Interrogating Hegemony

For the past decade, anthropological analyses of power relations in colonial and postcolonial societies have sought to transcend the antipodal notions of domination and resistance by detailing the complexity of social power and advancing a view of social order as a dynamic and uneven process.^[1] While applying insights about discursive and nondiscursive practice from Michel Foucault (1978) and Pierre Bourdieu (1977), these efforts have often drawn prime inspiration from an earlier continental source: Antonio Gramsci's (1971) concept of hegemony, usually by way of the reading given it by Raymond Williams (1977). It is this notion of hegemony that has undergirded a number of recent anthropological investigations of nationalism (see, e.g., Brow 1988, 1990; Crain 1990; Fox 1989, 1990; B. Williams 1991; Swedenburg 1990, 1991; Toland 1993; Woost 1993). In the view of these analysts, nationalisms operate hegemonically to channel sentiment and mobilize antagonisms; or to state it the other way around, it is hegemony that constructs Anderson's "imagined communities." While subordinates are never merely passive recipients of nationalist ideas (they may reinterpret them in various ways to incorporate their specific political concerns), the dialogue between nationalist elites and ordinary adherents is distinctly asymmetric, with elites ultimately controlling both the production of nationalist ideas and the vehicles of their transmission.

The concept of cultural hegemony has acquired a range of utilization in social thought well beyond the immediate analytical intentions of the political theorist and activist credited with introducing it. Antonio Gramsci, writing from prison in the years between 1929 and his death in 1935, developed the concept of hegemony chiefly to explain why capitalism in the industrialized West had not yet collapsed as a result of its own inner contradictions (Gramsci 1971; see also Perry Anderson 1976; Laclau 1977). Despite Gramsci's concern with the peculiar characteristics of capitalist ideology in the liberal democracies of the industrialized West, his notion of hegemony began to be applied to dissimilar settings soon after his writings became available in English.^[2] Cultural anthropologists came relatively late to the topic of cultural

hegemony but in recent years have embraced the concept in their analyses of social relations (see, e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Contursi 1989; Fox 1985, 1989; Lagos 1993; Linger 1993; Rebel 1989; Roseberry 1989, 1991 1994), often with specific reference to nationalism (see, e.g., Brow 1988, 1990; Crain 1990; Fox 1989, 1990; B. Williams 1991; Swedenburg 1990,1991; Woost 1993).

Despite hegemony's broad popularity in the social sciences, analysts have disagreed when interpreting its essential meaning. Definitions vary because, for one, Gramsci himself, as numerous commentators have noted, used the term inconsistently (see, e.g., Perry Anderson 1976; Abercrombie et al. 1980; Lears 1985).^[3] If anything approaching an interpretive mainstream does exist, it may be found among those scholars who accent Gramsci's writings on the complexity of workingclass consciousness. That interpretive emphasis has been demonstrated most famously by Raymond Williams, first in a 1973 essay entitled Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory , and later in his 1977 Marxism and Literature .^[4] In that first work, Williams offers his reading of hegemony as . . . "the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived . . . [Hegemony] thus constitutes . . . a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of [a] society to move, in most areas of their lives . . ." ([1973] 1980, 38). The "dominant culture," however, is neither monolithic nor univocal: ". . . alternative meanings and values, . . . alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world . . . can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture" (1980, 39).^[5]

This eloquent formulation incorporates an apparent contradiction. For Williams, hegemony shapes the experience of subordinates to such an extent that it constitutes a sense of absolute reality for them; yet in some unspecified manner, the dominant culture also allows subordinates the opportunity to devise "alternative senses of the world."^[6]

Williams's explication of hegemony in terms of a dominant culture has been quite influential among anthropologists, and most who employ the concept follow closely his usage.^[7] Williams's reading of cultural hegemony has also guided various anthropological analyses of nationalism (see, e.g., Brow 1988, 1990; Crain 1990; Fox 1990; Swedenburg 1990, 1991; Toland 1993; Woost 1993).^[8] These analysts tend to agree that subordinate classes are incorporated into the imagined community of the nation through nationalist discourses that work by

"articulating . . . the insecurities, preoccupations, hopes and fears of everyday consciousness" (Wright 1985, 175). Nationalist hegemony remains nonetheless vulnerable to challenges, primarily in the form of active assessments by subordinates of the claims and promises of nationalist leaders. In response, nationalist leaders make rhetorical and material concessions; however, these concessions never imperil the nationalist project itself. In the end, the dialogue of nationalist discourse is always a profoundly unequal one. Nationalist ideologies powerfully constitute individuals as subjects, with subordinates experiencing "a powerful reorganization of their common sense" as "these ideologies . . . become part of meaningful life" (Woost 1993, 516–17).

Before considering hegemony's relevance to nationalism, the concept itself requires closer examination. The notion of cultural hegemony depicts a dynamic process whereby systems of domination maintain themselves not only by means of rules and other coercions but by their profoundly formative effect on ordinary understandings of the social world. This depiction provokes a question: how do coercion and cultural hegemony interact to maintain a system of domination? Or, more to the point, how do we know when one or the other is operative? While Gramsci's writings are again inconsistent on this point, most anthropologists who employ the concept seem confident in their ability to discern hegemony at work.

James Scott, however, counsels utmost caution when attempting to disentangle the presumed ideological effects of cultural hegemony from the impositions of economic necessity and physical coercion. Domination, he notes, "produces an official transcript that provides convincing evidence of willing, even enthusiastic complicity" (1990, 86). Moreover, underclasses, for strategic purposes, avoid open defiance or the public discrediting of the official transcript's account of social relations. Most public events are thus available to researchers only in their official versions, as aspects of an elite-produced transcript in which exploitation appears natural and domination legitimate. Scott, for more than a decade the most energetic and articulate critic of the concept of hegemony, has drawn attention to the ubiquity of everyday resistance by subordinate classes. Such resistance includes a subtle but authentic ideological struggle in which "official descriptions of reality" are routinely "penetrated and transformed" (1985, 319) by subordinates who at the same time produce their own unauthorized "hidden transcript" of power relations (1990, 4).

Various anthropologist advocates of the hegemony concept have directly criticized Scott's views, arguing that by posing a dichotomy between domination and resistance he has failed to grasp "the complex dynamic nature of the hegemonic process" (Lagos 1993, 53).^[9] In their formulations, cultural hegemony is said to encompass both domination and resistance. But what, precisely, is meant by that claim? The consensus opinion seems to be that while hegemony accommodates—even "thrives on"—discontent, it "makes revolution hard to think" (Linger 1993, 3, 4). Resistance and even rebellion can be accommodated within a system of domination because "webs of domination,"woven mainly through discursive practice, encompass subordinates even as they try to resist (Lazarus-Black and Hirsch 1994, 9). The result is "the experiential starvation of the political imagination," with most resisters co-opted from the start by their use of the dominant political rhetoric (Linger 1993, 18).

Scott, however, rejects the central assumption of his anthropological critics that hegemony inhibits the political imagination of subordinates, citing abundant local versions of "the world turned upside down" to support his assertion (1990, 80). He has argued that subordinates generally limit the scope of their resistance and couch their protests in the language of the dominant ideology for strategic reasons, not as a result of the cognitive constraints imposed by cultural hegemony. Those strategic considerations primarily concern the personal safety and economic survival of members of subordinate groups. Before looking to discursive practice to explain the relative quiescence of subalterns, due notice should first be given to the coercive force ready to be applied against them, their experiences of past failures of open opposition, and "their daily struggle for subsistence and the surveillance it entails" (Scott 1990, 86).^[10]

Nothing in my reading of the Cotabato case supports a view of hegemony as encompassing both domination and resistance. As we shall see, Muslim subordinates in Cotabato have not depended on elite-generated language and images to make sense of power relations. Rank-and-file adherents of the Muslim separatist movement have routinely resisted official interpretations of events, often by means of imaginative narratives that served as charters for political decisions directly at odds with the directions of movement leaders. While it is prudent to approach dichotomous categories of social analysis such as domination/resistance with caution, overnuanced analyses of power

relations carry their own analytical distortions and produce mostly indeterminacy. To declare that hegemony comprises both domination and resistance removes an unwanted binary but reveals nothing about the sources and consequences of unroutinized insubordinations. In such a formulation, hegemony is incongruously imagined as an encapsulating dominant culture that is ever vulnerable to challenge yet ultimately imperishable, both constantly becoming and always already accomplished.

As this is the interpretation of hegemony most often employed to counter Scott's strong criticisms of the entire notion, there is good reason to remain unimpressed by claims made for hegemony as "a potent concept for the analysis of cultural order" (Woost 1993, 503). As noted, hegemony has been rather widely applied in anthropological investigations of nationalism. It remains to examine its performance in that analytical realm.