Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology

Antonio Gramsci has become a major presence in British and American anthropology, especially for anthropologists working on issues of culture and power. This book examines Gramsci's understanding of culture and the links between culture and power in which the author reveals how Gramsci offers a challenge to some of the most entrenched and anthropological assumptions about the nature of "culture". Drawing on texts including his pre-prison journalism, prison letters and the prison notebooks, the book offers the intellectual and political contexts within which Gramsci was writing. To show how notions of culture are being deployed, the final chapter in the book is structured as a dialogue between Gramsci and selected anthropologists, including John and Jean Comaroff, James Scott, Steven Feierman and Sherry Ortner, with extracts from these anthropologists' writings.