Consider a remarkable finding from a survey on domestic violence in India: 45 percent of women reported that a husband was justified in beating his wife for reasons such as neglecting housework or arguing with him. Amazingly, more women than men endorsed the violence committed against them.
This is cultural hegemony at its most visceral — the process by which power maintains itself not through force alone but through the consent it manufactures in the minds of those it oppresses. Antonio Gramsci, writing in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, was the first to name it clearly. He saw how cultural institutions — schools, media, churches — function in the modern era much as moralizing gods did in the ancient world: conditioning people to believe that the system works in their…
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Source www.resilience.org
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