The human and the political : being with Gramsci

The whole issue can be downloaded at http://ro.uow.edu.au/gramsci/vol2/iss3/ Table of Contents: Special Issue: Gramsci and Anthropology: A “Round Trip” edited by Sabrina Tosi Cambini and Fabio Frosini Editorial - Derek Boothman 1 Editors’ Introduction - Sabrina Tosi Cambini, Fabio Frosini 2 Introduzione dei curatori - Sabrina Tosi Cambini, Fabio Frosini 17 Part I: Uses of Gramsci 1. Elizabeth L. Krause, Massimo Bressan - Via Gramsci: Hegemony and Wars of Position in the Streets of Prato 31 2. Veronica Redini - «Un nuovo tipo umano». Per un antropologia del lavoro industriale a partire da «Americanismo e Fordismo» 67 3. Alessandro Simonicca - Recuperare la scalarità del denso, tra resistenza e studying up 87 4. Alessandro Deiana - Folklore come egemonia. Comprendere la cultura popolare; riconoscere la subalternità; lottare sul terreno della cultura? 113 Part II: History 5. Roberto Beneduce - History as Palimpsest. Notes on Subalternity, Alienation, and Domination in Gramsci, De Martino, and Fanon 134 6. Riccardo Ciavolella - Gramsci in antropologia politica. Connessioni sentimentali, monografie integrali e senso comune delle lotte subalterne 174 7. Fabio Dei - Popolo, popolare, populismo 208 8. Gino Satta - Gramsci’s «Prison Notebooks» and the “re-foundation” of anthropology in post-war Italy 239 Part IV: Intersections 9. Eugenio Testa - L’incanto del serpente. Gramsci in contrappunto tra Giorgio Baratta e Alberto M. Cirese 258 10. Lelio La Porta - Lo studio « disinteressato» come nuovo terreno applicativo della scienza dell’educazione 288 11. Roberto Dainotto - Filosofia, filologia, e il «senso delle masse» 306 Part IV: Memos and interviews 12. Piergiorgio Solinas - Egemonia e gerarchia, tracce nei «Quaderni del carcere» 331 13. Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani - Pluralismo degli ordinamenti giuridici e le «“nuove” credenze popolari» gramsciane: la sfida della modernità 342 14. Eugenio Testa - Notizie sul «Regesto gramsciano» di Alberto M. Cirese 351 15. Pietro Clemente - Gramsci ed io. Intervista (a cura di Sabrina Tosi Cambini e Fabio Frosini) 357 Part V: Reviews 16. Anthony Crézégut - Pour Tosel, un Aufklärer dans les Holzwege gramsciens 372

2017

In the 1970s, when the identity of Italian “demo-ethno-anthropological” studies was being defined and their academic status consolidated, scholars debated the features of a national tradition of studies. Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were then presented as the source of new ideas, which in the aftermath of WWII contributed in decisive ways to a renewal of scholarly theory, helping scholars to get rid of romantic leftovers such as the notion of “people-nation”, and encouraging them to turn away from “picturesque” oddities to address important social and cultural issues. This inscription of Gramsci into the genealogy of Italian anthropological studies, which recognizes the important role his thought played in scholarly debates, nonetheless risks concealing the different readings his reflections received when they were first published soon after the war (1948-1951). The paper focuses on the debate regarding Gramsci and folklore organized by the Gramsci Institute in Rome in the lat...

This course will introduce and interrogate a variety of ideas that underlie and inform the work of anthropologists in recent decades. Contemporary anthropology draws both on its own disciplinary tradition and its voracious appetite for ideas from the fields of philosophy, history, sociology, and political science, and from the reflection that takes place in movements like feminism and anticolonialism, among other sources. Far more than in early periods, the shared reading list of anthropological scholars since the mid-twentieth century is interdisciplinary. We will use some of the course to address the late 20th century “crisis” in anthropology, when a combination of ethnographic subjects writing back to those who studied them, and postmodern critiques of scientific certainty threw the discipline into a self-questioning mood. This is an era of post-’s and of “turns,” moments in which critical masses (or critically located clusters) of anthropologists proposed (and continue to propose) new approaches to the work of describing human life. We will also devote a great deal of time to theories of power that emerged in the last fifty years, including feminist approaches, work by Foucault, retheorizations of Marx, and subaltern studies. We’ll take on theoretical approaches to the colonial order, performativity, materiality, practice, and the construction of knowledge. This course is intended to supply others’ ideas and trace their influence, but also to draw you and your mind into dialogue with these theorists and their claims. It’s a place for patient encounter with the complexity of what you read, and a place for urgent critique of what you find most troubling, and a place for patience again as you gestate your own perspective and assemble your ensemble of familiar theoretical tools. Being fully and thoughtfully present, intellectually and personally, in these discussions is vital to what we will all get out of the experience.

Anthropology & Medicine, 2012

The aim of this paper is to convey the relevance of a Gramscian perspective in medical anthropology, stressing his anti-essentialist way of reasoning about ‘nature’. The author claims that Gramsci's understandings of the bodily life of the state can deconstruct naturalized realities in ways that are helpful for the ethnographer engaged in the political anthropology of embodiment and the management of health, persons, and life itself. The paper is presented in three parts. An attempt is made, first, to frame the relevance of Gramsci for Italian medical anthropology and second, to explore the components of the Gramscian concept of ‘second nature’ within the perspective that he himself calls ‘an anthropology’. Third, an example is given of how the proposed Gramscian insights could inform an ethnography on the biopolitical aspects for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease, which is currently being carried out in Perugia.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2002

I n the early 1920s, the critical theorist Georg Lukacs published a stinging indictment of what he understood to be the impasse of capitalist modernity.

Anthropology Book Forum, 2021

Social Dynamics, 1998

As we approach• the millenniumn the discipline of anthropology occupies a hiighly contested terrain, a battle-ground on which scientistic, humanistic, political-economic, anld postmodern agendas are puttinlg forth conficting claimns anid vying for hegemony (Lee 1992).,Onie readinig of anithropology is that it is a part of the discredited canon conlstructed by dead white males, architects and apologists for capitalismn and imiperialism. But despite the vogue fo'r anthropology-bashing • in some circles, I believe that quite differenlt r•eadigs are possibl: and I would like to present onie here. Anthropology's br•ief history as a discipline has beenl marked by both successes and failures. It is commiionplace to say it is a discipline in crisis; but on•e could argue thiat thiis has beenl true of its enltire history. Whiat I would like to do is give you a personal view of some of its strenigth~s and weaknesses; wher•e the disciplinie has come fromT and where it is goinlg. If I have anything to add to the usual rumninations on this subject it is thiat I feel that anthropology's politics are as muchi a part of its histo'ry and future as is its bodies of method, theory, anld knowledge. The paper will draw examples from anthropology generally but the ma7in line of marchi is to use a broad overview of th~e crisis and tranisformnation in anthropology as a point of departure to examine aspects of South• African society in the first post-Apartheid years. Regarding the disciplinie as a whole mny thesis is this: anthropology is un•dergoing a tranlsformnation that is pregniant with possibilities, but to paraphrase Gramnsci: whenever the old order is dyinlg anid the new struggling

Nomadic Peoples, 2018

Six years ago, Ugo Fabietti delivered a lecture entitled 'Errancy in ethnography and theory: on the meaning and role of "discovery" in anthropological research' to an audience comprising several generations of his colleagues and students gathered at Milano-Bicocca University's Department of Human Sciences. The paper, later published in the book Serendipity in Anthropological Research. The Nomadic Turn (Hertzog, Hazan 2012), offered a reflexive analysis of Fabietti's own ethnographic experience, which had 'transited'-as he himself put it-'through three principal terrains': the Arabian Peninsula, between 1978 and 1985, among the Shammar Bedouin nomads of the Great Nefud desert; the Iranian Coast of the Persian Golf, among the Iranian fishermen of the Hormuzgang region (1985); and the southwest Pakistan, from 1986 to 1994, among sedentary Pakistani farmers of southern Baluchistan (Fabietti 2012: 15). The article stresses the relation between the nomadism of his objects of study and the nomadic condition of his anthropology in the following way: 'Quite apart from having conducted my own research among the nomads, I also have a nomadic story linked to my professional background' (Fabietti 2012: 15). The intimate tension between the ethnographic research among nomadic peoples and the fertile errancy among scientific paradigms may be viewed as one of the key aspects of Fabietti's anthropological work and of his legacy. His oeuvre took shape over a historical period when anthropology as a discipline was struggling to find a place for itself within the Italian academic organisation of the disciplines. It also interpreted that 'perpetual principle of dissatisfaction' that Foucault (1971: 371) saw as driving anthropology, a dissatisfaction that in Fabietti's case was underpinned by rich philosophical and epistemological reflection on the discipline's multiparadigmatic quality: 'By training, I am not firmly committed to any one approach over another. I waver, perhaps unconsciously, between different paradigms … as a consequence of the realization that not everything can be treated in the same way' (Fabietti 2012: 15). The metaphor of the nomad informed Fabietti's flexible understanding of the role of anthropological theory and practice. His own key theoretical contributions were founded on the persuasion that fieldwork is a sort of anthropological laboratory and an initiatory rite of passage, which marks the career and the identity of the anthropologist as well as of the scientific community

A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra Vol. 1, 2020

This Prologue outlines the broad set of concerns that constitute the context in which this book intervenes. Accordingly, it summarizes the nature of the research project that resulted in this two-volume total community study of Soqotra; it identifies the initial vector that launched my quest for an alternative to the prevailing practice of anthropology; it invites the global audience of established and aspiring social scientists, to whom the book is addressed, to consider a different modality of doing anthropology; it highlights the pitfalls of the narcissistic foundation of ethnography and calls for its abandonment; it explains my oppositional attitude toward the transactional nature of fieldwork and its bathos; it situates Soqotra within an interstitial geo-cultural space that exempts it from the prevailing assumptions and themes associated with neighboring regional social formations; it proposes the re-centering of research subjects as audience of our research results as part of a discursive ethic of reciprocity; it laments the intellectual impasse engendered by the discipline’s anachronistic commitment to a Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge production that insists on a West-Rest antinomy and suggests an exit strategy; and finally, it confronts the endemic dumbing-down campaign for the use of “plain English” in academic social science that promotes the use of language as “mental popcorn.”