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Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology. By Kate Crehan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. x, 220. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.
Since the middle 1980s the notion of culture has come under attack in the field of anthropology. Critics of culture argue that it has become as "essentializing" as the genetic explanations for human variation that it replaced in the late nineteenth century. From their perspective, culture has come to be seen as an immutable trait of human beings, while some cultures are deemed to be superior to others. These critics advocate for a new problematic, which focuses on the ways in which ideologies of difference simultaneously create and conceal inequality. As a result, the concept of "power" has challenged "culture" as the unifying concept of anthropology.1 Not surprisingly, theories of power quickly came to center stage within the discipline, and a generation of anthropologists scrambled to read and understand the works of theorists like Althusser, Bourdieu, Debord, Foucault, and Gramsci. These scholars discovered what others before them already knew: the works of these theorists were for the most part dauntingly obtuse. Knowing (or at least appearing to know) these theories became valuable symbolic capital not only within anthropology but more generally throughout the social sciences and humanities-and the multidisciplinary field of African studies is certainly no exception.
Of all these difficult theorists, none perhaps is more difficult than Antonio Gramsci. The central difficulty with Gramsci is that his writings are highly fragmented. Most of his early writings are political...