Review:
Late capitalism and changes in production; the information economy; outsourcing; selling ideas
and in consumption: consuming symbolic values; quest for the authentic, which leads to hyperreal products (Starbucks, micro-brews, the House of Blues; the Hearst Castle) . . . looking for something more "real" and more "authentic"

ideology: cultural systems that justify particular social structures

domination, power, and authority: James Scott on Sedaka, Malaysia

hegemony: an ideology internalized by a subordinate group, associated with the Italian Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci  
 On hegemony

Counter-hegemony and resistance
James Scott on Sedaka, mechanized rice farming,  and "everyday forms of peasant resistance" or "weapons of the weak"

June Nash on Bolivian tin miners and ch'alla or El Tío:
El Tío (or ch'alla) is the guardian spirit of the mine/mountain: the devil who owns the mines and to whom offerings must be given.
El Tío is represented partly as a bull, partly as the devil, and partly as a white man. He requires weekly offerings of coca leaves, alcohol and tobacco.  A surprising attribute of El Tío is his large erect penis, which represents fertility and renewal.

Miners eat the mines (earn their living from them) and are eaten by them (literally from health problems, but also socially and symbolically).
While mines were run by Europeans, El Tío ceremonies tolerated; after mined nationalized in early 1950s, government officials tried to stop the ceremonies and El Tío became a symbol of resistance and union organizing

On Hegemony:
The concept of hegemony has gained increasing importance since the 1970s, and is now a standard analytic concept in anthropology. The importance of hegemony is tied to the rediscovery of the "Prison Notebooks" of the Italian Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci (1892-1937).

Gramsci’s ideas were based in Marx’s notion of false consciousness, a state in which individuals are ideologically blinded to the domination they suffer. Simply, the masses can be duped into buying into a system which exploits them. For Marx, ideologies and especially religion were "opiates of the masses" because of the social complacency they produced while parasitically eating away at the soul and livelihood of the being. For Marx, class consciousness was the only true consciousness. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he writes that:

upon the different forms of property [i.e. one's class position], upon the social conditions of existence, as foundation, there is built a superstructure of diversified and characteristic sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general. The class as a whole creates and shapes them out of its material foundation, and out of the corresponding social relationships. The individual in whom they arise through tradition and education, may fancy them to be the true determinant, the real origin, of his activities.

Yet true class consciousness is thwarted by the ideology of the ruling class. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write that

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it . . . . The individuals composing the ruling class posses, among other things, consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things, rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the idea of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

Gramsci gave the term hegemony to this process of political domination through ideological domination. He showed how states use the popular culture, mass media, education, and religion to reinforce an ideology which supports the position of dominant classes--putting words into people’s mouths. Importantly Gramsci showed how subtle the process of imposing hegemony worked, and that its effectiveness is in getting individuals to actively support a system which does not act in their own best interests.

From the website k.i.s.s. of the panopticon :
'Hegemony' -- the willing acceptance of one social group's dominance and control by another and the dominating group's main vehicle of control -- can be seen in terms of the more complex view of social structure, elaborated for the analysis of popular culture, developed in recent years within the Gramscian tradition.  While it is difficult to find an adequate definition for hegemony, Todd Gitlin gives a sense of how the concept works: " [H]egemony is a ruling class's (or alliance's) domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into their common sense and everyday practice; it is the systematic (but not necessarily or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to the established order. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the mechanisms of hegemony and the mechanisms of coercion. . . . In any given society, hegemony and coercion are interwoven."

One more definition: hegemony is “an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotation” (G. Williams in Eley 1994: 320-21)

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Much recent work has turned to counter-hegemony, examining ways in which individuals use the same symbolic resources of hegemonic domination to contest that domination. For example James Scott’s work on "weapons of the weak"