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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.<br/><br/>Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology<br/>By Kate Crehan Pluto PressCopyright © 2002 Kate Crehan<br/>All rights reserved.<br/>ISBN: 978-0-7453-1677-2<br/><br/><br/>Contents<br/>Reading Gramsci,<br/>Joseph A. Buttigieg, vii,<br/>Abbreviations, x,<br/>1. Introduction, 1,<br/>PART I CONTEXTS,<br/>2. Gramsci's Life and Work, 13,<br/>3. Anthropology and Culture: Some Assumptions, 36,<br/>PART II GRAMSCI ON CULTURE,<br/>4. Culture and History, 71,<br/>5. Subaltern Culture, 98,<br/>6. Intellectuals and the Production of Culture, 128,<br/>PART III GRAMSCI AND ANTHROPOLOGY,<br/>7. Gramsci Now, 165,<br/>Bibliography, 211,<br/>Index, 215,<br/><br/>CHAPTER 1<br/>INTRODUCTION<br/><br/>If one wants to study a conception of the world that has never been systematically expounded by its author-thinker, detailed work is required, and it has to be conducted with the most scrupulous accuracy and scientific honesty ... The search for the leitmotiv, the rhythm of the thought, more important than single, isolated quotations.<br/>(PNII: 137)<br/><br/>This book is about the concept of culture in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and the potential relevance of Gramsci's approach to culture for contemporary anthropologists. The basic question it addresses is: what might anthropologists, and others interested in issues of culture, have to gain from reading this early twentieth-century Italian Marxist? Its aim is not so much to answer this question as to provide readers with the information they need to decide for themselves.<br/>In the 30 years since the publication of the first major English edition of Gramsci's prison notebooks, Gramsci has become a name much cited by anthropologists. However, as Michel Foucault noted in a 1984 letter to the Gramsci scholar Joseph Buttigieg, Gramsci remains an author who is cited more often than he is genuinely known. Most anthropologists it would seem get their Gramsci second-hand. A key interprete