Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro
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known about their American counterparts.
Of course, the research on regional forms of (organized) crime is a well-established genre in both the social and the historical sciences. The point is how these studies may be said to pertain to a common research area, a supra-local one, that could contribute to the knowledge and understanding of a whole new class of social phenomena.
For many years, studies on organized criminal forms have typically been regionalized, i.e. remained local. There were studies on triads in the nineteenth century as well as on Indian thugs, many undertaken by British (colonial) observers. There were local studies (not many, as far as we know) on Japanese yakuza, the subject of a well-established genre of film production in Japan since at least the 1950s. More recently, there have been studies on gangs in Mexico and Colombia – many only available in Spanish. None of these books has been able to overcome the borders of their original language and enter the international debate, i.e. the debate written or spoken in English. When this has occurred, it has happened because of certain institutional arrangements or innovations in scholarly toolboxes. The ‘organized crime’ category has helped, of course, in looking for patterns across cases – regional and even national. After all, ethnicity has been a central variable in this research area for a long time. But you can study Mexican gangs without thinking you are contributing to the study of Sicilian mafia, a few similarities, for instance in terms of the concept of honour and masculine culture (after all, both Mexico and Sicily were influenced by Spanish baroque culture), notwithstanding.
In the 1980s, and even more in the 1990s, however, something changed in literature on mafia. The implicit message found in Hobsbawm’s first book was to become reality. Hess had already suggested a move towards comparative research in his introduction to a new Italian edition of Alongi’s (1977 [1887]) classic text on mafia. Gambetta’s book raised issues of comparative analysis, and a few of Gambetta’s students applied his model to other instances of the ‘industry of private protection’, such as the Russian mafiya (Varese 1994, 2001), Japanese yakuza (Hill 2003) and Hong Kong triads (Chu 2000). Other scholars also started to analyse local criminal experiences as if they were instances of a wider class of mafia phenomena, subsumed under some more general conceptual categories, e.g., as ‘patrimonial alliances’ in Collins’s (2011) interpretation.
This move notwithstanding, almost nothing of this literature can be found in the bibliographic references of books and articles devoted to Italian mafias written in Italy – as if they were, indeed, very diverse phenomena. Some brief references would suffice, just to acknowledge one’s awareness of the existence of similar phenomena in other parts of the world. It is easier to find attempts to locate Italian experiences and stories side by side with similar or apparently analogous experiences – such as Nigerian trafficking and cults, Colombian cartels, drug trafficking in Turkey, and so on – when there are documented connections among these geographically different species of criminal organizations.
The globalization of organized crime has surely pressed observers to focus on this network of interconnections as well as on their similarities. Nor is it surprising that books by journalists have been among the first to have arrived in bookshops and libraries – with the pioneering contribution of Manuel Castells (2000), who was neither a mafia specialist nor an established name in mafia studies but, rather, a sensitive and reputed analyst of social change. Comparative studies on mafias are far from common; we can count them on the fingers of one hand (see Varese 2010, 2017).
A big issue lies at the centre of this literature, however: how can we be sure we are making sound comparisons among things so far apart in space and with such different histories as the Sicilian mafia, the yakuza, the triads and even the so-called Russian mafiya if they are not supported by a theory, or at least a general concept (e.g., ‘organized crime’, the ‘industry of private protection’, and so on)? Indeed, a general concept of some kind is necessary when we are writing or talking about mafias in the plural – even if we restrict our range to Italian mafias such as the Sicilian one, the camorra, and the ’ndrangheta, which are different enough among themselves to make it difficult to compare them without some conceptual structure (see, e.g., Paoli 2003). This set of concepts is exactly what we need when constructing our research object.
To conclude this chapter, it would probably be useful to offer a final diagrammatic representation about the main distinctions that have structured the discussion on mafia since its inception in Italy in the nineteenth century. Instead of an image, I synthetize them according to the following set of conceptual, even epistemological, alternatives: individual/collective; centralized/decentred; ethnically based/diffused; economic/political; culture/structure; culture as regulative/culture as constitutive. Think of them as a series of nested, recursive oppositions. We will see in the next chapter how this set of oppositions has been managed in what looks like the single most influential of contemporary theories of mafia – i.e. the economic theory set forth by Gambetta working on the shoulders of pioneers such as Schelling, Reuter, Tilly and economic historian of Venice in the Middle Ages and early modern times, Frederic C. Lane. The next chapter addresses a critical reconstruction of that theory.
Notes
1 1 In this foreword, Cressey set forth a distinction between ‘organized’ and ‘an organization’, insisting that, in Sicily, according to Hess, mafia was organized but had not developed into an organization, as it had in the US. Cressey (1972b) advanced the same distinction in a critical review of Albini (1971).
2 2 Jeremy Boissevain ‘established his name in anthropology as one of the “Bs” – Boissevain, Barth, Bailey, Barnes, Bott – who in the 1960s and 1970s were important in superseding the structural-functionalist paradigm in British social anthropology with an actionist approach. Focusing on choice rather than constraint, on individual agency rather than structure, on manipulation and power-play rather than rules and tradition, and on dyadic relationships and ephemeral groupings rather than corporate groups, these transactionalists were instrumental in bringing the individual back into the scope of social anthropology’ (Ginkel and Stengs 2006, 15).
3 3 Like other villages studied by anthropologists, those studied by mafia scholars are also known by pseudonyms. ‘Villamaura’ was, indeed, the rural town of Sambuca, in the Province of Agrigento, just a few miles from Contessa Entellina, the village studied by Blok under the name of ‘Genuardo’. For the authors’ retrospective assessment of their study after thirty years, see Schneider and Schneider (2011).
4 4 For a very critical review of Sabetti (1984), see Blok (1986, 168): ‘We do not hear much about people who disagreed with the illegal regime of self-government. And Sabetti somehow conveys the idea that there were no dissenters, at least not until the 1940s and 1950s when the local mafia of Camporano was deeply involved in regional and national party politics and eventually had become another burden on the villagers.’ See also Sabetti’s reply, from which I draw just this brief excerpt: ‘The misunderstanding between Blok and me turns upon Blok’s failure to recognize that fundamental theoretical problems exist in defining ab initio Sicilian mafia groups as criminal associations or as creatures of landlords’ (1987, 381). For Sabetti’s own assessment of his own study after thirty years, see Sabetti (2011). For a recent assessment of the field of the anthropology of the mafia from Blok’s perspective, see Blok (2015).
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