in biology not culture.” Hybridity retains, even in mixture, the idea of separate elements “that somehow do not belong together,” with the implication that these elements have a prior self-belonging (63-4).
This “lingering assumption of distinct and rooted cultures” facilitates the exoticized othering it was designed to counter. As she points out, hybridity is often for “them,” not “us.” The ghosts of anthropology haunt even the most insightful of anthropologists. Crehan notes two interesting instances–I will discuss one–in the work of Liisa Malkki, who chooses to study the problem of the refugee in part as a way of countering the orientation toward durable forms that might seem to buttress the anthropological concept. She visits a Hutu political leader in his camp compound, where she observes that he has a mudhouse devoted to books, among which she notes a copy of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Malkki comments self critically that she should have had a longer conversation about such books “instead of seeing him so closely in relation to his geographical and `cultural’ context” (65). Crehan responds:
It is worth thinking about why [such "western" artifacts] seem so much more out of place than would a copy of, say, the Mahabharata found in the home of a European or American political figure. Sometimes it seems as if we who can claim a home in `western culture’ have culture in the singular, while the rest of the world are boxed up into their own unique cultures. It is interesting how those who fill their apartments in New York. . .with third world artifacts are never referred to as hybrid beings adrift between cultures.
Gramsci’s attitude toward “indigenous” cultures differs significantly from the anthropologists she discusses: “[n]one of the assumptions I [Crehan] have identified are to be found in Gramsci” (66). Gramsci did not want merely to study the world, but change it. Interestingly, the concept of “common sense” bears some similarity to the anthropological concept in that it describes the self-understanding of a group, like the subaltern. But this notion is nothing to celebrate and interestingly in conflict with the anthropological concept.
Gramsci saw such common sense as defined by its “fragmentation,” its “diffuse,” “incoherent, “and, therefore, “inconsequential” character–and often by its superstition–as in the case of the subaltern’s common sense Catholicism.
He was a careful student of the subaltern and was able to distinguish elements from peasant “culture” that
might play a role in the construction of a “renewed common sense,” a working class-peasant alliance that could offer the “clear, rigorous insight into how local environments of oppression are located within largely economic and political realities” (104).
He refused to romanticize the peasant because his goal was to help draw the peasantry to self-consciousness, to class consciousness, the substance of a renewed common sense marked by critical thought. His careful study of the peasant rebel and “religious visionary,” Davide Lazzaretti, was one such effort to identify subversive elements of subaltern common sense.
Ironically, in this particular case, the standard view of Lazzaretti as primitive–as exemplum of “age-old cultural traditions handed down from a distant past”–was an invention of intellectuals operating on behalf of the dominant class: the figure of Lazzaretti was put to the service of, in Gramsci’s words, “‘the patriotic’ (for love of country!) tendency that spawned the effort to conceal the causes of the general discontent that existed in Italy by providing narrow, individual, pathological, etc., explanations of single explosive incidents” ( 120). A further irony is that, as Gramsci notes, Lazzaretti’s visions derived not from “some fourteenth century legends but from a contemporary historical novel” ( p.120).
Gramsci, Crehan reminds us, was a Leninist–not a post-Marxist avant la lettre– who wanted to forge a revolutionary nationalpopular unity that could ultimately overthrow the dominant classes, and such a contestation required organization, a coherent, revolutionary culture, one that could make explicit “the embryonic, incoherent critiques” of the Italian state found in Lazzaretti. Unity must be forged on the right basis and for Gramsci and Crehan, this basis is the conventional Marxist one of class interest. If post-Marxists like Laclau and Mouffe deconstruct class interest by deconstructing base and superstructure, Crehan critiques base and superstructure, as noted above, in defense of class interest.
One consequence of [Gramsci's] bracketing of the base/superstructure hierarchy, Crehan notes, “is that the question of whether culture in general is part of the superstructure or part of the base becomes, like so many general questions in Gramsci, a question it is simply not meaningful to ask” ( p. 185). Crehan suggests that the maintenance of the distinction is inseparable from a particularly pernicious form of culturalism–the idea of culture (especially those viewed as backward, thus “third world cultures”) as a “survival.”
The base/superstructure distinction, whether in its mechanical expressions or seemingly subtler Althusserian variants (mode of production/social formation), almost inevitably secretes “the debris theory,” in which superstructural leftovers understood as bounded cultures are out of phase with the base, both conceived, as Meiksins Wood has put it, “as self-enclosed, spatially separate and discontinuous boxes” (recall above Crehan’s reference to boxed up cultures). Even in a Marxist anthropologist as brilliant as Eric Wolf, Crehan shows how the base/superstructure metaphor facilitates the bounded culture hypothesis with the result that Wolf’s own battles with the bounded culture concept lead him, “not to theorize class in a way that fully incorporates culture,” but to shift between the two concepts, foregrounding class in one instance, culture in another, “an Escher type paradox where it seems impossible to keep class and culture equally in view” (188).
Crehan/Gramsci insist on specific analyses of the relation between culture and class, but avoid the pitfalls of an empiricism that would lose sight of the centrality of class structure and class struggle to the constitution of power. While she opposes “hegemony lite,” with its reduction of hegemony to an apolitical concept of ideology, it is precisely Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that enables such specific analyses.
The upshot of the defense of hegemony is made apparent in Crehan’s discussion of two works of anthropology. In this first work, Gutmann’s The Meaning of Macho, she shows how a reconstructed concept of class and culture allows us to dispense with free floating panhistorical cultural concepts like “macho” [one version of "survivals"] in order to reconstruct a more accurate picture of class formation. She shows how the concept reduces the heterogeneity of gender practices in the working class as well as the heterogeneity and contradictory character of class identity. And she shows once again how culturalist concepts fall into some version of the tradition /modernity binary which renders it blind to its own very modern–not “archaic”–constitution. Gutmann’s correctives allow us to see through any culturalist hypothesis that Mexican macho represents an autonomous culture, “remnants of the male version of an earlier cultural horizon,” a “subculture[ that] represents a lag in the acculturative process” or an “atavistic throwback”( 197-9). The Mexican male is a “creation of Mexico’s relatively recent history not a pre-existing cultural reality that explains that history.” (199)
Crehan nevertheless criticizes this work for its– now canonical– emphasis o n race class and gender as co-primary intersecting elements of identity:
It is not that class. . . is, as Gutmann would argue, a distinct dimension of inequality or one factor among others such as nationalism, ethnicity and generation but rather that class should be seen as a way of analyzing systematic patterns of inequality, reproduced over time which are in various ways gendered, ethnicized and so on. (195)
Class (class structure, class rule, class struggle), properly contextualized, not reified cultures, is what does the relevant explanatory work.
The final figure she discusses for the purpose of demonstrating Gramsci’s usefulness is Roger Keesling. Although he flirts with a definition of hegemony lite, Crehan shows that in his case studies he employs Gramsci’s richer understanding of the term. Hegemony means in practice the power “t o determine the structuring rules within which struggles are to be fought out” (204). Specifically, Keesling focuses on the process “by which certain categorical structures have been imposed and to how the Solomon Islanders, who within the colonial order were certainly subalterns, could not but inhabit that colonial world and had no choice but to frame their struggles with it largely in its terms” (201).
As in the discussion of Gutmann, Crehan shows how an apparently indigenous category like the islanders” Kastom” (custom) was a product of the colonial order, not the mark of a rebel indigenous (bounded) culture returning to its roots.
This is not to suggest that the islanders lacked agency. As Crehan puts it, the Solomoners lived in a world “remade by forces generated by larger economic and political systems, which meant that their resistance against such systems was doomed to be just that, resistance.” They would not escape subalternity, and thus would “remain incapable of grasping the larger landscapes of oppression in which they are located” (205)
Though Crehan does not mention the motif of rearticulation in postcolonial discourse, it is worth noting that her emphasis on hegemony as categorical structures is in sharp contrast to those postcolonialists who would emphasize the power of “resignification” to subvert these structures.
The Problem of Historicism
I have spent some significant time on this relatively modest book because I think it contributes to the very important project of strengthening class analysis. There are, however, some serious problems with Gramsci’s thought, most deriving from his historicist conception of class consciousness-as I indicated above. While generally written in a critical spirit, Crehan’s book offers no criticisms of Gramsci and thus tacitly approves of aspects of his thought which threaten to undermine her project.
The problems with his concept of class consciousness have not gone unnoticed, detailed criticisms in the Marxist camp coming from Louis Althusser and Terry Eagleton among others. In what follows, I will present Crehan’s own careful elaboration of Gramsci’s understanding of class consciousness and then discuss key problems raised by critics.
According to Crehan, working class hegemony means, for Gramsci, that the working class must develop its “own” conception of the world. Proletarian self consciousness, thru the mediation of organic intellectuals, involves making fully coherent the world view already embedded in working class practical activity.
The path from fragmented subjectivity to organized class consciousness is the path to the collective subject and it is this achievement of collective subjectivity which defines progress for Gramsci. While Gramsci refers continually to the concept of progress, to proletarian self activity as critical consciousness, the substance of such activity, apart from a formal notion of making coherent what is fragmented, is not specified-except that this consciousness, as Eagleton has put it, must be “in tune with the significant tendencies of an era.”
As critics have noted, such a view, while claiming to unite theory and practice seriously impoverishes the former. It is, for one, circular, resting on a tacitly relativist view of truth and as a result, theory’s practical role is impoverished as well. Let me explain.
Class consciousness means knowing “your” class interests but knowing your class interests is equivalent to class consciousness, making coherent what is fragmented, making it your own. Thus, what is true becomes what is really yours, with no criterion for (collective) self-recognition beyond being in tune with the essence of an era-which offers no criterion at all since this essence cannot be defined apart from class consciousness, just is class consciousness. Correlatively, no distinction is made between collective subjectivity and revolutionary subjectivity as this would require attention to the theoretical content. Put another way, there may be numerous ways of rendering the fragments coherent. How does a historicist judge between them?
Class consciousness thus amounts to being thought by the class–as if the constative element of class consciousness reduces to the performative element, the abstract act of thinking itself. Class consciousness becomes the practice of that consciousness, not the practice of a theory that can be defended apart from the fact that it is held.
Both Eagleton and Althusser have noted that this historicist view of theory reduces theory/practice unity entirely to its organizational component. The unity of theory and practice just is the instrumentalist activity of mobilizing fragments, a view likely to engender a politics of manipulation, not a politics of truth.
Insofar as class consciousness on this view is equivalent to tuning in to the essential tendencies of the present, class consciousness is deprived of an intelligible future. Althusser makes this criticism of all Hegelian-Marxist historicism: that it blocks knowledge of the future, thus ruling out a science of politics: as he strikingly puts it, “tomorrow is forbidden it.”
In chapter seven, “Intellectuals and the Production of Culture,” Crehan presents Gramsci’s views on what a working class culture would look like. While he emphasizes that culture is tightly bound to (though not a superstructural reflection of) basic economic relations and is actively created, not handed down, Gramsci says nothing can or should be said on the question of what a working class culture would look like save that its nature is “unpredictable,” unforeseeable, that it represents a “radical break” with the present, that it is “absolutely mysterious. ” (128). This view becomes understandable in the light of his historicism. Most Marxists rightly understand the future as emerging dialectically out of the potentialities of the present. While it’s admirable of Gramsci to wish to avoid dictating the future, both because it cannot be done and because it would be dogmatic, suggesting a radical break like this between present and future is incompatible with a dialectical understanding of the relation between theory and practice. This refusal to discuss or theorize any future culture parallels the refusal to specify the content of class consciousness
Viewed from another angle, the normative role theory would play to guide or shape the relation of present to future disappears. What I am suggesting then is that the failure to sustain a plausible concept of truth undermines a cogent theorizing of the notion of objective interest in an emancipated future, which in turn should be the basis for class consciousness. I would further assert that thought through, the notion of objective interests requires the dialectical unity of fact and value, truth and justice. As Eagleton has noted, the idea that the present carries emancipatory potential, that this potential is being blocked by the current social order, rests on truths about human needs and human potential and on a judgment “always made from the standpoint of some possible and desirable future” (Eagleton, 1990, p. 106).
Crehan’s failure to address Althusser’s criticisms are significant for a couple reasons. Crehan’s rehabilitation of class analysis is meant to get beyond the base/superstructure aporias that produce different versions of “debris theory,” “survivals,” etc. and yet it is precisely Althusser’s “debris theory” which responds to the weaknesses of Gramsci’s historicism. Althusser’s response to what he sees as the historicist/pragmatist collapse of distinctions, from base and superstructure to theory (science)/ ideology is his distorted understanding of uneven development, in which unevenness consists of the discontinuous temporalities of an out of sync base and superstructure-in other words, superstructural lags, survivals.
And if historicists collapse theory into revolutionary ideology, he splits theory (science) from revolutionary ideology, fact from value, and views the latter not the former as mobilizing revolutionary activity, with the consequence that Althusser actually repeats Gramsci’s mistake of instrumentalizing practice since theory is now too independent to guide practice. An additional irony is that Althusser defines theory in much the same way that Gramsci defines revolutionary ideology-in terms of their coherence. So that strictly speaking there is no difference between the two. If Althusser’s criticisms of Gramsci are warranted up to a point, his own position compounds Gramsci’s errors and, as is well known, has given rise in many ways to postmarxism, the position Crehan opposes via her critique of the culture concept and “hybridity” in anthropology.
In short, Crehan’s failure to address criticisms of Gramsci, especially ones central to the Marxist tradition coming from Althusser, weakens both her defense of Gramsci and, more importantly, of class analysis. Fortunately, the concept of class interest that undergirds class analysis is fully defensible. Eagleton himself is able to criticize both Gramsci’ s historicism and Althusser’s theoreticist response while avoiding the traps of post-Marxism. His ability to do so, defend the concept of class interest and the Marxian dialectic of theory and practice implied by it, rests on something like an acceptance of moral realism.
Obviously, this is not the place for a defense of moral realism but let me make a few assertions by way of conclusion: Moral realism reconciles fact and value, the normative and the empirical, and cogently reconciles interest relativity (here, class interest) and objectivity, including moral objectivity. Because it is rooted in assertions about human well being (as opposed to god’s eye views and noumena) it can accommodate moral facts upon which Marxist routinely rely: that exploitation and oppression are facts, facts that rely on va
lue judgments about human needs for which evidence can be offered.
To return to the subject of Gramsci and the anthropologists, moral realism captures important grains of truth in both positions. While at odds with Gramsci’s historicism, it makes good sense of the anti-relativist impulse that seems to be at work in Gramsci’s own refusal to romanticize the subaltern and in his “utter rejection” of fixed and bounded cultural entities that exist across time. Clearly, one of the reasons for his rejection of what we would now call the idea of different worlds or incommensurable cultures is that this way of thinking, “seemingly innocuous,” is “worthy of the black hundreds, or the American Ku Klux Klan or the German swastikas,” that such a view involves “a fundamental error,” one which promotes the idea of “different races,” a racist and, needless to say, erroneous assumption required for “pogroms” to take place, an assumption that “ruling classes and groups know how to exploit” (Crehan, 207-10).
And while the notion of different worlds may have been attractive to anthropologists battling ethnocentrism, Satya Mohanty, a moral realist, suggests real respect for “the other” requires the rejection of relativist premises:
We can learn from others only if we take them seriously enough to imagine situations in which they might in fact be wrong about some things, in ways that we can specify and understand. The version of multiculturalism that demands a suspension of judgment on purely a priori grounds [Mohanty is also here critiquing the bounded whole view in anthropology] offers us at best a weak pluralist image of noninterference and peaceful coexistence which is based on the abstract notion that everything about the other culture is (equally) valuable. Given the lack of understanding or knowledge of the other, however, the ascription of value (and of equality among cultures) is either meaningless or patronizing.
1. Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002)
2. To take only one obvious example, Lyotard’s postmodern condition’s attempted subversion of grand narratives is a subversion of the Marxist totality, especially the category of class, but this attempt is inseparable from the defense of the local, the mini narrative, whose exemplum–the Cashinhua–is an indigenist narrative.
3. Though Crehan does not discuss current uses of the trope of “archaism,” we see it all around us in establishment media coverage–genocide unleashing tribal or ethnic energies: Rwanda, Bosnia. It is invoked to explain Israel/Palestine conflict on a regular basis. It of course underlies any clash of civilization paradigm.
4. See Ellen Meiksins Wood’s essay “Rethinking Base and Superstructure,” chapter two of Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
5. I would make one small criticism of her generally valuable discussion of base and superstructure. Though she notes Gramsci’s own difficulties with the dichotomy, she seems reluctant to go much beyond Gramsci’s discomfort with the distinction and seems to countenance his view that the base is ultimately determining. This is however a problematic formulation as Marxist and post Marxist critics have noted, the latter delighting in the view that the last instance never comes. But, to paraphrase E.P. Thompson, the determinative effects of the mode of production–the structural domination of capital over labor–are operative all the time. As is well known, Thompson did not find it useful to define this structural domination in terms of base and superstructure, with its problematic privileging of economy over culture.
6. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1990), p. 121.
7. The motive for this collapsing of theory into revolutionary ideology is critical, to combat the idealism behind a view of theory as wholly independent, with no relation to the social totality so that theory appears to float freely above questions of power and class interest. This fear also underlies the historicist ban on moral theorizing, on the future oriented, utopian sort of thinking involved in imagining a better world. Marx himself seemed to resist such theorizing as a form of true socialism, a false universality that would only serve to mystify class interest.
8. Louis Althusser & Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (New York: Verso, 1979), p. 95.
9. I am here referring to Crehan’s citation of and commentary on Gramsci’s letters to his sister-in-law, Tatiana, in which Gramsci critiques Tatiana’s acceptance of the premise of a recent German film–that a love affair between a Jewish woman and an Austrian officer is doomed because they come from different worlds.
10. Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), p. 145.The obvious relativist rebuttal to Mohanty is that suspension of judgment allows anthropologists to describe the other culture’s self understanding, itself a prerequisite for opposing ethnocentrism. Mohanty, following philosophers like Donald Davidson, shows that such suspension of judgment is impossible, that an evaluation attributing rational agency to the other is always already at work and is a condition of “the other’s” intelligibility. The main point here is that, impossible as it may in fact be, this suspension of judgment means that ordinary human processes of negotiation, agreement and disagreement that allow people with different histories to engage one another at deeper levels are cut short. Realism facilitates this deeper process of mutual recognition and understanding. Finally, it ought to be noted how easily cultural relativism can be manipulated by imperialism. For example (one among many), the U.S. State Department’s support of Mussolini was justified with the view that Italians “hunger for strong leadership and enjoy being dramatically governed.” See Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), p. 65.