This special issue is about the anthropological use of the analytical tools Antonio Gramsci's work offers. It is about the connection between implicit and taken-forgranted ideas, claims, power hierarchies, struggles, and implicated moralizations and their effects. We foreground common sense as a key concept in terms of its potential for contemporary ethnography. Common sense allows us to work through and with ethnography towards an understanding of hegemony and history, two other influential Gramscian concepts anthropologists work with and build on. Such an approach allows for a multi-threaded and integrative analysis in the politically and economically charged times we live in, times in which the historical political forces in Europe (where we base the analyses of the articles in the issue) often resemble the "regressive modernization" that Stuart Hall described with a Gramscian vocabulary when analyzing the Thatcher era in the UK and its mix between authoritarian neoliberalism and conservativism (Hall 1998). Notably, the materialist and ideologyfocused understanding of culture that Gramsci's work offers (Crehan 2011) is both sensitive to its complexity, fluidity-indeed, maybe most notably, its paradoxicality. Also, it directs attention to the persistence of power structures in society and how they frame relations, ways of life, and livelihoods. In this "Introduction" section, we lay out our take on a Gramscian analysis of common sense in more detail and discuss its potential for providing nuance and critique.