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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This ground-breaking book offers a deep and original analysis of the Mafia - in particular Cosa Nostra - as a distinct form of politics. Marco Santoro breaks with criminal and economic approaches which see the Mafia as an industry of private protection and rationally calculating wealth accumulation. Instead he argues that it represents an alternative way of organizing political relations, the exercise of power, and the struggle for prestige. Nor is this a distortion or failure of the modern Western state, based on the rule of law: the Mafia is best understood as an older, alternative tradition of politics, a distinctly Southern institutional arrangement of social life focused on personal ties and obligations. Today, the Mafia still thrives among subaltern classes and in regions that the modern state has not yet incorporated, as a conservative counter-politics of prestige. Pivotal to understanding this world is a cultural sociology of the Mafia, offering the tools and concepts necessary to penetrate the symbolism and structures of Mafia life. Blending diverse theoretical strands with folk sources and the voices of Mafiosi themselves, Santoro develops a political theory of the Mafia, shedding new light on this captivating, global, and remarkably resilient phenomenon.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Quote
Preface
Notes
1 Mafia, Politics and Social Theory: An Introduction
The Argument
The Setting (The Case Study)
Where Is the ‘Politics’ in Mafia Politics?
Contesting Eurocentric Social Theory
A Final Note on Sources and Method
Notes
2 The ‘Mafia’ in ‘Mafia Studies’: (Re)constructing a Sociological Object
An Archaeology of ‘Mafia Studies’, 1860–1900
Towards a Comparative Approach: Hobsbawm’s Pioneering Contribution and the Neglect of American Research on Organized Crime
The Modern Wisdom (or Mafia Studies since 1970)
Global Mafia (or a Globalization of Mafia Studies)
Notes
3 What is Right with the Economic Theory of the Mafia?
The Rationalist School and Its Foils
The Economic Theory of the Mafia
From the Economic Theory of the Mafia to Protection Theory
Some Problems with the Theory
Towards a Political Theory of the Mafia
Notes
4 The Public Life of Mafiosi
The Publicness of the Mafia
The Public Lives of Mafiosi
Protection as a Field (A First Instalment)
The Public Secrecy of the Mafia
Notes
5 The Mafioso’s Gift, or: Making Sense of an ‘Offer You Cannot Refuse’
Of Gifts and Commodities (and Goods as Well)
The Gift and the Mafia
The Gift of the Godfather: Giving Evidence to the Argument
‘An offer you cannot refuse’
‘I am someone who has always cried over the pain of others’
Of hospitality and conviviality
Politics of the Mafia Gift
Notes
6 Blood,
Bund
and (Personal) Bonds: The Mafia as an Institutional Type
Of Brotherhoods and Institutions
The mafia and the ‘fraternization contract’
The organization model
From brotherhood to
Bund
Rituals of blood
Culture, Writing and Communication
Mafia as mode of personal communication
Hermeneutics of mafia communication
From writing to structure
Violence, Communication and Pathos
Notes
7 Mafia as an Elementary Form of Politics
Refining the Model: The Political Nature of Mafia Obligation
Testing the Model: Questions of Method
Testing the Model: Six Tracks for Future Research
Was there already ‘mafia’ in ancient Mediterranean civilizations?
Secret societies, triads, and the mafia in China
Sicily as the future of Russia, again
Yakuza, the Japanese mafia
Is India the future of Sicily?
Looking for the mafia in the US Congress
From
Mana
to
Mafia
: On the Very Idea of ‘Elementary Forms of Political Life’
Notes
Appendix
‘Mafia Studies’ as a ‘Field’
Notes
References
Name Index
Subject Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 3
Table 3.1: Three ideal-typical research schools/approaches in the field of mafia studies
Table 3.2: Social and intellectual properties of the ETM as a ‘theory group’
Table 3.3: Social and intellectual properties of PT as a ‘theory group’
Chapter 4
Table 4.1: The great divide of public vs. private and its extensions
Appendix
Table A.1: Most cited social science books on the Sicilian mafia (or US Cosa Nostra)
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1: The ‘modern description of Europe’, by Sebastian Münster (...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1: Map of Sicily with the location of the three case studies (Blok 1974; Schneider ...
Figure 2.2: Mafia studies, after 1970: a conceptual map (I)
Figure 2.3: Mafia studies, after 1970: a conceptual map (II)
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1: Number of citations of Gambetta 1993–2019
Figure 3.2: Minimal social network in the mafia
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1: The relation between mafia, state and politics, according to mainstream scholars...
Figure 7.2: The relation between mafia, state and politics, according to this book
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
A Riccardo
MAFIA POLITICS
Marco Santoro
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Marco Santoro 2022
The right of Marco Santoro to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7067-6
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Acknowledgements
This book has been long in the making. In some form, it started in the late 1980s as an undergraduate thesis (tesi di laurea) under the guidance of Lorenzo Ornaghi and the late Gianfranco Miglio at the Catholic University of Milan. My ideas on mafia politics began with their teachings and provocative ideas regarding politics and theory. Moving from political theory to sociology by way of political and institutional history gave me many opportunities to encounter other approaches and meet many people. I would like to remember here the late Cesare Mozzarelli for giving me a sense of what the métier d’historien can be, and Marzio Barbagli for showing me what good empirical sociology should be, and what it cannot be.
A book published in Italian in 2007 (La voce del padrino, a title which plays with ‘His Master’s Voice’ formula in ways that can work only in Italian) was a first major step in my research on mafia politics, to which this book is indebted for Chapter 6. I would like to thank Gianfranco Morosato and Sandro Mazzadra for making that publication possible.
In the years since then, many colleagues and friends have contributed to further shaping and refining my ideas, as well as offering venues for me to present and discuss them. Obviously, I cannot mention everyone, but here I would like to thank a few of the many who have helped pave the way to the publication of this book.
Thanks to Jeff Alexander for inviting me to the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology in 2008 to present my early ruminations on mafia culture structures, and to Philip Smith for reading and commenting on an early paper presented at a seminar on culture and power organized by Fredrik Engelstadt and Wendy Griswold in a wonderful place on a fiord near Oslo in December 2007. Thanks to Harrison C. White for our discussion with his students on the mafia while briefly visiting Columbia’s Department of Sociology and attending his lessons on language and society in 2008. Thanks to Randall Collins for inviting me to Las Vegas in 2011 to present an early version of the argument developed in this book (under the title of Chapter 7) at the annual Congress of the American Sociological Association, and to George Derluguian for organizing the Presidential Panel on mafias where I tried it out. Thanks to Christian Frankel and Paul du Gay for inviting me to the Copenhagen Business School in that same year to present and discuss an early version of Chapter 6.
Thank you, Cristiana Olcese and Mike Savage, for inviting me to the London School of Economics in 2013 to present my ideas on mafia and aesthetics (to be developed in my next book, hopefully) at a conference and then as a guest in the Sociology Department. Thanks to Nando dalla Chiesa for inviting me many times to the Summer School on organized crime and mafias that he has been directing at the University of Milan, offering a venue to discuss my ideas with colleagues and people from the antimafia movement (who usually disliked them). Last, but not least, thanks to Gisèle Sapiro for welcoming me to the EHESS in Paris in 2015 to present my research on the mafia as an invited scholar, and to Deborah Puccio-Den for discussing it in a dedicated seminar during my stay.
My colleagues at the former Department of Communication, University of Bologna, also deserve thanks for their discussion of a very early presentation of Chapter 5. Thanks to Claudio Paolucci for his support in that early phase. Fabio Dei has been supporting me more recently, also contributing anthropological references and criticism of my argument about the place of the gift in mafia politics.
Among colleagues and friends who read and commented on early versions of my argument from a scholarly perspective alien to mafia studies, I recall with pleasure Peter Bearman, Johan Heilbron, George Steinmetz and Alessandro Duranti. The late Alessandro Pizzorno was an insightful commentator of some early writings and an inspiring presence while writing this whole book.
Roberta Sassatelli, Monica Sassatelli and Jasper Chalcraft helped develop the book proposal and put it into good English. Thank you for your help.
Umberto Santino and Anna Puglisi of the Centro Siciliano di Documentazione Giuseppe Impastato made my Palermo trips stimulating and productive. Researchers on the mafia will be ever grateful to you. Cirus Rinaldi and Giovanni Frazzica also contributed to my enjoyment of that strange city during my time there. Thanks to Barbara Grüning for helping with any German translations that came up and for giving me a sense of Italian and even mafia life in comparison with German social life, especially in the DDR. Federica Cabras made me aware of the Nigerian mafia and what young scholars can do while studying young victims of that kind of mafia. Federica Timeto helped me to better understand Sicily and Sicilians, while generously hosting me in Palermo with her cats, showing me films, books, pictures, places and much else. Marco Solaroli and Matteo Gerli helped as research assistants in many professional and friendly ways.
The list of colleagues deserving mention would be too long, but I want to specifically recall here the following: Raimondo Catanzaro, Umberto Santino, Nando dalla Chiesa, Alberto Vannucci, Monica Massari, Maurizio Catino, Federico Varese (who also read and commented on Chapter 3: thank you, Federico!), Felia Allum, Filippo Sabetti, Rocco Sciarrone, Alessandra Dino, Lucia Michelutti, Damiano Palano, Filippo Barbera. Barbara Carnevali deserves a special mention for reading and supporting an early statement of Chapter 2’s ontological argument. I haven’t been so generous with her symmetrical requests of reading, and for this I’m still apologizing.
I would thank Diego Gambetta whose work on the mafia I discovered while writing my undergraduate thesis and attending a seminar he gave in Milan in 1987. His harsh reaction to a critical note of mine published a few years later indirectly fostered my research on the mafia to this day (an exemplary case of unintentional effects of intentional actions, I would say).
Thanks to Richard Burket for your precious and professional help in making my English correct and more readable and much shorter, and to Jonathan Skerrett at Polity for patiently awaiting my chapters over all these years, offering suggestions and encouragement: I’m sure I would never have finished without your gentle but determined spurs.
In the many years I have been working on this book (very slowly at the beginning and then quickly in the last two years), my personal life has been animated by many changes and challenges. Thank you, Roberta, with whom this book project started (as did many other projects, including the biggest one): without you I doubt I would ever have thought about it. Thank you, Federica, for giving me the pathos, flavour, generosity and love of your detested Sicily, as well as a clear idea of what feminism and anti-speciesism may be in sentimental affairs. The Minotaur is still with me! Thank you, Federica, for your critical but passionate approach to mafia studies, your very special antimafia militancy, and your attitude towards life. Battiato has gone, but I always remember you with deep affection. Thank you, Barbara: you have been so close to me so many times and in so many ways in all these years that no words can do justice. Finally, thank you, Chiara: your grace and love is a wonderful ‘free’ gift (it does exist, indeed!). Time will tell us where le vent nous portera.
My son has been a source of joy and personal growth in all these years. I dedicate this book to you, Riccardo. Grazie per sopportare un padre che ti tormenta da quando avevi nove anni per farti vedere Salvatore Giuliano. Ancora non sono riuscito a convincerti. Un giorno lo guarderemo insieme, ne sono certo.
Opening epigraph from: Becoming Deviant, David Matza, Copyright 1969, Prentice-Hall. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.
Epigraph to chapter 3, reproduced with permission, is © 2008 by the University of Klagenfurt, Karl Popper Library.
Epigraph to chapter 5 is reproduced, with permission, from The British Journal of Sociology © 1957 London School of Economics.
Quote
Among their most notable accomplishments, the criminological positivists succeeded in what would seem the impossible. They separated the study of crime from the workings and theory of the state.
Matza 1969, 143
Crime is a political phenomenon and must be analyzed accordingly.
Chambliss 1989, 204
Preface
The political philosophers who taught me a generation ago were quite clear that whatever was to be called ‘political’ must have something to do with the State: if phrases like ‘University politics’ or ‘Church politics’ were used, then they meant that these institutions were playing a part in State politics: otherwise the phrases were simply metaphors. But political structures can be recognized at all levels and in all kinds of activities and can, when appropriate, be compared with one another.
Bailey 2001 [1969], 12
Unlike Frederick Bailey, the political theorists who taught me (in the early 1980s in Italy) were well aware that politics can have a life of its own, quite distinct from the ‘state’. Moving from ideas originally proposed by scholars such as Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, and apparently, though not often explicitly, backed by scientists operating in the life sciences (e.g., Wilson 1975; de Waal 2007 [1982]), they were not afraid to recognize ‘political structures … at all levels and in all kinds of activities’ (to follow the words of Bailey). The so-called ‘mafia’ could easily fit these ideas. In the case of Mosca, this fitness was probably not incidental. As a Sicilian, Mosca was well aware of the limits of the state in monopolizing politics, even though, as a liberal scholar educated in law and committed to national unity, this awareness was not something he could so explicitly and publicly extend to the mafia. In fact, Mosca wrote intensively about the mafia, but never explicitly about it being a ‘political structure’. Weber came closer to this vision, referring to the camorra and the mafia as cases of ‘intermittent financing of political groups’ (1978 [1922], 195) – but it is far from clear whether he considered camorra and mafia as political groups in themselves or as channels for financing more established and acknowledged political groups. Schmitt never wrote a line about the mafia, but his seminal and much debated ‘concept of the political’ is capable of accommodating almost anything that might generate a certain degree of intensity in the relations among friends and enemies – a suggestion that could inspire a whole research programme about all those ‘social unities’ that are commonly labelled as ‘criminal organizations’, including not only mafias but also terrorist groups and even hybrid formations claiming to be states, such as ISIS.
None of these research lines has been systematically pursued in mafia studies – a few attempts moving along these lines notwithstanding (e.g., Sabetti 1984; Calise 1988; Catanzaro 1992 [1988]; Santino 1994; Schneider and Schneider 2004; Collins 2011). In mafia studies, the assumption of an almost perfect and normatively backed equivalence between ‘state’ and politics has been dominant, and only rarely called into question. It is as if social scientists, when studying mafias, tend to believe in states and their claims much more than when they are studying states as such. In some way, this may be considered an indication of the success of criminology, the discipline that, in the words of an influential sociologist of deviance, ‘has managed the astonishing feat of separating the study of crime from the contemplation of the state’ (Cohen 1996, 4). Suspended between the mafia and the state, mafia scholars have little doubt about where to go. If mafia has to do with politics, says the common wisdom, this is only because it also has to do with the state – as an object of law enforcement and a potentially disruptive force within the state (with mafia being responsible for criminal activities such as corruption, collusion and even violence against representatives of the state). Mafias may at best have ‘policies’, but not ‘politics’ – because ‘politics’ is another thing. Or better: should be another thing.
The sense in which politics is intended in this book is rather different. Following a few established, albeit marginalized in mafia studies, traditions in political philosophy and anthropology (e.g., Leach 1954; Bailey 1971, 2001 [1969]; Geertz 1963; Freund 1965; Swartz et al. 1966; Swartz 1969; Thompson 1975; Scott 1985; Derrida 1988; Masters 1989; Rancière 1998), politics is here conceived of as different from the ‘state’. The concept of politics is wider than the concept of the state, and politics as a sphere of human action is larger than what the state, as a historically grounded institution, comprises. Politics exists before, besides and beyond the state. It is probably true that the state is the main protagonist in the political life of modern times, even though there are clues that this is not always the case and that states are losing their authority, and that other forms of political organization do exist beside, behind and sometimes within the state (e.g., Skalnik 2004). But the state has never, in fact, managed to exhaust the sphere of politics. Thinking of ‘mafia politics’, both meanings of politics suggested by Bailey should therefore be included: that is, we should consider mafia as both an institution playing a part in state politics and as a political structure on its own, independently from any assumptions we may have about the ‘state’. As the first meaning is better known, the main focus of this book is on the second meaning.
There are a few expressions in contemporary research that resonate with ‘mafia politics’, the term I have chosen for the title of this book. The first that comes to mind is possibly Achille Mbembe’s (2003) notion of ‘necropolitics’. For Mbembe, the creation of the state’s Other as a permanent enemy to be killed, and the consequent management and disposition of dead (and disappeared) bodies under state auspices, illustrates the ‘necropolitics’ at the heart of contemporary governance. Mbembe (2003, 13) explicitly opposes this politics to mainstream political theorists’ notions of liberal democracies based on the collective agreements of self-aware, autonomous citizens. This approach could help us get at what Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004, 6) have referred to as ‘the secret life of the state’ existing behind the official rhetoric of centralized bureaucratic rationality and the rule of law. Undoubtedly, mafia pertains to a zone of social life where the dead are very present – and not only mass media but also art photography on the mafia has directed their focus precisely to this area.
However, for all its fascination and cognitive appeal, the notion of ‘necropolitics’ covers only one region, and probably not the largest, of what I mean by ‘mafia politics’, lacking not only any precise institutional reference, but missing the specific link to the protection of life that is at the core of mafia politics – and not bare life (as Agamben would call it, the simple life of those who are struggling for survival) but political life, as bìos (Agamben 1998). In this sense, ‘mafia politics’ could be closer to another proposed term, ‘gastro-politics’ (Appadurai 1981), insofar as it would direct our attention to the ways in which politics works as a vital resource, grounded in human appetites and longing for a safe existence. ‘By gastro-politics’, wrote Appadurai, ‘I mean conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic resources as it emerges in social transactions around food. In this sense, gastro-politics is a common feature of many cultures’ (1981, 495). Clearly, also in this case, the focus is more on materiality, albeit semiotically dense, than on social relationships and their management. Mafia politics is radically about the latter.1
Research on the mafia is very insidious – because ‘mafia’ is an insidious reality. It is something that exists, so it is a reality: this book never claims the contrary. But the reality of this ‘reality’ is a complex one: it is multilayered, multivocal, with blurred boundaries with respect to other social realities. This is not uncommon in research on ‘social things’ (e.g., Lemert 1997). In the case of the mafia, however, this is the absolutely normal situation: everything can be read differently, everything could be an object of discussion, everything seems to change according to the perspective from which it is seen. Not surprisingly, the mafia may be as difficult to study as the state – and I would like to recall here the words of Philip Abrams:
We have come to take the state for granted as an object of political practice and political analysis while remaining quite spectacularly unclear as to what the state is … the state, conceived of as a substantial entity separate from society has proved a remarkably elusive object of analysis … the difficulty of studying the state can be seen as in part a result of the nature of the state, but in an equally large part must be seen as a result of the predispositions of its students. (1988, 59, 61–2)
The difficulties in studying the state are nowhere more evident than when dealing with crime. The nexus of state and crime is far from exceptional. The very existence of crime and criminals is obviously a matter of state authority and state laws (e.g., Briquet and Favarel–Garrigues 2010). But the links between crime and state are not limited to official penalties, courts, police, prisons and the like. It seems there are strong tendencies for states to engage directly in criminal activities or to enter the world of crime in spite of itself, or at least of its official claims. You do not need to look to the distant past or very far away to see these tendencies at work. In the Middle East, organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq provide local governance while participating in a range of offshore illicit activities and organizing terrorist activities (e.g., Haidar 2019). Armed groups in Afghanistan, Colombia and Mali have been engaged in drug trafficking, often with the connivance, if not outright participation, of state agencies (e.g., McCoy 2003). In Somalia, organized piracy emerged a decade ago as a central factor in the country’s political economy – and its complex politics and long-running civil war (Shortland and Varese 2016). In the Sahel and North Africa, militant, terrorist and militia fortunes have been tied to dynamics in organized hostage markets and in drug, oil and cigarette smuggling. In Central Africa, the traffic in diamonds and wildlife is well established (Bayart et al. 1999). In the Balkans and Turkey, cigarette smuggling, organ trafficking, human trafficking and trade in stolen cars have all been factors in the region’s recent past and post-war politics (cf. Cockayne 2016; see also Chambliss 1989; Heyman 1999; Nordstrom 2007; Wilson 2009; Chambliss et al. 2010).
To investigate the political nature of mafias is strategic to answering a question many people are asking nowadays: how is the convergence between mafias and states, which is happening in every corner of the world right before our eyes, possible? How can it be that risks of ‘mafia states’ are emerging worldwide? The answer given in this book is simple: because mafias and states share exactly the same nature, because they are two institutional forms of political life, because even if they are almost opposites, they are arranged in such a way as to make one the perfect counterpart of the other. Like yin and yang, they are mutually reinforcing and complementary.
This book has been a long time in the making. In a way, it started as a tesi di laurea (Master’s thesis) in 1988 in political science, which developed into a book twenty years later (Santoro 2007). In the meantime, I have worked on many other topics – such as the social history of legal professions, the sociology of artistic production and cultural consecration, the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, the Chicago School of sociology, the international circulation of ideas – all of which have helped me to refine my vision of the mafia by exposing me to literature that is not typically used by mafia scholars. The 2007 book is the most immediate antecedent to this one – the latter sharing some arguments of the former but adding many new insights mainly drawn from research programmes I was not aware of back then (in part because they were not yet available), such as the debate on Southern Theory and alternative traditions in social theory (Reed-Danahay 1995; Alatas 2006a, 2014; Connell 2007; Patel 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012) and the new historiography of the state (Ruggie 1993; Spruyt 1994; Thompson 1994; see also van der Pijl 2007).
In its main thesis, this book joins a series of other books that are contributing from different perspectives and intellectual traditions to develop what I would call a political theory of the mafia – something nobody yet seems ready to openly propose as such, but whose seeds have been sown in the past few decades by many scholars, including two giants in the historical social sciences: Eric Hobsbawm (1959) and Charles Tilly (1985). What a (sociologically grounded and historically sensitive) political theory of the mafia might look like is the question that inspired and drove the writing of this book.
Notes
1
Other exemplars would include ‘machine politics’ (e.g., Merton 1949; Scott 1969), ‘kinship politics’ (e.g., Hammel 2005), ‘clan politics’ (e.g., Collins 2004; Schatz 2004; Ceccarelli 2007), ‘patronal politics’ (e.g., Hale 2015), ‘warlord politics’ (e.g., Reno 1998) or even ‘chimpanzee politics’ (e.g., de Waal 2007 [1982]).
1Mafia, Politics and Social Theory: An Introduction
Throughout the history of the human race no land and no people have suffered so terribly from slavery, from foreign conquests and oppressions, and none have struggled so irrepressibly for emancipation as Sicily and the Sicilians. Almost from the time when Polyphemus promenaded around Etna, or when Ceres taught the Siculi the culture of grain, to our day, Sicily has been the theater of uninterrupted invasions and wars, and of unflinching resistance. The Sicilians are a mixture of almost all southern and northern races; first, of the aboriginal Sicanians, with Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and slaves from all regions under heaven, imported into the island by traffic or war; and then of Arabs, Normans, and Italians. The Sicilians, in all these transformations and modifications, have battled, and still battle, for their freedom.
Marx 1860
The Argument
This book aims to offer a fresh perspective on mafias which, in many ways, is an alternative to what nowadays constitutes the mainstream in this research field. Taking the Sicilian case as its main reference point, the book develops the idea that what mafiosi do is better understood if framed not as ‘(organized) crime’, nor as ‘business’ or ‘economy’, as a widespread scholarly wisdom maintains,1 but as ‘politics’. Like feudalism, the city-state or the empire, what we call ‘mafia’ identifies first and foremost a way of organizing and managing human relationships among people who mutually recognize themselves as participants in the same collective identity: political relationships, in other words. This view resonates with, and qualifies, the description of mafia set forth by a renowned insider, Bill Bonanno, the son of Cosa Nostra godfather Joseph ‘Joe’ Bonanno: ‘[Mafia] is in the way one person connects to another. Mafioso is, first and last, about the nature of relationships’ (Bonanno 1999, xv).
That mafiosi also perform some politically relevant functions – e.g., they provide votes to politicians – is well known, but this book goes well beyond this simple and well-documented fact. It argues that the mafia is inherently a political institution, which may perform a number of different functions (as political parties do, for instance), but is especially well suited to performing political ones because the nature of social relationships in mafia life is eminently political.
To be sure, the mafia may be even more than politics: as this book maintains from the start, what we call ‘mafia’ is really a total social fact (as Marcel Mauss would say) wherein politics, economics, religion, sexuality, morality and many other social things converge and coexist. The book acknowledges this complexity but chooses to analytically emphasize the political side of this totality because of its centrality to the whole architecture. Politics is the pillar of that ‘total social fact’ called mafia. Seen from the vantage point of politics, it is argued, the mafia may be better captured in its genesis, its inner working mechanisms and its reproductive/expansive power.
Of course, how we conceive of ‘politics’ is essential to consider. If we narrowly define politics as the sphere of the (liberal, constitutional, maybe also democratic) state, the mafia falls out of this realm, by definition. It can thus be easily relegated to other – presumably less noble and less legitimate – institutional fields, such as economics, business and, obviously, crime. But if we adopt a wider and more historically sound concept of politics, and accept that there have been, and still are, various ways of organizing political life, including ways that have been and still are framed as ‘crime’ by the (liberal, constitutional, maybe also democratic) state, then a whole research field opens itself up to our investigations. That is the move made by this book, which could also be read as a book on politics and the ways of conceiving it in contemporary sociological terms.
But mafia is not simply ‘politics’ at large (as it is not simply ‘business’, even for those observers and scholars who adopt an economic perspective). If politics is, indeed, a very general category, mafia exhibits the features of only a certain kind of politics: more precisely, it accounts for a certain mode of political organization. The latter is at the centre of the book, which develops what I would call a political theory of the mafia, modelling the political aspect of mafia’s social totality, and putting it centre stage. A major claim of the book is that this political mode is deeply rooted in a popular reinterpretation of an ancient and diffused aristocratic culture2 and should be conceived as a mode of political expression of historically subaltern groups in their quest for status and power.
Put in other terms: I suggest that what we call ‘mafia’ could be conceived of as a sort of popular or folk politics that has gained some degree of local and even translocal hegemony by innovatively drawing on cultural models which are firmly opposed to bourgeois ones – ranging from aristocratic to subaltern modes of cultural expression. ‘Mafia’ is what may happen to ‘hidden transcripts’, James C. Scott’s (1990) famous formula for capturing subaltern infrapolitics,3 when their bearers become locally dominant while refusing to culturally transform into a fully-fledged dominant class imbued with bourgeois, middle-class values, i.e. the values at the core of the contemporary global social world. The warrior ethos of the old aristocratic classes (in Sicily, the baronial culture; in Japan, the samurai ethos) is the cultural horizon of mafiosi – not the spirit of capitalism, not a bourgeois civic culture (see Elias 1982 [1969]; on the samurai ethos, see Ikegami 1997; on the Sicilian baroni, see Pontieri 1943; Marino 1964). Instead of challenging the old hierarchies and eventually creating new ones – which is the aim of ‘progressive’ subaltern groups, according to modernist and socialist visions of politics – mafiosi have worked, and still work, hard in order to ‘achieve a superior rank while making no objection to the persistence of a hierarchical order’ (Gould 2003, 164). Out of utopia, and in purely analytical terms, there is no special reason to prefer the first (‘progressive’) option to the second (call it ‘conservative’). This analytical distinction is a crucial point for understanding the mafia in sociological terms – a distinction this book maintains in order to develop a non-normative, non-statist, and alternative understanding of the mafia as a global form.
At risk of being repetitive, a warning is necessary at this point in order to prevent possible objections and even misunderstandings – and the book elaborates on this, as it is a crucial theoretical element of the whole argument. Contrary to what our received wisdom might suggest, to say that mafia is of a political nature is not the same as advancing an equation between the mafia and the state – a common stance in the past, especially among lawyers and jurists. Indeed, this book argues that the mafia is very different from the state, even if they can both be placed in the sphere of politics. But the state, as a historical institution, has not monopolized politics, and politics may be organized in many other ways (see Masters 1989; Poggi 1991; Schmitt 1996 [1932]). To be sure, the equation of mafia with the state has been strongly criticized by many scholars in recent decades, including the promoters and supporters of an economic theory of the mafia who conceive of it as an industry for private protection. This book maintains that they are right in saying that the mafia is different from the state, but that they go too far when they infer from this that the mafia is ‘a specific economic enterprise’ (Gambetta 1993, 1).
Mafia may be an enterprise, but it is far from patently obvious that it is an economic enterprise. It is one thing to say that mafiosi ‘produce and promote’ something like protection, but it is quite another to say that they also sell what they produce and promote. Production is such a general category of social life that anything humans do can be subsumed under this rubric: from culture to deviance to space. Promotion is a communicative function that can work in any setting, from industry to social movements to family. On the contrary, selling is a much more specific activity, which presumes the existence of a market and the working of a commoditization process – something that has only occurred in certain places and times, and with reference to certain goods (e.g., Sassatelli 2007). As I will show, mafiosi do not sell; they simply give their ‘help’, they offer their ‘support’, while ritually emphasizing their disinterest; characteristically, they make gifts. And a gift is a totally different thing from a commodity (Mauss 1990 [1925]; Bourdieu 1980, 1996 [1992], 2017; Gregory 1982; Godbout and Caillé 1998; Godelier 1999; Silber 2009; Liebersohn 2011; Caillé 2020).
To insist that ‘mafia’ is not to be mistaken for the state does not mean that the state is irrelevant for the understanding of mafia. As the currently dominant, most legitimate mode of political organization worldwide, the (modern, originally European) state is clearly the necessary reference point for any understanding of the mafia – be this framed in political terms, as suggested here, or in criminological and/or economic terms, as maintained by current scholarship. What is crime and what belongs to economics instead of politics is contingent upon the state and its workings. A close look at the state as a historically grounded political institution should therefore be pivotal in any serious analysis of the mafia. However, this is an intellectual gambit that current scholarship on mafia rarely makes, preferring to move from implicit and normative ideas of the state. The consequence is that, even in the best literature, a sociology of the mafia is contrasted with a philosophy of the state – leaving the state, as it were, in the heaven of pure ideals and forms while firmly locating the mafia in the dirty, material ground. The absence of the state was normal in the social sciences in the 1950s to 1970s – the same period in which mafia studies developed (e.g., Hobsbawm 1959; Hess 1970; Schneider and Schneider 1976; Arlacchi 1983a; for partial exceptions, see Blok 1974; Sabetti 1984). It is less acceptable in current scholarship, after the ‘return of the state’ occurred in the 1980s (e.g., Almond 1988; Spruyt 2002). We could say that, in mafia studies, the state still needs to be brought back in (Evans et al. 2010 [1985]).
This book aims to facilitate this move, and argues for the adoption of a heuristic symmetry in the study of the mafia.4 What new light could be shed on the mafia if we put aside the normative claims of the (European, liberal, modern) state and look at both the mafia and the state in truly sociological, i.e. empirically disenchanted, terms? What new light could be shed on the mafia if we put the state, with its normative claims, in brackets and problematize our hopes for the advent of a never fully gained ‘modernity’? What light could we shed on the mafia if we consider the idea that politics includes the voices and actions of subalterns (Guha 1999 [1983]; Rancière 1998; Scott 1985, 1990), and accept that people coming from the subaltern classes may become dominant in certain conditions – not necessarily backed by the state’s laws and codes – while remaining faithful to their social and cultural background?
These are the questions from which this book springs. In replying, it argues that what we name ‘mafia’ may be conceived of as a special mode of political organization whose institutional logic can be identified through a comparison with other (equally historical) modes – such as the (territorial, sovereign, and originally European) state, the city-state, the city-league, various patrimonial forms of administration, and more primitive forms of political organization such as the chiefdom. While identifiable with none of those, the mafia draws elements, techniques and mechanisms from many of them, in an institutional synthesis that may really be considered as a masterwork of (collective and individual) social engineering.
The words ‘mafia’ and ‘mafiosi’
The origins of the name ‘mafia’ remain rather obscure. A number of hypotheses exist, some of them more persuasive than others. The confusion started in the very early days after Italian unification (1861), when suggestions about the original meaning and the linguistic roots of the word made their first appearance. Strange as it may seem, no written evidence of the word exists before Italian unification; indeed, dictionaries of the time did not hesitate to attribute the matrix of the name to northern Italian dialect – be it the Piedmontese or the Tuscan vernacular. At least on this point some agreement has been reached relatively quickly: no one would object anymore to the fact that ‘mafia’ is a Sicilian word that existed well before Italian unification – even if how much before is far from clear, given that the etymological roots of the word are not clear. The first documented occurrence of the term dates back to 1865, when the word was evoked in an official, but not public, report by a Piedmontese officer to account for everything against the new government that could be said to exist in Sicily – including anarchists and socialists. The first authoritative testimony about the word and its social uses in common speech dates back to 1889. According to the influential Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), the adjective mafiusu (in Italian translated as ‘mafioso’) was in use in his Palermo neighbourhood when he was a child, with the meaning of ‘cute’, ‘smart’, ‘well done’ (Pitrè 1889, 2008). No immediate connection with crime existed at the time, according to this authoritative source. In fact, the source of the association with the criminal world of what was previously a word with aesthetic and maybe ethical connotations was a literary invention. In the early 1860s, a drama was written and performed in Palermo with the title of I mafiusi di la Vicaria, set in a prison (Vicaria was the traditional name of the prison building in Palermo) with a few prisoners as characters. This was a story of prison life and eventual redemption, in which a sort of local boss, after years spent in prison acting as the ‘provider of social order’, found a new civic consciousness once free. Originally staged in 1863 and performed in Sicilian theatres throughout that decade, the drama had some relevant success in the 1880s, even being represented in theatres in Rome. In sum, an event in the ongoing national public sphere was at the origin of an association – that of the name ‘mafia’ with a certain social phenomenology linked to the world of prisons and gangs – which would know further success in subsequent decades. With the massive Italian migration to the US, the word ‘mafia’ reached the other shores of the Atlantic, thereby starting its international circulation – a phenomenon we are still witnessing today.
Two points need some further clarification. First, if not the name, then the social reality to which the name refers pre-existed the arrival of the Piedmontese army. References to a social phenomenology appearing similar to what was subsequently intended with the term ‘mafia’ without being named as such date back to at least 1838: not exactly prisons and gangs, but ‘fraternities’ and ‘sects’ operating as ‘small Governments inside the Government’ (see Pontieri 1945, 190–1). Second, regarding the etymology, the most accredited argument among an array of many is that mafia’s roots are in the Arabic language – Arabic being the idiom of the conquerors of the island in the High Middle Ages – and Arabic is a strong matrix of many Sicilian dialectal words still current today (Arab influences are still visible today in other cultural forms, such as regional Sicilian cuisine and some local artistic expressions, like folk music). Possibly, the most sociologically interesting hypothesis about etymology sees the name ‘mafia’ derived from the Arabic mu’afa which means ‘safety and protection’. Certainly, it is the most acceptable also because of the theoretical understanding of protection as one crucial objective of mafiosi activities, if not their core activity. What mafiosi do, says the sociological current common wisdom, is provide protection to people and things. While made famous and analytically elaborated by Gambetta (1993), this association with protection is widespread in the literature on the mafia, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. Interestingly, protection is far from a special activity of mafiosi: indeed, protection is exactly what any political institution and leader would claim to provide, according to a well-established line of thought dating back to Greek political theory, and with Thomas Hobbes as its modern champion. As ‘protection’ is what mafia deals with, it is worth investigating what protection is and what its provision entails – something we will do in the next chapter.
There is a last hypothesis, authoritatively advanced by the Italian linguist Mario Alinei, a major scholar of Indo-European languages, who sees in the word ‘mafia’ a derivation from the Osco-Umbrian (ancient pre-Latin italic language) (a)mafla, whose meaning is ‘comparable’ to the Latin amicitia (friendship) with an immediate reference to the meaning of ‘political friendship’, i.e. alliance, which for Alinei may account for the positive meanings attached to the word ‘mafia’ in Sicily and in the Mezzogiorno.
Source: Novacco 1959; Hess 1970; Lo Monaco 1990; Patella 2002; Alinei 2007.
The Setting (The Case Study)
The Sicilian mafia is the main empirical focus of this book, on the assumption that, while not exhausting the phenomenon, this regional and historical case has a sort of ontological primacy – at the very least for giving the name to the category. However, in developing and testing its arguments, the book makes comparative references to other mafias as well, especially the American Cosa Nostra (strongly linked to the Sicilian mafia), the Neapolitan camorra, the Calabria-based ’ndrangheta, the Russian mafiya, the Japanese yakuza and the Chinese triads. An unusual comparative attention is also devoted to a still relatively understudied instance of mafia, the Indian mafia (Ghosh 1991; Michelutti et al. 2018). It is one of the strategic moves of the book to compare cases of mafia life in geographically and culturally distant locations that may have some commonalities in their political histories. What makes India an interesting comparative case for a study of mafia focused on the Sicilian case is its colonial past under the British.
Suffice it to say that, over ten centuries, Sicily was conquered and ruled by such different peoples as Muslim Saracens, Normans, the French, Aragones, the Spanish and, finally, (northern) Italians. After unification, Sicily accounted for a large portion of the Italian emigration towards the United States, Latin America and Africa. Emigration means not only exit and loss, but also gaining new ideas and institutions through transnational circuits, mimicry and imitation. The American experience is an integral part of the Sicilian mafia’s current repertoire – a pattern that works also for other Italian mafias. But the same could be said for other experiences of contact and interchange as well. Muslim domination lasted two centuries, leaving a deep cultural heritage that is still visible in folklore, language, art and gastronomy (Britt 2007; Dalli 2008). In the twelfth century, Sicily was the site of one of the very first experiments in state-building in the world (under the Normans, who introduced feudalism to the island), before becoming a sought-after colony of grand foreign powers like the rising French monarchy, the Habsburg Empire and then the Bourbons, who dominated in Spain and Italy from the sixteenth century well into the nineteenth. Sicily’s status changed many times; sometimes it was a totally dependent colony (not only under foreign powers in Paris or Madrid, but also under Italian continental cities like Naples), at other times it was a semi-autonomous regional state. When the mafia was first ‘discovered’ – something which occurred in the 1830s – Sicily was still a dominated country in the Mediterranean Sea, at the extreme southern periphery of Europe, very close to Africa, and longing for its independence, or at least some degree of political autonomy (Abulafia 1977, 1987; Bresc and Bresc-Bautier 1993; Takayama 2019).
While never formally a colony, for centuries Sicily had been under the dominion of some other, often foreign, political centre. The famous Sicilian Vespers (1282) epitomises the strong tensions this situation of subjection could generate. After Spanish domination, which lasted for more than two centuries (see Benigno 2007), a British protectorate was established in 1806 continuing until 1816 – a short period, but also a very productive one (Simon 2021). In those few years, in fact, a series of reforms changed the political and institutional structure of the island – including the definitive demise of feudalism and experimentation with a liberal constitution and parliamentary monarchy (Mack Smith 1968). The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of intense mobilization, and insurgences occurred in 1820, 1838, 1848 and 1866 (Nicotri 1934). Even after Italian unification (1861), Sicily was periodically the site and target of political projects of separation from the Italian national state, seen by many Sicilians as a colonial power. In 1943, the Sicilian separatist movement gained new force and, with the aid, it seems, of organized banditry (for the occasion promoted to the status of a newly formed Sicilian army) and the mafia, produced the most impressive moment of crisis in national identity since unification (Marino 1979). The granting of regional autonomy to Sicily after the Second World War was mainly an institutional response from the national centre to this deep and dangerous local quest for independence. In brief, we could say that the Sicilian mafia evolved in a context of semi-colonial dependence periodically marked by violent popular insurgencies against foreign dominators. The aforementioned alliance of mafia with political separatism was hardly occasional. We can say that no event of political mobilization in the modern history of Sicily, at least since the 1830s, has taken place without the active presence of the mafia and mafiosi. This presence is just the tip of the iceberg of the political role played by the mafia in Sicily, and, from this basis, in other parts of the globe.
The decades that predated the discovery of the (Sicilian) mafia were the same in which a relatively new institutional form, the sovereign territorial state, was expanding its hegemony from specific regions of central Europe, such as England and France (and to a lesser degree Prussia), where it was first elaborated, to the rest of Europe, including Sicily. Historically, both France and England had important vested interests in the Mediterranean island: France in the thirteenth century (the period of the Vespers), England (the other island where the Normans dominated and had started the institutional experiments which strongly contributed to the early emergence of the state: see Strayer 1970) until the early nineteenth century, during and after the Napoleonic wars, when Sicily was under the protection of the United Kingdom.
The multilayered political and social history of Sicily, from the Middle Ages to national unification under the Kingdom of Italy (1861) and beyond, accounts for the institutional synthesis that the name ‘mafia’ has the power to evoke. It is a claim of this book that understanding the Sicilian mafia means accounting for its social and institutional genesis in this complex and long-lasting web of influences and interests impinging upon Sicily since the Middle Ages (see Greif 2006 for a discussion about the lasting influence of medieval institutions). The rise of the mafia is just another aspect of the history of the conflict between the state and other political forms – such as city-states, empires, city-empires, as well as more primordial but effective organizations such as clans, families, warrior-leagues and so on – and it is within this history that it has to be embedded. Some elements suggest that the mafia’s institutional history may also be embedded in the history of political ideas, including utopian (e.g., socialist and, especially, anarchist) ones. In this respect, even though they are probably exceptional, the stories of Vito Cascio Ferro and Bernardino Verro – respectively, an influential godfather who was a leading local socialist and anarchist in his youth, and a renowned Sicilian trade unionist who was a mafioso in his youth – are enlightening. As a minor point of the book, I emphasize the anarchist moment as the plea for an understanding of the mafia’s structure and functions independently from any concession to the state as a political ideal and an institutional model; as I will never be tired of repeating, I want to analyse and assess ‘the mafia’ from a radically nonstate-centric and, possibly, non-Westernized point of view. This emphasis on anarchism is not only a theoretical move but a return to what I see as one major historical spur to the development of mafias all over the world, including Italy. Contrary to an entrenched belief – including Francis Marion Crawford’s claim, which I will cite in the next section – anarchism and the mafia, at least in Sicily and the US, ran parallel for a while. The book also capitalizes on this historical connection to derive a few theoretical implications.
However, the Mediterranean region is a cultural formation on its own (Cassano 2001; Piterberg et al. 2010), and in this historical and geographical juncture we have to locate the historical experience that gave ‘mafia’ its name, i.e. the Sicilian mafia. This was actually the great insight of Fernand Braudel’s 1949 study, The Mediterranean World: the idea that it was possible to have a society maintaining itself through the active exchange of goods, people and ideas without a unified ‘administrated territory’ as we know it in our statist times. This book further develops the idea that Sicily – i.e. the place where something like ‘a mafia’ was first identified in the 1860s and from which every analysis of the mafia as a social type should start – is located in this Mediterranean world between Europe (i.e. a dominant region of the global North) and Africa, or better, the African shores of the Mediterranean Sea (i.e. an important piece of the global South). It occupies an interstitial location between Europe/civilization and Africa/barbarism (see, e.g., Niceforo 1899). It is worth recalling that, just after political unification, many functionaries and soldiers coming from the northern Italian regions labelled Sicily as ‘Africa’ (see Schneider 1998; Moe 2002). Indeed, there are also documented connections between mafiosi and Africa at least since the end of the nineteenth century – and in some periods, there was a mafia family based in Tunis. But the relation between the mafia and Muslim Africa goes deeper than this, and has to do with the common roots in the medieval Arab and Muslim domination that produced the word ‘mafia’ itself – a local popular derivation from Arab terms meaning, not by chance, ‘protection, shelter’ (see Patella 2002; see also pp. 5–7).
This ‘zone of contact’ has a culture of its own. Honour is a well-known element of this Mediterranean cultural world (Peristiany 1965; Herzfeld 1987; Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers 1992; Blok 2001; Giordano 2012), on which even Pierre Bourdieu (1977) focused attention in his early experiences as an ethnologist working in Algeria among the Berbers (it must be recalled that the Berbers were among Sicily’s rulers in the Middle Ages). Other common features can be listed as well – for instance, a certain conception of justice and of personal loyalties (e.g., Rosen 2002; Cornell 2005). Indeed, we should remember that Sicily was also heavily influenced by Greek culture, as its eastern shores were colonized by the Greeks in the eighth century bc. As shown by van Wees (2001), archaic ancient Greek society and politics had many similarities with the contemporary mafia’s culture of violent competition. However, it is a matter of fact that although the Greek influence was strong in the eastern provinces of Sicily, that was not the case in the western provinces, where the mafia developed. In the western provinces of the island, it is the Arabs who left a legacy. Rather than conceiving them just as mere evidence of deeply rooted traditions, I suggest that the similarities between the Sicilian mafia and ancient Greek politics have to do with what, in the last chapter of the book, will be called the ‘elementary forms of political life’ (see also Posner 1979).
What the Arab, Greek and African elements remind us is that Sicily, and the Sicilian mafia as well, developed in an area where the globalizing world about which we so intensively talk today was already somehow in place (Abu-Lughod 1989). Sicily existed midway between North and South, influenced by European history but geographically, and even ethnologically, closer to the Mediterranean world, to that southern part of Europe which borders on the northern part of Africa. Using concepts elaborated in northern Europe, at the historical core of the global North, or in the US to understand other parts of the world is an example of what a few years ago Susanne Rudolph (2005) termed ‘the imperialism of categories’ (see also Rudolph and Rudolph 2010). This is also what sociological research on the mafia has typically done, exporting concepts and methods typically rooted in Anglo-American Lockean universal liberalism (sometimes in German neo-Kantian ethical universalism) and applying them to make sense of the mafia’s patterns of social life, that is, a totally different historical, geographical and cultural experience. This alternative, southern location and identification is what this book wants to privilege, grounding our understanding of the Sicilian mafia in situated, local knowledge, and connecting the sociological understanding of the mafia to alternative conceptual repertoires, on the one hand, and to contemporary pleas for the rethinking of the social sciences as a world scale affair, on the other (e.g., Chakrabarty 2000; Alatas 2006a; Connell 2007; Patel 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 2016). This is the object of the Chapters 4–6
