Anthropology Through a Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory

4. The Hegemony of Discontent

Chapter 4 The Hegemony of Discontent The Rebel Island At the heart of Gramsci's notion of hegemony is his most vital insight: culture is political.l For Gramsci (1971), hegemony springs not only from the explicit ideological, moral, and philosophical underpinnings of power but also from less fully conscious, transparent realms of thought-the experientially insistent world of common sense. This taken-for-granted portion of culture, the fragmented "'spontaneous philosophy' of the multitude" (421), muddies perceptions of injustice, inducing political passivity. In short, common sense makes revolution hard to think. I will argue against imaging common sense as a paralyzing mystification . The most insistent common sense is embodied knowledge, an amalgam of thought and sentiment. If common sense makes revolution hard to think, it more crucially makes it hard to feel, not because common sense anesthetizes the emotions but because it diverts them into politically innocuous channels. I have two major objectives in this chapter . First, I seek to integrate emotion into a theoretical concept of common sense. Second, I seek to show how common sense can fuel varieties of protest and rebellion that remain encapsulated within an unyielding political structure. The argument draws on events that occurred toward the end of my 1984-86 fieldwork in Sao Luis, capital of Maranhao, a socially traditional and economically depressed state of northeastern Brazil.2 Within a period of two months, sao-luisenses revolted twice, first at the ballot box and then, violently, in the streets. In the mayoral election ofNovember 1985, they defied Jose Sarney, political chief of Maranhao and the first maranhense president in Brazil's history, by electing Gardenia Gon- ~alves, wife of Sarney's archrival, Joao Castelo. Then, in January 1986, sao-luisenses reversed themselves: an enraged multitude set fire to the city hall as the new mayor barricaded herself behind overturned tables 80 Chapter4 and her aides frantically gouged escape routes in the building's rear walls. Yet for all its authentic fury, the city-hall uprising was, like the bitter election that preceded it, part and parcel of a long-standing political game played by Sarney and Castelo, who used citizens as counters by manipulating deep commonsense understandings and emotions. Thus in Sao Luis, a historically restive city that proclaims itself the Rebel Island, common sense neither mesmerizes nor sedates the populace . Rather, it guides dissatisfaction into popular mutinies that can shift power from one elite competitor to another, but never-at least thus far-to the mutineers. This volatile hegemony thrives on discontent. Hegemony, Common Sense, and Political Structures Let me first set out some analytical terms. Hegemony is the maintenance of a political structure through the cultural shaping of experience, obviating or lessening reliance on illegitimate force.3 Although worked out, explicit symbolic formulations constitute one aspect of hegemony, hegemony is not just ideology. Indeed, ideology is hegemony's weak point. Ideology is vulnerable because it is visible; public statements of belief and justifications for oppression invite contestation. Gramsci's originality lies in his emphasis on hegemony's invisible, insidious, more potent underside: the "practical consciousness" that saturates "the whole process of living ... to such a depth that the pressures and limits of ... a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense" (Williams 1977: 110). In Gramsci's scheme, common sense, a "crudely neophobe and conservative " (1971: 423) mishmash of unreflective popular thought, impedes the transformation in workers' consciousness that, according to a naive marxism, should be the inevitable ironic product of capitalist social relations . Common sense permits only the most sporadic and uncoordinated "flashes" of progressive political action (326-27). Hence Gramsci assigns a key revolutionary role to intellectuals: they invent the cultural criticism that remakes common sense into a new worldview "rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and imperative quality as traditional beliefs" (424). This new common sense permits consciously revolutionary political practice. Unfortunately, Gramsci's discussion of common sense, however provocative an advance in political theory, is anthropologically thin. Anthropologists, on the other hand, have had a lot to say about common sense, mostly in the guise of culture, their stock in trade, but have often ignored its politics. In this chapter I hope to formulate a concept of The Hegemony of Discontent 81 common sense that is both anthropologically rich and politically sensitive . For Clifford Geertz (1983), common sense is...