Suchergebnisse

Contributo a Anniversary Forum Cirese 101: Rileggere le "Osservazioni sul folclore" di Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli, a cura di, Anuac, 11, 1, 2022.

"Culture" was always for Gramsci an important aspect of political struggle. In the Prison Notebooks he insists on the need for «a cultural front alongside the merely economic and merely political ones» (Gramsci 1995: 345). We should note, however, that the concept of culture we find in the notebooks is rather different from that of mainstream anthropology (see Crehan 2002). At the same time Gramsci's approach to culture and the relation of culture to history can be seen as informed by an ethnographic sensibility, which is always determined to seek out, and take seriously, the narratives others use to make sense of their world and navigate their way through it. To clarify the nature of the ethnographic sensibility we find in the notebooks and the letters from prison, the article compares this sensibility to that of Bronisław Malinowski as laid down in the famous "Introduction" to Argonauts of the Western Pacific (termed by George Stocking, anthropology's mythic charter). The article argues that Gramsci's ethnographically-informed approach can help anthropologists and others trace out the complicated passage between the material structures that shape the basic social and political landscapes within which people live, and the narratives by which they live. And that understanding this is a crucial foundation for any effective political movement that would bring about a more just and fair world.

Observations of illiterate Kaonde villagers in northeast Zambia show that they face subsistence problems. Although becoming literate enhances success, it is unfeasible because of lost productivity-time costs. Capitalism's challenge to the villagers' oral culture is felt as anxieties over whether to market occasional surplus for individual profit rather than to share the surplus with kin in order to obligate them in hard times, as advised in old bishimi (folktales). The politics & ideology of local school officials, a returned factory worker, & a community-selected health representative are examined for the likelihood that a unified sense of this culture will survive in the wider society. G. Schubert

The paper investigates some of the implications for a group of Zambian hoe cultivators of being locked into an agricultural system not geared to production for the market and at the same time having a growing independence on a range of industrially produced goods obtained only through some form of economic exchange with the wider Zambian economy. The paper focuses particulary on the women concerned. The research was carried out between 1979 and 1981 in a small Kaonde community. (DÜI-Hns)

The area of Mukunashi in Zambia is one where capitalist production relations have been but minimally introduced, but where patterns of exchange have increasingly taken a monetary form. Crehan is concerned to investigate the implications of such economic changes as have occurred for the position and role of women. In common with similar situations elsewhere, she finds that new capitalist farming units when introduced are invariably run by men who in turn appropriate any surplus accruing. Women continue to be primarily responsible for supplying family food requirements, and the burden of 'female' tasks as regards both time and energy prevents them moving into cash generating activities, save in the case of beer brewing. The latter is an exception largely because the operations it involves are capable of being accommodated into women's normal routine. But while women are able to earn some cash through their efforts, it is hardly sufficient to give them any economic independence.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Part I. Subalternity, Intellectuals, and Common Sense -- 1 Subalternity -- 2 Intellectuals -- 3 Common Sense -- 4 What Subalterns Know -- Part II. Case Studies -- 5 Adam Smith -- 6 The Common Sense of the Tea Party -- 7 Common Sense, Good Sense, and Occupy -- Conclusion. Reading Gramsci in the Twenty-First Century -- Bibliography -- Index

Kate Crehan applies Antonio Gramsci's concepts of subalternity, intellectuals, and common sense to offer new ways to understand the many forms that structural inequality can take and the relationships between the experience of inequality, exploitation, and oppression as well as the construction of political narratives

For six months in 1988 I lived and carried out research in two small rural communities in the North-Western Province of Zambia, one of the country's poorest and most remote provinces. This was a return to the same province, and the same linguistic area, where I had done the fieldwork for my Ph.D. dissertation ten years earlier (Crehan 1987). I had stayed then for two years in Kasempa District. In 1988 I decided to base myself in one of North-Western's smallest and most impoverished districts, Chizela (see fig. 1), in two communities I have called Kibala and Bukama.[1] This is a book about the lives of the men and women of Kibala and Bukama; and about the ways in which those lives were located within the larger economic and political order of postcolonial Zambia in the late 1980s.