Antonio Gramsci and medical anthropology today. Hegemony, agency and transforming persons

This article has only one aim: to demonstrate the urgency for contemporary medical anthropology of a direct and reflexive reading of the works of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci's dialogic and experimental way of thinking seems to elude all the interpretive classifications furnished by the exegetes or by anthropological theory. The author of this article lays stress on Gramsci's anthropological vocation and explores three main questions: hegemony, agency, and transformations of the person. There is a dramatic and reflexive attention in Gramsci for the bodily esperience of suffering, for the embodiment processes, and at the same time an "engaged observation", which can be called ethnographic, of the the microphysics of social transformation, the hegemony and the agency of the State, the person, and the collectivity. The Gramscian critique can push contemporary medical anthropology to lay stress on the political aspects of embodiment in order to put into question the health-illness dichotomy and to conceive it instead as a socio-political process. This involves a reinforcement of a critical, reflexive, self-objectifying methodology inside the medical anthropological scientific and academic field itself.