ABSTRACT
What can the political role of ethnography be in attempts to achieve social change? One of the uses to which ethnography in anthropology has been put in the last several years is the detection of “resistances,” counter-hegemonic visions and practices. In Gramsci’s (1971) terms, a social group may adopt, during “‘normal times’—that is when its conduct is not independent and autonomous but submissive and subordinate”—a conception of the world “which is not its own but is borrowed from another group”: this it does for reasons of submission and subordination (p. 327). But at other times
the social group in question may indeed have its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic; a conception which manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes—when, that is, the group is acting as an organic totality. (p. 327)
