Gramsci's concept of common sense: a useful concept for anthropologists?

Abstract

The article begins with a brief look at the anthropological notion of culture and some of its ghosts, contrasting this with Gramsci's very different approach. It goes on to look in detail at Gramsci's concept of ‘common sense’, arguing that common sense as theorized by Gramsci provides anthropologists (whose discipline is so concerned with the quotidian) and others, with a useful theoretical tool with which to map everyday life. Gramsci's understanding of common sense encompasses its givenness – how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as an external reality – but also stresses its contradictions, fluidity and potential for change. To help clarify the specific character of the Gramscian notion of common sense, the article compares it with another concept that has been widely embraced within anthropology and elsewhere: Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus – a notion, I argue, that remains in many ways tethered to its anthropological origins.