State, community, individual - Societal and Political Psychology ...

and individualism that dominate the Euro- Canadian
social scene.
Here, I wish to comment on the sad state of
affairs that prevails in many First Nations communities
(and elsewhere, as a large percentage
live off-Reserve) by examining Euro-Canadian
cultures of governance and their impact on
First Nations.
I adopt a gramscian approach to develop
one hypothesis that can account for the situation
because it reveals that the nature of Euro-
Canadian governance is everywhere, and for
all First Nations cultures, incompatible with
the development and expression of First Nations’
notions of agency and engagement of
the Self. As Leader of the Italian Communist
Party and a leading critic of the Italian Fascist
regime, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned in
1926 and died 11 years later after a brief period
of liberty. 4 Many of his analyses addressed the
question of why subaltern classes had not revolted
against bourgeois oppression, as Marx
had predicted. Rather, he noticed that as they
became somewhat better off, they tended to
adopt some of the cultural traits of their oppressors.
This, he argued, was due to cultural
hegemony, where western governments for
several decades had experimented with new
techniques of governance that were based on
politicising symbols that many thinkers had
previously ignored because their signifi eds
were situated in the microculture of everyday
life. In other words, by politicising “normal”
practices and values associated with the banal,
by the late 1800s governments were able to
create meaningful cultural capital that bridged
the gap between rich and poor, bourgeois and
working class. It was no surprise that growing
industrialism that inevitably enriched the society
(though not all segments equally) raised
the social aspirations of the better-off underclasses,
to the point that they appropriated
these newly-legitimate signs of power (ways
of eating, of dressing, of socialising, room
layouts, etc.) because these were of course to
be found in their own culture. In other words,
they were given politically legitimate tools to
initiate forms of resistance that were in some
cases even more powerful than bourgeois culture
because the petty bourgeoisie and the rich
proletariat had the advantage of “authenticity”:
the simpler the food, the more their dress was
derived from traditional costumes, the more
robust their wine, the more they could make
Societal and Political Psychology International Review
volume 2 ● number 2 ● 2011 ● pp. 89-93
claims of cultural legitimacy. Gramsci realised
that this repoliticisation of these powerful
symbols of upper class and then of “national”
identity (so they became after they were appropriated
by other classes) in fact reproduced the
system, since these symbols were a) no longer
restricted to a small dominant group but were
available to everyone with the social capital to
use them; b) were doubly validated by the similar
praxis of who, in theory, should be class
enemies. In other words, economic considerations
that were traditionally used as a measure
of people’s orientations towards class and politics
were inadequate descriptions of the how
functioned the political status quo. Gramsci
revolutionised how people see power, as he argued
that beyond the elementary deployment
of force by a ruling elite, there was also a form
of implicit acquiescence by the ruled, not in the
sense of de Toqueville or Rousseau’s notion of
the social contract based on the cognizance of
all parties and on the full disclosure of explicit
values supporting it, but rather in the willingness
to play the power game for smaller stakes
and with slightly re-written rules. 5
Since Gramsci’s time, this position has had
a huge infl uence on the social sciences, as for
example on Michel Foucault’s notion of normalisation
and on widespread ideas of agency
as the ability of individuals to take signifi cant
action and independent positions vis-à-vis established
institutionalised structures and practices
whose overall aim is to channel or weaken
individual action. 6 Pierre Bourdieu adopted the
gramscian line when examining the microcultures
of status. 7 Bourdieu affi rmed that objects
consumed in local status wars are evaluated
according to people’s “birth” (their inherited
cultural baggage) and by « education » (their
acquired cultural baggage). Objects are acquired
according to a person’s habitus, which
is a predisposition to individuality and to individualism.
In the capitalist context, this is an
important set of values that are a manifestation
of bourgeois cultural hegemony (though he
does not use this word).
Herein lies the problem with failed strategies
of local empowerment claimed by First
Nations and conceded by the Canadian government.
Local empowerment focuses on politics
and its symbols, whereas for most Euro-Canadians
governance and notions of empowerment
of the Self (agency) are expressed in non-political
terms. The more First Nations have in-
91