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Gramsci's concept of commonsense: a useful concept foranthropologists?Kate Crehan aa College of Staten Island and the Graduate CenterPublished online: 22 Feb 2011.

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Gramscis concept of common sense: a useful concept

for anthropologists?

Kate Crehan

College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center

Abstract

The article begins with a brief look at the anthropological notion of culture and someof its ghosts, contrasting this with Gramscis very different approach. It goes on tolook in detail at Gramscis concept of common sense, arguing that common sense astheorized by Gramsci provides anthropologists (whose discipline is so concernedwith the quotidian) and others, with a useful theoretical tool with which to mapeveryday life. Gramscis understanding of common sense encompasses its givenness how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as an external reality but also stresses its contradictions, fluidity and potential for change. To help clarifythe specific character of the Gramscian notion of common sense, the article comparesit with another concept that has been widely embraced within anthropology andelsewhere: Pierre Bourdieus notion of habitus a notion, I argue, that remains inmany ways tethered to its anthropological origins.

Keywords

Gramsci, common sense, culture, anthropology, Bourdieu, habitus.

Common sense . . . the traditional popular conception of the world what

is unimaginatively called instinct, although it too is in fact a primitive and

elementary historical acquisition. (Gramsci 1971: 199)

How might Gramscis concept of common sense be useful for anthropologists?

In English common sense is a term whose meaning tends to be taken as self-

evident. In one recent anthropological study, for instance, Ann Stolers (2009)

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense,

common sense (as the subtitle indicates) is a central category; and yet nowhere

in the book does Stoler feel it necessary either to define common sense or to

discuss its character as a theoretical category. The meaning of common sense in

Gramscis writings, however, is far from self-evident. First, there is the problem

that the English term common sense is not a simple equivalent to the Italian

term senso comune. While common sense is a generally positive term, signifying,

according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Good sound practical sense;

combined tact and readiness in dealing with the every-day affairs of life; general

Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16(2) 2011: 273287

Journal of Modern Italian StudiesISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online 2011 Taylor & Francishttp://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2011.542987

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sagacity, the Italian term has none of these positive connotations. Senso comune

refers simply to the beliefs and opinions supposedly shared by the mass of the

population. And indeed one of the main arguments I want to make in this essay

is that one of the great virtues of Gramscis concept of common sense for

anthropologists is precisely its broad, all-inclusive character. To understand why

this inclusiveness might be so helpful to anthropologists, however, it is necessary

to go back to the historical origins of one of anthropologys most fundamental

concepts, the concept of culture, and the lingering effects of these origins.1

The anthropological view of humankind as comprised of a diversity of

cultures, each with its own way of life, emerges out of Romanticism and

nineteenth century narratives of Nationalism. At the heart of these narratives is

the claim that a nation represents a specific people born of a specific territory

to which, by virtue of this special kind of belonging, they have an inalienable

right. Actual nation-states may be quite recent creations in historical terms and

their boundaries in reality far from fixed, but nations themselves those

imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson termed them, underpinning the

concept of the nation state seem almost to inhabit a realm outside time. They

both loom out of an immemorial past and glide into a limitless future

(Anderson 1991: 1112). This assumption of a fixity and permanence rooted in

tradition is one of the major roots of the anthropological concept of culture.

In line with this way of imagining cultures, there has been a tendency for

history to be seen as something that happens to cultures, rather than cultures

being seen as themselves the ever-shifting products of history.

One strand in the broader discourse of nineteenth-century Nationalism, as

Andersons use of the term community indicates, is a fundamental opposition

between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. And this has left its legacy in anthropology.

The opposition was first formalized by Frederick Tonnies in his enormously

influential Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Here Tonnies defines gemeinschaft

as an authentic, usually relatively small, community, which is woven together by

ties of kinship, and often a common religious affiliation, into a tight-knit web of

moral cohesion. Gesellschaften, by contrast, are the impersonal, conflict-ridden

and essentially artificial associations characteristic of the modern industrial

world. The allure of community an entity more often evoked than defined

remains powerful. Tellingly, unlike other terms of social organization, such as

state or society, community is a term that seems, as Raymond Williams noted,

never to be used unfavourably (Williams 1983).

Let me be clear here: in no way am I suggesting that contemporary

anthropologists think of the cultural worlds they study in the Romantic terms

of nineteenth-century Nationalism. My point is, simply, that the notion of

culture remains marked by its emergence within this context and that the

anthropological concept of culture continues to be haunted by the ghost of the

traditional, and the pervasive warm glow of gemeinschaft.

Another significant characteristic of the anthropological notion of culture is

the assumption that cultures are essentially systems. In an enormously

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influential formulation, Edward Tylor (1871) defined culture as that complex

whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any

other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

Anthropologists over the years have had very different understandings of the

precise nature of that complex whole, but running through these different

understandings tends to be the assumption that, whatever else they may be,

cultures are in some sense systems. Anthropologists today may no longer think

of cultures as bounded entities, but certain a priori, if often implicit,

assumptions that cultures, however conflictual and contradictory they may be,

are nonetheless systems of one kind or another tend to linger.

Gramscis concept of culture

Gramsci offers us a very different notion of culture. In part this is because his

concern with culture stems from quite other roots than those of anthropology.

The anthropological projects origins can be traced to Europes expanding

confrontation with new and unfamiliar worlds and a determination to

dominate these new worlds - but also reflected is the would-be dominators

awareness that to be successful they needed to understand those with whom

they were now having to deal. The emergence of anthropology as a distinct

discipline was rooted in a concern to understand these unfamiliar others in

their own terms. Anthropologists may often have failed to live up to this ideal;

but whatever their faults, colonial anthropologists tended to be more

concerned with the understanding and preservation of the cultures they

studied rather than their transformation one reason why actual colonial

administrators often found the work of anthropologists of little practical use.

Gramscis project, however, was not that of anthropology. He was a

political activist committed to the revolutionary transformation of his society, a

transformation that for him necessarily involved radical cultural change. This is

because the realities of power bring into being cultures of subordination; the

subordinated come to see the hierarchies of the world they inhabit as inevitable

and inescapable, the will of God or the law of nature. They may not like their

subordination, but they cannot see how things could possibly be other than as

they are. Any revolutionary transformation both brings about and depends on

the transformation of the existing culture of subordination. There is no simple

recipe, however, for cultural transformation; it is a complex historical process in

which there needs to be an active dialogue between intellectuals and non-

intellectuals. Those who live the harsh realities of subordination, however

capable they may be of everyday resistance, cannot, in Gramscis view,

themselves come up with the coherent, effective counter-narratives necessary if

the existing hegemony is to be overcome. But it is just as true that intellectuals

cannot themselves devise these narratives unaided. It is their interaction with

the subordinated and what Gramsci termed their feeling-passion in other

words the raw experience of oppression that educates the intellectuals. And it

Gramscis concept of common sense

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is only when there is a genuine dialogue between intellectuals and non-

intellectuals that an effective political force, a historical bloc, capable of

transforming society can come into being:

If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the

leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic

cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence

knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then

is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an

exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders

[dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social

force with the creation of the historical bloc. (Gramsci 1971: 418)

If they were to have any hope of being effective, in Gramscis view, Italian

revolutionaries needed to understand the complicated relationship between

intellectuals and the mass of the population over the course of the history of their

country, and devise strategies for change that make sense in the cultural worlds

occupied by the mass of the population. This conviction lies behind Gramscis

interest in culture and its prominence as a topic in the prison notebooks.

The prison notebooks themselves were Gramscis response to his

incarceration. Despite having been condemned in 1928 by Mussolinis fascist

regime to a twenty-year prison sentence, Gramsci was determined, as far as

humanly possible, to use his time to study and write. And, not surprisingly, a

question that runs through the prison notebooks is: What had led to the defeat

of the left in Italy? And how might that defeat be reversed? Before his arrest,

Gramsci had a long career as a political journalist, but while he saw such writing

as important, he also saw it, as he put it in a letter from prison to his sister-in-

law Tatiana Schucht, as essentially ephemeral: In ten years of journalism I

wrote enough lines to fill fifteen or twenty volumes of 400 pages each, but they

were written for the day, and in my opinion, were supposed to die with the

day (Gramsci 1994: 66). Forcibly removed from the immediacy of the day-to-

day political struggle, Gramsci was determined to devote himself to a more

rigorous study of the roots of fascisms triumph in Italy and the failures of the

Left that had led to this triumph. Understanding this required, in Gramscis

view, an exploration of culture. When and how has culture changed? When

and how has it persisted? The concept of culture here is best understood as a

shared way of being and living, which has come into existence as a result of the

interaction of myriad historical forces, and that remains subject to history.

Cultures for Gramsci, while they may seem to persist for long periods of time,

are always also in flux, coming into being, undergoing transformation, passing

away. Gramsci never assumes that cultures constitute systematic wholes. The

degree to which a given culture can be seen as some kind of system is an

empirical question which, like the question of its persistence or transformation,

can only be answered by careful empirical study.

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Gramscis thinking was very much grounded in Marx and for him, as for

Marx, the ultimate shaping forces in human history were a societys basic

economic structures structures defined by how resources are distributed in

that society. The systematic and persistent inequalities of such structures give

rise to distinct classes. But while Gramsci saw culture as fundamentally shaped

by economic forces, he was no crude economic determinist, stressing, for

instance (Gramsci 1971: 162), Engelss caution that,

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determin-

ing factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither

Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence if somebody twists this

into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he

transforms the proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. (Marx

and Engels 1975: 394, original emphasis)

One way of characterizing Gramscis approach to culture is that culture is how

the realities of class are lived.2 We all of us come to consciousness as members of

specific cultural worlds at specific historical moments and we tend to experience

the particular realities of our cultural world as fixed and unalterable, no more

than simple reflections of the way the world is. Such realities as disparities of

wealth and power, for instance, may be thought of as the manifestation of the

laws of economics or of divine will, and they may be celebrated or railed against,

but to those whose everyday reality they are, they appear unchangeable. Only a

fool or a madman would even try. The emblematic figure here is Don Quixote

charging windmills. To capture the solidity and apparent naturalness of

cultures in the eyes of those who inhabit them, Gramsci uses the notion of

common sense, and it is this aspect of Gramscis approach to culture on which I

focus here.

I want to begin, however, not with Gramsci, but with another theorist,

whose way of naming the taken-for-granted in everyday life has been widely

embraced within anthropology. The theorist is Pierre Bourdieu and the

concept that of habitus. Habitus has seemed to many anthropologists to offer a

powerful theoretical tool for those wrestling with the problem of theorizing

everyday life. Here I want to use the notion of habitus to throw into relief the

character of Gramscis very different concept of common sense.

Habitus and doxa

The concept of habitus was introduced into sociology by Marcel Mauss in his

essay Techniques of the body, but it is Bourdieus formulation (very different

from that of Mauss) with which most anthropologists are familiar. Although

Bourdieu would come to define himself as a sociologist, he began his intellectual

career as an anthropologist, and it was empirical anthropological research that

gave birth to many of his theoretical concepts, including his elaboration of

Gramscis concept of common sense

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habitus. In A reply to some objections (first presented in the mid-1980s) he

draws attention to the ethnographic works which are at the origin of most of

my concepts and takes his critics to task for ignoring, the anthropological

foundation of a theory of action, or of practice . . . condensed in the notion of

habitus (Bourdieu 1990a: 107, emphasis added). As he explains, he developed

the concept of habitus in response to specific questions that arose for him in the

course of his fieldwork among the Kabyles in Algeria. Notions that I developed

gradually, such as the notion of habitus, came from the desire to recall that beside

the express, explicit norm, or the rational calculation, there are other principles

that generate practices (Bourdieu 1990a: 76). His explication of habitus in

Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) can be seen as rooted in the very

anthropological project of attempting to understand the structuring mechanisms

shaping a way of life (in this case that of the Kabyles), which those who live it,

simply live, without apparently having any need to be consciously aware of these

mechanisms. Indeed, as Bourdieu shows and this is as true of other societies as

it is of the Kabyles sometimes it is important that members of a culture are not

consciously aware of the rules they are following. Gift giving is one example he

uses. All societies have their shared understandings of what constitutes

acceptable and appropriate norms of reciprocity; too close an examination of

whether particular individuals are observing those norms, or whether a given

transaction adheres to them, risks bringing the whole edifice of assumed

disinterested generosity crashing down. With the concept of habitus Bourdieu

seeks to provide a way of thinking about the all-important but submerged

mechanisms that orchestrate how the members of a given group go about their

daily lives. He defines it in Outline of a Theory of Practice as follows:

The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the

material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce

habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures

predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the

generation and structuring of practices and representation which can be

objectively regulated and regular without in any way being the product of

obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a

conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to

obtain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the

product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu, 1977: 72,

original emphasis)

Note here that one example of what produces habitus is: the material

conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition, and that habitus is

defined as comprising systems of dispositions. I shall come back to both these

points. The term disposition itself, as Bourdieu explains in a footnote to this

passage, seems particularly suited to express what is covered by the concept of

habitus (defined as a system of dispositions). First, because it conveys the idea

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of the result of an organizing action, with a meaning close to that of words such as

structure . . . . Second, it also designates a way of being, a habitual state

(especially of the body) and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity, or

inclination (Bourdieu 1977: 214, original emphasis). For Bourdieu, therefore,

the disposition captures the crucial but unarticulated knowledge that in the

course of their socialization embeds itself not only in patterns of thought, but in

the very bodies of individuals. Such dispositions play a powerful role in

directing their actions, even if they would find it hard to put such knowledge

into words. This acknowledgement of the importance of embodied knowledge

often unmediated by language and simply lived, is one of the strengths of

habitus as a theoretical concept.

In addition to a system of dispositions (a habitus), any established order is

characterized by what Bourdieu terms doxa: an agreed account of how the

world works. The more this account is unspoken and taken for granted, the

more secure that regime of power. Doxa is both unspoken and essential; in his

much-quoted phrase, what is essential goes without saying because it comes without

saying . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 167, original emphasis), Bourdieu also makes a

clear distinction between doxa and opinion:

In class societies, in which the definition of the social world is at stake in

overt or latent class struggle, the drawing of the line between the field of

opinion, of that which is explicitly questioned, and the field of doxa, of that

which is beyond question and which each agent tacitly accords by the mere

fact of acting in accord with social convention, is itself a fundamental

objective at stake in that form of class struggle for the imposition of the

dominant systems of classification. (Bourdieu 1977: 169, original emphasis)

I want to draw attention to the implicit assumption in this passage that there

are societies without classes in which doxa rules unchallenged. Indeed, lurking

here, it seems to me, is something like Levi-Strausss problematic distinction

between hot and cold societies (see, for instance, Levi-Strauss 1969: 33). In

addition both the dispositions of habitus and doxa are concerned with ways of

being, habitual states embedded deep within the subjectivity of individuals,

and as a result they necessarily stress the fixity of certain ways of being.

It is not coincidental, I would argue, that the anthropological data that led

Bourdieu to develop the concept of habitus were collected during his

fieldwork among the Kabyles. This fieldwork was carried out in the 1950s in

extraordinarily difficult circumstances at a time when the Algerians were

engaged in an often brutal liberation struggle against the French colonial state.3

Nonetheless the Kabyles we encounter in Outline of a Theory of Practice which

builds its theoretical schemas on the basis of Bourdieus Kabyle data still

follow a traditional pastoralist life. Bourdieus well-known essay on the Kabyle

house (reprinted in Bourdieu 1990b: 27183) provides a similar picture of an

unchanging peasant way of life, in which each dwelling is constructed

Gramscis concept of common sense

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according to the same strict rules that determine the arrangement of every inch

of living space, down to the storage of each item of household equipment.

Within the world of the Kabyles, according to this account, any deviation,

however minor, is unthinkable. It is perhaps not surprising that a man so

fiercely opposed to French colonialism and so deeply sympathetic to the

Algerians fighting for their independence should stress the autonomy of Kabyle

culture and its profound difference from the culture of the French colonizers.

Something that is not apparent from Bourdieus account of the Kabyles is that

the Kabylia was in fact a hotbed of Algerian nationalist struggle.4

It is important to emphasize that, while habitus may focus on fixity,

Bourdieu does not see it as rigid and unchanging; in certain respects it is highly

flexible. As a system of dispositions guiding behaviour, this system of lasting,

transposable dispositions is continually having to adapt to specific and, in a

sense, unique circumstances:

[I]ntegrating past experiences, [this system] functions at every moment as a

matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the

achievement of infinitively diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers

of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems, and thanks

to the unceasing corrections of the results obtained, dialectically produced

by those results . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 83, original emphasis)

Nonetheless this flexibility has its limits. We can see habitus as something like a

particular language which, while it allows its speakers to come up with an

infinite number of different utterances, maintains an essentially unchanging

grammatical structure. This raises the question of more fundamental change.

How is it possible for this system of dispositions, woven into the very being of

individuals, to change in fundamental ways? And, since human history is a story

of transformations, in certain circumstances this must happen. Significantly, for

Bourdieu, it is not within habitus itself that the seeds of change lie, but in the

dialectical relationship between a specific habitus and objective events that

demand a response beyond that of the given habitus:

collective action (e.g. revolutionary action) is constituted in the dialectical

relationship between, on the one hand, a habitus, understood as a system of

lasting, transposable dispositions . . . and on the other hand, an objective event

which exerts its action of conditional stimulation calling for or demanding a

determinate response. (Bourdieu 1977: 8283, original emphasis)

This stimulation is conditional because it only acts on

those who are disposed to constitute it as such because they are endowed

with a determinate type of dispositions (which are amenable to reduplica-

tion and reinforcement by the awakening of class consciousness, that is, by

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the direct or indirect possession of a discourse capable of securing symbolic

mastery of the practically mastered principles of the class habitus). (Bourdieu

1977: 8283, original emphasis)

Habitus, it would seem, does not contain within itself the potential

for transformation; there needs to be, as it were, another habitus waiting

in the wings ready to displace the existing one and take its place on the stage.

As a theoretical concept, therefore, habitus provides a powerful account of

how and why cultures persist through time, reproducing themselves from

generation to generation, but it does not tell with much about the dynamics of

change. And one of the problems here is Bourdieus insistence on the systematic

character of habitus. In other words, the different elements of habitus are

assumed in some sense to constitute a whole. As he defines it in one of the

passages quoted above, habitus refers to systems of durable, transposable

dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures,

that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representa-

tion . . . (Bourdieu 1977: 72; emphasis added). Given habituss systematic

character, it makes sense that any fundamental transformation involves the shift

of one habitus to another, and that the potential for change comes not from

within habitus itself, but from external events.

In summary, while the concept of habitus provides a persuasive account of

the power of the taken-for-granted substructure of embodied and other

knowledges that play such an important role in the shaping of day-to-day life, it

is less useful as a tool for the analysis of social transformation. If we want to

understand not only why things stay the same, but also why they sometimes

change, Gramscis notion of common sense, it seems to me, might provide a

more fruitful approach, or at the very least, a useful corrective to the

assumption that cultures necessarily constitute systems of some kind.

Common sense and good sense

In the prison notebooks Gramsci is centrally concerned with the dynamics of

social change: how and why has a given change happened, or not happened;

how might it be brought about in the future? And in thinking this through he

spends a good deal of time teasing out the complex and contradictory nature of

common sense, how it both helps reproduce and maintain existing power

regimes, but can also carry within it the seeds of transformation. But what

exactly does Gramsci mean by common sense, and why might it be a useful

analytical concept for anthropologists?

The first point to make is that common sense for Gramsci is always a

heterogeneous jumble. He describes it like this:

Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time

and space . . . it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental

Gramscis concept of common sense

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characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one

individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and [inconsistent5], in conformity

with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is.

(Gramsci 1971: 419)

As a result, Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and

one can find there anything that one likes (Gramsci 1971: 422).

This radically unsystematic concept of common sense, I would argue, is

useful for anthropologists because it offers them a way of thinking about the

taken-for-granted cultural worlds of quotidian life free of certain lingering

assumptions that cling to the term culture. As I have already argued, the very

term culture in anthropology implies something made up of different

elements that nonetheless hang together. Remember how for Bourdieu habitus

is very much a system of dispositions. Gramscis concept of common sense, by

contrast, insists that while there may be systematic elements within the

confusion of common sense, such systematic elements can only be discovered

through careful empirical analysis; they cannot be assumed to exist a priori. And

this radically open way of approaching quotidian, lived reality, it seems to me,

provides anthropologists with a useful model. In the space of a short article, it is

not possible to explore this at length, but I want to begin at least to sketch out

how Gramscis concept of common sense productive might be productive for

anthropologists.

Very importantly, it offers anthropologists an approach to the mapping of

cultural worlds free of the gemeinschaft of Romantic nationalist narratives. As a

would-be revolutionary, Gramscis concern with the cultural worlds inhabited

by those of the bottom of the social pyramid was not that of conventional

anthropology. He was interested in these worlds because he wanted to bring

about fundamental social change and this, as he saw it, necessarily involved the

radical transformation of common sense. Achieving this demanded that

progressive political activists, such as himself, neither celebrated nor

condemned the world of common sense, but understood it in all its

contradictory complexity. Gramscis approach here his refusal either to

romanticize or demonize popular culture and his insistence that what is claimed

as tradition must always be rigorously scrutinized and unpacked offers

anthropologists a way of thinking about the communities they study that

escapes any residual notions of the traditional, authentic gemeinschaft.

Gramscis careful, analytical attitude to common sense is illustrated by his

scathing comments on one of the leading Italian intellectuals of his

time, Giovanni Gentile. Gentile had claimed that philosophy could be

thought of

as a great effort accomplished by reflective thought to gain critical certainty

of the truths of common sense and of the naive consciousness, of those

truths of which it can be said that every man feels them naturally and which

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constitute the solid structure of the mentality he requires for everyday life.

(quoted in Gramsci 1971: 422)

For Gramsci this was simply yet another example of the disordered crudity of

Gentiles thought. Honing in on Gentiles formulation: the truths of common

sense, Gramsci asks:

And what does a truth of common sense mean? Gentiles philosophy, for

example, is utterly contrary to common sense, whether one understands

thereby the nave philosophy of the people, which revolts against any form of

subjectivist idealism, or whether one understands it to be good sense and a

contemptuous attitude to the abstruseness, ingenuities and obscurity of certain

forms of scientific and philosophical exposition. (Gramsci 1971: 42223)

For Gramsci the messy conglomerate that is common sense precisely because

it is not any kind of systematic whole must be teased apart and its separate

elements analysed. And this is especially important for those seeking to change

society The bringing into being of new, genuinely counter-hegemonic

narratives a crucial part of any social transformation has to start with the

world inhabited by the mass of the population. And that world is the world of

common sense: the starting point must always be that common sense which is

the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made

ideologically coherent (Gramsci 1971: 421). As this comment makes clear,

while Gramsci insists on common senses chaotic and incoherent character

and incoherence is always negative for Gramsci he is far from simply negative.

The term he uses for the positive part of common sense is good sense, which

for him has a meaning closer to the English common sense than senso comune. In

several Notes he reflects on this good sense dimension of common sense,

writing in one, for instance:

In what exactly does the merit of what is normally termed common sense

or good sense consist? Not just in the fact that, if only implicitly, common

sense applies the principle of causality, but in the much more limited fact

that in a whole range of judgments common sense identifies the exact cause,

simple and to hand, and does not let itself be distracted by fancy quibbles and

pseudo-profound, pseudoscientific metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. (Gramsci

1971: 348)

In another Note he defines good sense more precisely. Taking the common

expression being philosophical about it, he notes that, while this expression

may contain an implicit invitation to resignation and patience, it can also be

seen as an invitation to people to reflect and to realise fully that whatever

happens is basically rational and must be confronted as such. It is specifically this

appeal to use reason rather than blind emotion that is the part of [common

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sense] which can be called good sense and which deserves to be made more

unitary and coherent (Gramsci 1971: 328). In general it is the elements within

common sense that reflect rational thought, however naive and raw a form this

may take, which for Gramsci constitute good sense.

For Gramsci, we can say, common sense is a multi-stranded, entwined knot

of, on the one hand, clear sightedness (good sense), which, like the little boy in

the story, is not fooled by the sophistry of the Emperors tailors; but, on the

other, blinkered short-sightedness that clings defensively to the comfortable

and familiar. Common sense is, as he puts it, crudely neophobe and

conservative (Gramsci 1971: 423). Nonetheless any genuinely counter

hegemonic narrative has to begin with common sense:

Is it possible that a formally new conception can present itself in a guise other

than the crude, unsophisticated version of the populace? And yet the historian,

with the benefit of all necessary perspective, manages to establish and to

understand the fact that the beginnings of a new world, rough and jagged

though they always are, are better than the passing away of the world in its

death-throes and the swan-song that it produces. (Gramsci 1971: 34243)

As this passage indicates, for Gramsci a central task for any serious

revolutionary is a transformation of popular culture which builds on the

beginnings of a new world that culture already contains. And it is this concern

that lies behind Gramscis interest in subordinated peoples understandings of

their world. He was very from being a disinterested, objective observer of

popular culture. It is important to stress this point, since anthropologists who

have drawn on Gramsci in part precisely because of his concern with culture

have not always paid sufficient attention to this basic differences between

Gramscis project and theirs. Anthropologists tend to focus on describing the

cultural worlds they study, and rather than seeking to change them, have often

argued passionately for their right to exist in their present form. Gramscis far

from celebratory approach to popular culture comes through very clearly in his

observations on folklore. While many of the original nineteenth-century

collectors of folk tales, such as the Grimm brothers, saw these tales, and folklore

in general, as in some sense an embodiment of the authentic and ancient nation,

Gramsci certainly did not. He did believe that it was important to study folklore,

but this was because of the traces of oppositional world views that could be

found there. By definition subordinated people tend to leave few traces in the

official historical record, any evidence of their narratives, therefore, however

fragmentary, is valuable. Folklore should be studied because it represents:

a conception of the world and life implicit to a large extent in determinate

(in time and space) strata of society and in opposition (also for the most part

implicit, mechanical and objective) to official conceptions of the world (or

in a broader sense, the conceptions of the cultured parts of historically

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determinate societies) that have succeeded one another in the historical

process . . .. This conception of the world is not elaborated and systematic

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. It is,

rather . . . a confused agglomerate of fragments of all the conceptions of the

world and of life that have succeeded one another in history. In fact, it is

only in folklore that one finds surviving evidence, adulterated and mutilated,

of the majority of these conceptions. (Gramsci 1985: 189)

As this quotation makes clear, Gramscis concern is to understand the history

of subordinated groups better, not to celebrate or preserve authentic cultures.

Indeed he argues that individuals need to transcend the cultures that have

formed them, asking in a passage that reflects his own scorn for the kind of

Italian provincial culture in which he himself grew up:

[I]s it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed

by the external environment, i.e. by one of the many social groups in which

everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the

conscious world (and this can be ones village or province; it can have its

origins in the parish and the intellectual activity of the local priest or

ageing patriarch whose wisdom is law, or in the little old woman who has

inherited the lore of the witches or the minor intellectual soured by his own

stupidity and inability to act)? Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out

consciously and critically ones own conception of the world and thus, in

connection with the labours of ones own brain, choose ones sphere of

activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be

ones own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the

moulding of ones personality? (Gramsci 1971: 32334)

Gramscis palpable disdain here for Italian rural society is very far from the

empathetic identification with those studied which has long been a hallmark of

anthropology. What the anthropological and the Gramscian project do share is

a commitment both to taking the cultural worlds in which they are interested

seriously and to understanding them in their own terms.

Common sense, culture and history

Gramscis concept of common sense also has interesting implications for how

we think about the relationship between culture and history, a relationship that

has been much debated within anthropology ever since its establishment as a

recognized discipline. In recent years there has been much fruitful collaboration

between anthropologists and historians, and many anthropologists, such as

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Stoler, do deeply historical work. Nonetheless, within the discipline a sense

that history is something that happens to cultures has not been completely

banished.6 Common sense in Gramsci, however, is never opposed to history in

this way. Rather, it is in the course of history, and as the result of historical

processes, that common sense emerges. As with the material debris that

gradually accumulates in any area of human habitation, new ideas are

continually drifting down to join the existing agglomerate of common sense.

Some may only remain there momentarily, others for somewhat longer, while

some manage to embed themselves in seemingly more secure ways. Common

sense, therefore, is never stable but is continually changing in piecemeal ways.

The key point here is that common sense is not defined by whatever systematic

elements it may contain. It should be seen rather as a whole mass of disparate

beliefs and opinions that have come together over time. In any given time and

place this common sense provides a heterogeneous bundle of taken-for-granted

understandings of how the world is that make up the basic landscape within

which individuals are socialized and chart their individual life courses.

The analysts task, like that of the archaeologist, is to sort through this mass of

beliefs and opinions: identifying the very different elements it contains and the

social realities to which they are linked, exploring just whose common sense

they are (mens, womens, poor peoples, the better-off, the more educated, the

less educated, the old, the young, and so on), and mapping out just what linkages

there are between the different elements. As with material strata, there are

reasons why some elements persist and some do not, but the forces acting to

consolidate or destroy are multiple and the results of their interactions are always

unpredictable. Understanding this process in a given time and place again

requires empirical analysis of how particular elements of common sense are

disseminated; for instance, the mechanisms through which specific individuals

do, or do not, internalize them what indeed does it mean to internalize them?

To what extent do the different elements hang together? Do individuals pick

and choose between them?

What Gramscis concept of common sense offers anthropologists, I would

argue, is a way of thinking about the texture of everyday life that encompasses

its givenness how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as

an external and solid reality but that also acknowledges its contradictions,

fluidity and flexibility. For all its apparent solidity it is continually being

modified by how actual people in actual places live it. Gramscis inherently

vague concept of common sense, I would argue, is one from which the ghost

of the bounded culture, existing outside history a ghost anthropology has

found hard to banish completely has genuinely been exorcised.

Notes

1 Crehan (2002) discusses this at greater length.2 Crehan (2002) examines Gramscis general notion of culture in more detail.

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3 Bourdieu describes the circumstances of his Algerian fieldwork, Sketch for a Self-Analysis (2008), an account of his intellectual formation written at the end of his life.

4 See, for instance, McDougall (2008: 88). Edward Said (1989: 223) also noted thisabsence in his article Representing the colonized: anthropologys interlocutors,writing: Bourdieu, in Outline of a Theory of Practice, perhaps the most influentialtheoretical text in anthropology today, . . . makes no mention of colonialism, Algeria,and so on, even though he writes about Algeria elsewhere . . . It is the exclusion ofAlgeria from Bourdieus theorizing and ethnographical reflection in Outline that isnoteworthy. I am grateful to Aisha Khan for drawing this article to my attention.

5 Gramsci writes inconsequente, which Hoare and Nowell Smith translate asinconsequential. In this context inconsistent is a better translation. I am gratefulto Frank Rosengarten for drawing my attention to this mistranslation.

6 Marshall Sahlins for one continues to be a fierce defender of the distinction betweenhistory and culture, as in his 2004 collection of essays, Apologies to Thucydides.

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