Hegemony (Cultural Anthropology) PDF

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Hegemony (Cultural Anthropology)...

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Hegemony -

Bimarsh N. Rana

In Marxist thought, hegemony means the power the dominant group or class holds over other groups. Cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule maintained through ideological or cultural means with consent without the use of power/ force or coercion. It is usually achieved through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and behavior of the rest of society. Cultural hegemony functions by framing the worldview of the ruling class, and the social and economic structures that embody it, as just, legitimate, and designed for the benefit of all, even though these structures may only benefit the ruling class. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony out of Karl Marx’s theory that the dominant ideology of society reflects the beliefs and interests of the ruling class. Gramsci argued that consent to the rule of the dominant group is achieved by the spread of ideologies—beliefs, assumptions, and values—through social institutions such as schools, churches, courts, and the media, among others. These institutions do the work of socializing people into the norms, values, and beliefs of the dominant social group. As such, the group that controls these institutions controls the rest of society. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the "common sense" values of all. Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony followed from his attempts to understand the survival of the capitalist state in the most-advanced Western countries. Cultural hegemony is most strongly manifested when those ruled by the dominant group come to believe that the economic and social conditions of their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people with a vested interest in particular social, economic, and political orders. Gramsci’s key observation was that in advanced capitalist societies the perpetuation of class rule was achieved through largely consensual means—through intellectual and moral leadership. Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony thus involves an analysis of the ways in which such capitalist ideas are disseminated and accepted as commonsensical and normal.

Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony in an effort to explain why the worker-led revolution that Marx predicted in the previous century had not come to pass. Central to Marx’s theory of capitalism was the belief that the destruction of this economic system was built into the system itself since capitalism is premised on the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class. Marx reasoned that workers could only take so much economic exploitation before they would rise up and overthrow the ruling class . However, this revolution did not happen on a mass scale. In sum, cultural hegemony, or our tacit agreement with the way that things are, is a result of socialization, our experiences with social institutions, and our exposure to cultural narratives and imagery, all of which reflect the beliefs and values of the ruling class....