Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro
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rejected by Gambetta and others, who, however, err in considering this tradition as the cultural approach, without realizing that it is just one, and among the weakest, possible approach to cultural analysis; e.g., Alexander 2003; see also Swidler 1986; Sewell 2005; Santoro and Solaroli 2016).
A Final Note on Sources and Method
This book is not based on new ethnographic or statistical or historical evidence. Even if it makes use of some undervalued and neglected sources, it is an exercise in metatheorizing. At the same time, it is an attempt to reflect, utilizing new theoretical resources, on a relationship that has often been studied by scholars of mafia, including scholars of so-called ‘organized crime’ (an expression I would always put in quotation marks for reasons I will explain in the next chapter): namely, the relationship between social reality and imagination – sociological imagination, but also literary imagination, and any other kind of imagination through which representations are generated and transmitted. In this exercise, I have relied upon an array of different kinds of sources:
sociological, anthropological and historical studies on the Sicilian mafia, since its inception in post-unification Italy to current studies of various kinds of mafias all over the world;
literary sources, with all the caveats suggested by the rich tradition of literary sociology (for praises of literature as strategic sources for sociohistorical research, especially on crime, see Benigno 2015 and Boltanski 2014);
investigations by journalists and reporters, recalling that journalism is a field with its own rules (Benson and Neveu 2005) and, no different from criminology, history or sociology, which means journalistic sources have to be weighed against these rules;
autobiographies and memories of mafiosi or people close to them;
judicial and police sources, and other institutional (state) sources, such as parliamentary inquiries and committee hearings.7
Whenever possible, I have privileged sources coming directly from mafiosi voices or writings, beyond the state officers’ mediation (as in police reports or trial proceedings) and possibly even scholars’ mediation (e.g., Arlacchi’s edited interviews, or even ghost writers or co-authors, albeit in the latter cases we can assume mafiosi viewed and accepted the text). This means that I have privileged sources such as letters, verbatim witness accounts, taped conversations and the like. In reading these sources, I have used every available critical methodology useful for deciphering or better discovering and extracting ‘hidden voices’ between the lines, and capable of keeping any bias coming from state-mediated representations under control (from Bourdieu’s field analysis to Carlo Ginzburg’s evidential paradigm, from critical discourse analysis to deconstruction).
Notes
1 1 It is worth noting that the original Italian subtitle of the bestseller Gomorrah (Saviano 2007) was Viaggio nell’impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra, i.e. A journey into the camorra’s economic empire and dream of domination (see Saviano 2006). In other words, the mafia’s reality is business, politics is in its fantasies.
2 2 So ancient that its elements could be traced back to Ancient Greece: see van Wees (1999, 2001).
3 3 As it is clear, I see no reason to give the label infrapolitics to what is in fact ‘politics’ – for everything except the fact that it is enacted by people not formally in dominant positions.
4 4 A symmetry that is not different from that advanced by proponents of the Strong Program in the sociology of science in asking for the equal treatment of false beliefs and ‘true’ (i.e. not yet falsified) theories as research projects, or from ANT scholars (e.g., Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and others), who claim that human and nonhuman actors embedded in a network should be treated equally and described in the same terms (they call it the principle of generalized symmetry). The rationale for this principle is that differences between these actors should not be presupposed, as they are generated in the network of relations. See in general Latour 2005.
5 5 As Sinisa Malešević has recently observed: ‘Although most sociologists recognize that without group solidarity it would be difficult if not impossible to envisage the existence of social order, this topic still remains under-theorized and under-analysed’ (2015, 86). Considering this lack of studies, it is not surprising mafia scholars usually miss the opportunity to address mafia(s) in what is the main point for their members, according to almost all the available witnesses and the charters of mafia and mafia-like groupings – i.e. ‘group solidarity.’
6 6 As a counterpart to, and condition for, secrecy, communication is clearly a central ingredient of mafia life, where everything has meaning and exists through meanings and symbolic forms (Gambetta 2009). It is because of the centrality of communication that deception plays such a role in the mafia and in mafiosi’s social life. Curiously, this focus on communication has been pursued not through an emphasis on the category of culture, but against it – possibly because of a narrow and outdated understanding of what culture and cultural analysis are in the social sciences.
7 7 In this book I reduce to a minimum the use of visual sources. They will figure more prominently in a book in progress on mafia aesthetics.
2 The ‘Mafia’ in ‘Mafia Studies’: (Re)constructing a Sociological Object
The Mafia is an organized crime formation with Sicilian roots; branches in France, Tunisia, and the Americas; and a recent presence in Russia and Eastern Europe. Its historical successes vis-à-vis other criminal groups, particularly in the United States, have made the word mafia (whose origin has never been convincingly traced) a brand name for organized crime. Recently repressed on both sides of the Atlantic, the Mafia, as such, may be on the wane, although reduced vigilance could allow a resurgence.
Schneider 2008, 550
What is ‘mafia’? Encyclopaedic entries nowadays repeat something like a mantra, well represented by the epigraph of this chapter: the mafia is a form of organized crime, possibly the most successful organized crime formation to have ever existed, so much so as to give its name to the whole genre. Cinema and novels have greatly contributed to this characterization of mafia in recent decades (e.g., Renga 2019 [2011]). But this general definition is far from exhaustive. Indeed, there is no shortage of alternative conceptions in the academic literature: it is a primitive, popular, ‘prepolitical’ movement, according to the influential Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1959); a way of acting according to a shared set of subcultural norms and values for the German sociologist/criminologist Henner Hess (1970); a ‘power syndicate’ for the American crime historian Alan Block (1983) – who worked not on the Sicilian mafia but on its branch in the US; a structure of mediation historically developed to fill the gaps between local society and a loose and weak national state, according to the Dutch anthropologist Anton Blok (1974); an aspect of the development of a ‘capitalism of mediation’ in the global economy for the American anthropologists Jane and Peter Schneider (1976). We could continue for some time with definitions like these, apparently lacking in consistency and disorienting to even the most patient student.
In order to move beyond such a simple list of definitions and to look for some conceptual patterns, in this chapter I provide an overview of the social research that has been done on the mafia, mapping the main currents and approaches that have developed since the early studies on the Sicilian mafia (and still earlier on the camorra) published in the 1860s up to recent works, authored by sociologists, anthropologists, economists, criminologists and political scientists. Since Hobsbawm’s pioneering contribution, historians too have devoted growing attention to mafia(s) – especially since the 1990s – and I will consider their works as well insofar as they have seriously built upon the social sciences