An important concept to cultural anthropology is hegemony, which in general is cultural logic or a ‘common sense’ to a given culture. There is a mountain of meaning behind understanding hegemony, but it is an informative way of seeing the cultural distinctiveness of every individual as a product of collective human minds over the course of many generations in a given culture, society, and now increasingly, the world. Hegemony is a product of popular discourse naturalized through discursive practice, which is always evolving – that is, people’s thinking aligns to culturally specific ways of viewing the world through influence, practice, and reinforcement. Hegemony is complex: it helps explain language, slang, accent, etc, as well as sociopolitical beliefs such as gender roles, governance, class, race, etc. Hegemony is always adapting, changing, and extremely hard to actually pin down and define due to this (technology being an important example of this – imagine telling a Yanomami of the Amazon everything about the iPhone; their cultural logic would have no idea what to make of such a thing, let alone how to use it; then tell them about the iPad) – however, by recognizing hegemony, we see what we have in common with others, what makes the human mind in general so complex, and what we deem ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’ about our social world beyond science is really a product of our collective minds. Scientific reasoning underlies hegemony as objective reality, while hegemony is the reality given to us by our subjectivities, to put it purely academically.
Modern anthropology goes to great depths in understanding hegemony in our globalized world of open borders, open economies, governmental deregulation, the enormous growth and power of the private sector, widespread media influence – essentially the global ‘free market’ or neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is an economic model championed by University of Chicago economists since the 1970s (but its roots go much deeper, which I will not dwell on here) with the likes of Milton Friedman and his influence on Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. It essentially gives absolute power and freedom to the market for all individuals in all societies to take part in, with each government acting to support its people entering the free market (through job training programs and buttressing the growth of the private sector through tax breaks, subsidies, and the like) – which is largely what we have today in the US with few exceptions. Classical liberalism relies on social programs supporting individual rights such as unions, welfare, and social security to fill in the spaces and inconsistencies that a capitalist society inherently leaves in its path, but what makes neoliberalism even ‘liberal’ at all in this sense is how it approaches the market for everyone to be a part of. ‘Neoconservatism’, on the other side, takes neoliberalism’s economic and social principles but with the added ‘state-centric’ importance in protecting national borders, patriotism to the nation state, and an enormous national defense to protect it all.
The main line of argument against this economic approach is that it reifies the ‘free market’, or tries to make reality out of the abstract. The ‘free market’ we take part in is a product of hegemony just like Coke advertising is to an American mind and because it is an abstract concept and not objective reality, when we rely so heartily on it as neoliberalism does, great inconsistencies and social problems appear. Neoliberal hegemony makes common sense out of the competitive ‘nature’ of humans as applied to the politics of the economy, but that ‘nature’ is entirely subjective and that is what is key to this understanding (and why Social Darwinism via Herbert Spencer was disproved even before the 20th century as attempting to reify ‘race’ and ‘class’ in a hierarchical system). The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is common sense to neoliberal hegemony because of a reified individual socioeconomic status – but there is nothing more real about that than saying money grows on trees, hegemonically speaking – socioeconomic status became imprinted in logic as soon as neoliberalism deemed it so as an economic force, with morality being more associated with poverty than ever (i.e. drug use, welfare dependency, criminality), rather than an enormous shortcoming of our economic system we have in place in people’s access to the ‘free’ market of realistic growth (beyond a plethora minimum wage jobs with no upward mobility that no one really wants – besides immigrants whose hegemonies make these low-level jobs seem adequate in comparison to the lives they have had in another country). One could argue ideologues such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck make their careers on defending the social effects of this very reified hegemony of the free market, but I’m getting way ahead of myself.
What is most prescient of the issue is that neoliberalism, globalization, and the ‘free market’ are the products of US-led western minds, and when it is forced (or coerced through the World Bank, IMF, NAFTA, etc.) onto other countries, societies, and cultures it is an instance of imperialism, NOT the reified ‘succumbing to the forces of modernity’ that we reason in our hegemonic minds. What our western hegemony erases in its path of dominance is extremely important to cultural anthropologists, myself (obviously) included. Chile has a brutal history in dealing with this, as well as much of the Latin American continent of which I intend to further my study in.
I feel that I need to include this post on hegemony and neoliberalism before I delve deeper into Chilean history, its key social figures, and its modern society that I plan to include in later posts dealing within the context of anthropological understanding. Without this introduction I would get ahead of myself too fast before showing why these concepts matter so much to anthropologists (and thus what can be learned from anthropology) and how change is indeed possible, at the very least from this point of view of looking at hegemony through discursive practice and its effect on the individual (for more on this, see J.K. Gibson-Graham’s A Postcapitalist Politics). What underlies all of this is my belief that culture is what makes humanity so unique and its differences so illuminating and important to our modern world that, in turn, makes my education in anthropology so necessary and rewarding. With neoliberalism as a global force actively wiping out cultural distinctiveness in each society’s reified ‘path to modernity’ (not to mention the very real disastrous environmental effects it leaves on each ecosystem with its large-scale industry and agriculture) we lose so much of humanity in the local knowledge we can all learn from that cultures produce through their own hegemony rather than from inheriting ours (my post on the bar scene in Bellavista further illuminates this problem that I find). So, bear with me while I delve into why Chile matters in the context of all this.
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