Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro
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and his point of view was necessarily that of the (Italian, national, constitutional and monarchical) state he was serving. From this point of view, the mafia could never be a ‘complete and highly efficient form of self-government’, because it could only be crime, albeit a particularly complex and puzzling form of crime. In a sense, I would suggest Crawford’s outsider perspective – grounded as it was on his personal experience as an American writer living in southern Italy after a few years spent as a young man in colonial India studying Sanskrit and editing a journal on local (i.e. Indian) affairs – anticipates the perspective this book tries to develop in a more radical and consistent form, that is, a non-statist, non-Eurocentric, non-nationalist view of mafia as a different ruling class and form of government. Crawford, of course, was not alien to Eurocentric prejudice, and inevitably perceived the south of Italy – as he had colonial India – with Anglo-Saxon eyes (incidentally, there is a wide British literature on Indian criminality, which presents many analogies with Italian commentaries on the Sicilian mafia of the same period: for two enlightening contemporary studies, see the now classic Guha 1999 [1983], and Mayaram 2003). But his decentred vision as an observer with no vested interests in his object of study had potentialities worthy of further development. The scholars he makes reference to – all Euro-American social scientists, indeed, with the important exception of Mosca, whose situated knowledge of Sicilian social life had to come to terms with his rooted national and liberal attitudes, an issue surely less urgent for the anarchist Merlino – are certainly helpful in this endeavour. Think of Weber’s description of mafias (and camorras) as financial channels for political groups (it is not clear which groups he had in mind, however), of Tilly’s astute discussion of the analogy between the early state and organized crime, and more recently of Collins’s reading of mafias as patrimonial alliances that survived the state’s penetration of the modern world, and indeed contributed to its failure as a monopolistic agency.
This work builds on all these previous scholarly contributions which have shed light on the political side of the mafia. None of these scholars, however, has systematically tried to develop a comprehensive analysis of the mafia as a political institution or form, modelling it as such and analytically contrasting it to other models seemingly more convincing and acceptable, such as those typically developed in the fields of criminology and economics, or even economic sociology – which in fact are still the dominant perspectives in the literature (e.g., Cressey 1969; Arlacchi 1983a; Reuter 1983; Schneider and Schneider 1976; Catanzaro 1992 [1988]; Gambetta 1993, 2009; Sciarrone 2009 [1998]; Paoli 2003; Varese 2001, 2010). This is what this book aims to do, furthering the knowledge we have of the political dimension of the mafia, while embedding it in a critical theory of the political conditions of knowledge production in the social sciences. This makes the book a useful critical review of current scholarship, too. It is not a textbook, but rather a comprehensive critical guide to the available literature that advances a fresh interpretation of old and new evidence (for a first step in this direction, see Santoro 2007, 2011).
In this endeavour, political anthropology can offer powerful tools – such as Elman Service’s (1962) bands/tribes/chiefdoms/states taxonomy and its developments, or Abner Cohen’s (1981) dramaturgical model of elite politics in Africa (see also Carneiro 1981; Claessen and Skalnik 1979, 1981; Runciman 1982) – and some use will be made of them. The category of the chiefdom looks especially enlightening for classifying and making sense of mafia political structures. Equally promising for a re-reading of the available evidence is the analysis of political strategies developed by Frederick Bailey (2001 [1969]) after he watched the famous televised US congressional hearings of Joe Valachi on the criminal organization of Cosa Nostra. This analysis shows how a large part of the strategies elaborated and employed by mafiosi – which exhibit surprising similarities to those used by the Swat Pathans in Pakistan (Barth 1969) – already make sense in the context of political competition and leadership selection, and that a purely economic reading (as economic strategies of businessmen) does not add much to their understanding. But to capture mafia political architecture as it exists and works in institutional environments that also include the state, we need models permitting us to relativize, historicize and criticize the state’s claims as well as its imagery. Anthropological models are, unfortunately, too naive with respect to the history of political institutions and accept an idea of the state that is too general and transhistorical for our interests (see Spruyt 1994, 195n2). We need more specific, and historically determinate, conceptual instruments. This is what Tilly’s (1985) reading of early war-making states as organized crime, or Scott’s (1998) deconstruction of the liberal state’s imagination and cognitive claims, can offer us. Carl Schmitt’s (1966 [1932]) theory of the political – and work on political conflict and political friendship grounded on it (e.g., Kelly 2003; Mouffe 2005; Slomp 2007) – could also offer important ideas and suggestions even for an empirically based social theory like that pursued in this book. Through these studies, it is possible to put in brackets the modern, territorial, sovereign, rational, European state’s claims of objectivity, universality and equity, and look at the political game as it is practised in real life, even from within the historically specific form of the Western state, and against its supposed universality, equity and rationality.
While useful in analytical terms, these works are not enough by themselves. We need additional tools if we want to grasp the mafia’s identity and specificity. I suggest it is possible to find these tools in such different and seemingly at odds sources as Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift (1990 [1925]), especially as revised by Bourdieu (e.g., 1996 [1992], 1997, 2017; see also Silber 2009); German formal sociological theory based on both historical research on ancient European peoples and ethnographic research on colonial societies (e.g., Schurtz 1902; Simmel 2009 [1908]; Schmalenbach 1977 [1922]; Vierkandt 1931); and recent work in cultural sociology focused on the deepest foundations of social life in symbolic codes and structures (e.g., Alexander 2003, 2013; Smith 2005; Alexander et al. 2011). Indeed, a secondary contribution of this book is the attempt to merge different and usually non-communicating strains of theoretical work in a compact analysis. I will discuss these intellectual resources in the following chapters when useful.
Contesting Eurocentric Social Theory
If these (European and North American) works provide the toolkit for attempting an overall anatomy of the mafia as a mode of political organization, the crucial metatheoretical background of the book is located in three related streams of contemporary thought: (1) the rise of alternative, i.e. non-Western and Southern, discourses in the social and historical sciences, including subaltern studies (Ludden 2001; Chakrabarty 2000; Alatas 2006a; Connell 2007; Patel 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012); (2) the current revision in political science of the theory of the state in light of a more globalized – i.e. non-Eurocentric – understanding of political life (e.g., Spruyt 1994; Thompson 1994; Scott 1998; Steinmetz 1999; Rudolph and Jacobsen 2006; Rudolph and Rudolph 2010); (3) the resurgence of anarchism as a theoretical structure and cognitive device in the social sciences (see Clastres 1988 [1974]; Graeber 2004; Scott 2010, 2012; for an earlier contribution directly relevant to our topic, see Reclus 1891). In the following, I will elaborate briefly on these points.
As for the first point, besides the notion of subaltern politics, I would underline what can be gained in mafia studies from the rediscovery of Ibn Khaldūn’s social theory of solidarity, what the medieval Arab scholar called ’asabiyya (Khaldūn 1967). The name of Ibn Khaldūn has been much discussed recently as an early pioneer of sociology and a great source for those alternative discourses in the social sciences that current globalization is reclaiming (see especially Ahmed 2003; Rosen 2005; Alatas 2006b). To be sure, Ibn Khaldūn was well known long before this recent resurgence of interest spurred by global thinking, as a forerunner, together with Vico, of Comte’s idea of sociology, even among Italian scholars (e.g., Barnes and Becker 1938). His great work, The Muqaddimah, was (in its French translation) a source for nineteenth-century scholars of politics and ethnicity, such as Ludwig Gumplowicz, himself a source for Mosca’s political sociology. This early and now classical contribution can be profitably used in mafia studies as well – not surprising, considering the Mediterranean location of Sicily, the medieval Arab colonisation and the Arab roots of the very word ‘mafia.’
A brief description of the concept will suffice.5 ’Asabiyya