Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro
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discovered the importance of labor migration and the ways in which it connected our field site not only to the state, but to an international labor market as well. (Schneider and Schneider 1976, x)
Like Blok, the Schneiders’ target was the concept of culture – and the associated approach to cultural explanation – in terms of norms and values related to socialization, a concept they proposed to overcome by suggesting the idea of cultural codes as historically adaptive determined structures to be used as symbolic tools and resources – a move that, in many senses, anticipated the one taken more famously by American sociologist Ann Swidler (1986) in the following decade. It is worth remembering that Swidler’s work was built, in part, on the shoulders of the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, a participant in the same intellectual network as Boissevain and Blok. The Schneiders’ position with respect to the status of culture and cultural analysis is well captured in this excerpt:
Scholars and others concerned with underdevelopment often link it to the presumably reactionary and traditional qualities of peasant culture. In our view, such cultural determinism is incorrect, yet it is seductive … In the course of anthropological study in a west Sicilian agricultural community we identified three cultural codes as particularly interesting and salient. The code of family honor (onore) asserts the primacy of the nuclear family in society and establishes women as symbols of familial worth. The code of friendship (amicizia) and hospitality helps solidify the omnipresent coalitions and cliques through which business affairs and other ventures are conducted. Furberia, the code of cleverness or astuteness, focuses on the individual and his immediate family, and helps legitimate the idea that almost anything goes in defense of one’s personal interests … Local as well as foreign observers frequently attribute the island’s economic difficulties to the codes in question, noting, for example, that preoccupation with family honor undermines the kind of trust that is necessary to collective organization for long-term gain, while friendship and cleverness rationalize foul play and corruption. We see these codes, however, in another light. We intend that this volume should provide a clear case for a different understanding of the role of culture in change, and that it should do this by demonstrating (1) that exogenous colonial and neo-colonial forces have had an overwhelming impact on Sicily, not only in the recent past but also over centuries, and (2) that the cultural codes at issue were instruments of adaptation to these secular forces, and not simply residua of a ‘traditional’ preindustrial past. (Schneider and Schneider 1976, 1–2; emphasis added)
A question we could raise at this point is the following: do these contributions and their authors amount to what could be termed a scientific or intellectual movement (Frickel and Gross 2005)? As a matter of fact, Hess and Blok worked independently – Blok refers to Hess, saying he became aware of his work after he had finished writing his own book (1974, 13) – and with different methods (ethnographic and archival for Hess, only archival for Blok) and from different intellectual traditions (respectively, historical-anthropological research strongly influenced by Elias’s sociology, and Weberian sociology). Blok and the Schneiders – who indeed confess in the acknowledgements of their books that they met each other several times while doing ethnography – were closer in terms of disciplinary affiliations, personal networks (with Wolf and Boissevain as common nodes) and even research sites.
The Schneiders’ Marxist approach was shared by the Italian authors – the aforementioned Arlacchi (who was a student of Giovanni Arrighi, at the time teaching in Calabria before moving to the US and joining Wallerstein at the Braudel Centre at the State University of New York at Binghamton) and Nando dalla Chiesa, whose book Il potere mafioso. Economia e ideologia (1976) was explicitly framed in Marxist-Gramscian terms and was conceived and written in the same intellectual milieu in which Arrighi had studied and trained. So, it seems that all the books published on mafia in the 1970s, except for Hess’s, shared a set of personal relations and conceptual strategies. Of course, there was enough difference in accents, topics and writing styles to make the individual books worthy of attention in their own right.
Indeed, while the research of the 1970s was conducted under the aegis of Marx, the 1980s saw the discovery of Weber’s insights by mafia studies. Arlacchi’s second book on the mafia is paramount: originally published in Italian in 1983, Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was pivotal in suggesting it was time to make the turn from culture to economics – and possibly from anthropology to economics – also in the study of Italian mafias. Arlacchi’s solution was ingenious: while culture worked in making sense of traditional mafia, it did not work in accounting for the newly emergent forms of mafia, much more oriented towards profit (instead of honour) and business (instead of social control) than the earlier ones. The concept of the ‘enterpreneurial mafia’, aka mafia as business, was born – and the way towards an economic theory of the mafia began to be paved.
The first to profit from this turn-in-the-making was a Canadian-Italian political scientist, Filippo Sabetti – the author of the third historical-ethnographic study on Sicilian mafia worthy of consideration, after Blok, and Schneider and Schneider (see Figure 2.1). Sabetti’s approach in Political Authority in a Sicilian Village (1984) was highly original: indeed, his book was the first to make use of institutional theory to make sense of the mafia. The challenging perspective that Sabetti adopts – inspired by American political scientist Vincent Ostrom and future Nobel prizewinner Elinor Ostrom, as well as Italian liberal economist Francesco Ferrara – is made clear from the very first page of his book. After quoting an imaginary conversation between a Sicilian and a Neapolitan that the French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville had used as an expedient to present his thoughts after his southern travels in 1827, Sabetti continues:
Figure 2.1: Map of Sicily with the location of the three case studies (Blok 1974; Schneider and Schneider 1976; Sabetti 1984)
Note: the map also includes the location of the first ethnographic study in Sicily (Gower Chapman 1971), originally done in 1928–9.
Against the stark backdrop of governmental failures and general social disintegration, local outlaw societies or mafia groups stand out as the most successful long-term efforts at collective action in Sicily. These mafia groups have, however, been viewed, especially from outside of Sicily, as gangs of malefactors, as expression of fundamental asociality of islanders … as outlaw protective agencies of large landowners or urban capitalists, and, more generally, as impediments to human development … The study of mafia groups and how they actually work in Sicily has, in fact, become impenetrable on any premise except that of killing or murder. The multitude of problems inherent in governmental failures, general social disintegration and outlaw societies has often been characterized as the Sicilian problem or in Italian as sicilitudine. The present study is an effort to provide a more satisfactory explanation of sicilitudine within the microcosm of a single Sicilian community. (1984, 3–4)
Drawing upon a suggestion included in Alongi’s early book (1977 [1887], 45), Sabetti makes sense of mafia as an instance of self-government, a regime of self-reliance rather than a criminal institution: ‘Villagers [of Camporano, the community under investigation] attempted to obtain satisfactory remedies to local contingencies through a pattern of social organziation outside of the formal institutions. This pattern of social organization is the outlaw regime of mafia or what a sociologist policeman characterized as “primitive self-government”’ (1984, 95).
Through intensive fieldwork and, above all, the analysis of various documentary sources (including archival ones), Sabetti claims to identify in the career and doings of Mariano Ardena, the local mafia boss, an instance of a ‘profitable altruist’, i.e. ‘a villager who by helping others also helps himself’ (1984, 6). Clearly, people like Ardena were playing at the borders of legality, and it was easy for them to get involved in veritable outlaw societies along with more established and legalized ones, such as social clubs or cooperatives. A crucial insight in Sabetti’s reading of the mafia is that ‘[s]uch outlaw societies are confronted with all the