Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro

Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro


Скачать книгу
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. 57).

      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).

      To limit the history of mafia – even of the Sicilian mafia – to the adventures of a single country would in any case mean to surreptitiously accept what has been called methodological nationalism – the methodological assumption that ‘a particular nation would provide the constant unit of observation through all historical transformations, the “thing” whose change history was supposed to describe’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 305). Problematic in all cases, this assumption is especially troubling in the study of mafias. Wherever and whenever they developed – in the first half of the nineteenth century in southern Italy, at the beginning of the twentieth century in the eastern US, in the eighteenth century in Japan and China, after the collapse of communism in Russia – mafias are indeed part and parcel of a series of overlapping transnational, sociospatial networks of power which embrace large and largely unpredictable areas of the world (Mann 1986a, 1986b; Castells 2000; Collins 2011).

      At the same time, we should notice that even though mafias have developed in many different parts of the globe, they do not exist everywhere, and even in the same country (e.g., the US) not every ethnic group has produced its own mafia. Why mafia develops in some places or among some people and not in others – under the same structural conditions, of course – is something only a culturally sensitive analysis could hope to explain. Using a well-known metaphor (Swidler 1986; see also Tilly 1978, 1995), we could say that the cultural repertoire used by would-be mafiosi has to show some consistency to be recognized as such, and the ingredients for the formation of a mafia-like repertoire of collective and individual practice may not be available everywhere.

      This original and constitutive transnational, global scope of mafias explains the subtitle originally imagined for this book: ‘a southern view’. It claims that we gain in both sociological understanding and political effectiveness (that is, in our fight against organized crime) if we recognize the mafia as a culturally based expression/form of political organization, variously developed in its plural instances far from the established centres but always in some relationship with them. This form may have run parallel to the development of the state (and the diffusion of capitalism as well), but it is fundamentally different from the modern state (and capitalism) as institutional mode(s) of organizing political (and, respectively, economic) life.


Скачать книгу