Gramsci was by far the most ethnographic of the ‘western Marxists’. Both his journalism and his prison notebooks read in many respects like field notes (or blogs, but that’s a different discussion). He’s working his way through low-brow, middle-brow, and high-brow culture throughout (the common sense/good sense/philosophy typology of intellectual systems).

This is pretty hard to see in the commonly-excerpted translations, which tend to focus on the high-brow stuff by default. But he never did boil it all down into a comprehensive theory of culture, so what we get are these little gems of observation and analysis about mundane people with ordinary ideas, loosely tied together into categorical threads (again, like field notes or a blog). Not easy to excerpt.

“Participant observation continues to produce some of the most interesting and evocative accounts of subculture, but the method also suffers from a number of significant flaws. In particular, the absence of any analytical or explanatory framework has guaranteed such work a marginal status in the predominantly positivist tradition of mainstream sociology. More crucially, such an absence has ensured that while accounts based upon a participant observation approach provide a wealth of descriptive detail, the significance of class and power relations is consistently neglected or at least underestimated.” (Subculture; Routledge, 1979)

And how could Hebdige say such things that would be echoed by Rex 30 years later? Gramsci, via Raymond Williams: The reason why generations of cultural studies folks have asked why particular forms should occur at particular times and with what particular results.

So, please do continue. You’ve done a great job with the author lists and Marxist political economy vs. Kenneth Burke humanistic, literary description. Could we have a bit more about what this difference meant in practice, topics, methods, results, that sort of thing?

It’s humbling to see the students grapple with the sacred truths and rituals of the various historiographic sects. They start by thinking it’s all a bunch of egghead mumbo-jumbo. I might as well have a bone through my nose and wave a rattle at that point. After lots of conversation and reflection they see the point, but what excites them is all these different ways of looking at things. They don’t see any reason to convert to one faith or another, they want to grab-bag.

By the time the precious few get to grad school they’ll be much more sophisticated about how important the dogmatic hairs being split are, and they’ll be all set to become theory missionaries.

I’m more of an agnostic myself at this point, after an ill-spent existentialist-marxist youth.

Reinventing Anthropology was an edited volume with its genesis in the late 1960s that presented a Marxist, left (they would say ‘radical left’) challenge to anthropology. It was edited by Dell Hymes, but also featured Big Marxists like Eric Wolf, Bob Scholte, and Stanley Diamond. There are direct connections, intellectually and sociologically between that scholarship and the political economy/historical anthropology (Sahlins, Wolf, Mintz) of the 80s.

Myth, Symbol, Culture was a volume edited by Geertz based on a conference co-organized by Paul De Man and bankrolled with Ford Foundation money. Included the original, shorter version of the Balinese Cockfight Essay, essays by James Fernandez, Mary Douglas, Judith Shklar — the humanistic, apolitical, literary, Kenneth Burke version of cultural anthropology which has direct connections with the crisis of representation literature of the 1980s.

Myth, Symbol, Culture: 1974, Geertz, interpretive/symbolic anthropology, contributions from Mary Douglas and James Fernandez. A very literary approach.

Reinventing Anthropology: 1969, Dell Hymes, “action” anthropology/political economy, contributions from Eric Wolf and Laura Nader. A radical, critical indictment of anthropology.

Could we humbly ask for you to elucidate a bit that radical difference in focus, for those of us–like myself–who may not have read the volumes in question?

For example: Cultural Studies (Birmingham school) is in the process of replacing both literary folklore and anthropological folklore in the United States. This has been widely remarked upon. So why, upon examining CS, would you then turn to folklore, when they’re essentially the same thing now? Read Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity. Discuss.

LFB: I think you articulate exactly the concerns that stimulated my blogging in the first place. Although your major beef in this particular case is that you don’t want to label Penley as “so-called American CS” rather that Real True CS. I’ll leave you and Penley to fight over who is pirating whose identity.

However I will say that I do think it is important to examine how CS and anthropology articulate (that is after all, why I read the book in the first place). I have descended from broad brushstrokes (this is, btw, a blog — we do brushstrokes here) to the work of particular authors (Penley and Brooker).

For the record, I do not feel angst about the job market since I already have a job (!) but (more seriously) the real problem facing anthro Ph.D.s is much, much bigger than academic turf wars between antrhos and CS/So-Called American CS and has to do with troubling large-scale changes in our institutions in their entirety. Thanks for the comment.

What sometimes passes as so-called “American CS” is probably better described as pop culture studies, and is not – strictly speaking – CS at all. I have not read the book in question, but it looks like it is an example of the latter, so perhaps our quarrel is over terminology. Nonetheless, in your CS posts that I’ve read, you paint with very broad strokes, without much discussion of what CS actually is, what its potential is, or how its relationship to anthropology is marred by job market angst. With CS jobs in the Chronicle growing, and anthro ones often in peril, it might be a good time to examine why anthropologists have such a difficult time justifying their relevance these days. It is, in fact, very relevant… but why are anthropologists – especially cultural anthropologists – at such pains to convince others? I suspect that CS is not popular because it’s easier – it isn’t – but because it feels more relevant. There is plenty of bad CS, of course, but there’s plenty of second-rate work being done in anthro, too. And there are plenty of anthropologists with definitive views on CS who have no knowledge of its complicated genealogies, or who could even articulate its tenants. At any rate, my apologies for my earlier ad hominem on you, but I do look forward to your posts on Symbolic-Interactionism, which is another favorite sub-discipline of mine.

Not having read the book, I can’t comment on your reading of it. The response was to the hypothesis mentioned at the end of your message. It is quite thought-provoking, albeit, as I indicated, a bit of a stretch.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several directions in which research might be taken.

1. The history of the basic scientific/scholarly gesture of isolating problems to reduce them to manageable size.

2. The relation of that gesture to functionalism and the notion that objects of study should be examined in relation to how their parts fit together, as opposed to circumstances external to them.

3. The specifically romantic focus on aesthetic detail, which involves both acceptance of the basic gesture, framing the problem, and rejection of the scientific mode of framing in terms of concepts and variables abstracted from the object in question and aiming at universal, instead of particularistic, understanding.

All this has me musing on the intellectual history of the early to mid 20th century and why this particular focus became so popular in fields as apparently diverse as anthropology and literary criticism. There is, in both these examples, a rejection of historical and biographical context. Why then? At that particular moment in history? Can’t help it. These sorts of questions occur to me.

Makes sense. But seems too direct in the leap from longish text artifacts to a method for analyzing them. Neglects the fact that the method in question is itself a product of history.

From Wikipedia,

bq. New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography.

The New Critics insisted on treating works of literature as autonomous aesthetic wholes that can only be properly understood from the inside out, i.e., in terms of the way in which the elements of a work are combined within the frame of the work itself. Their approach was, while restricted to works of literature, heir to the same romanticism as, for example, structural-functionalism in anthropology, which was built on the insistence that societies be conceived, like works of art, as autonomous wholes. Marx would have said, “fetishized objects.” Following sociologist Dan Foss (famous to those delighted by him for several years on Anthro-L), I prefer “thingies.”

That said, I return to Marx via, yes, Victor Turner, and observe that simple transference of New Critical methods to pop culture artifacts results in the kind of mystification that, focused on the artifact itself, neglects the social context, the relations of production and consumption, the contradictions and political struggles in which the artifact is embedded and in which it may have numerous roles to play.