Blackwell Reference Online

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Hegemony is conventionally used to refer to the balance of forces between states facing off in the international arena. But, as a result of the writings of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), hegemony is now more often used in the social sciences and social history to refer to the complex way in which power infuses various components of the social world. Power plays a role in the reproduction and possible transformation of social relations, for example, and in daily and longer-term social practices. The notion of hegemony has played an especially strong part in helping us to understand how power works to form the social person, shaping the way in which people variously experience the world they live in.Over the past 25 years, anthropologists have increasingly used hegemony to better their understanding of the way power works through and beyond the state in different kinds of societies. At just the time when anthropologists were beginning to recognize that the people they studied in the local setting of their fieldwork had long been embedded in the fields of force of larger states, people in cognate disciplines were reworking our understanding of how power works in society. The reex-amination of the work of Gramsci (Mouffe 1979), Foucault's work on the specific nature of modern power, the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall in shaping a new field called “cultural studies,” and Bourdieu's ... log in or subscribe to read full text