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. 5–7).
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).
What the Arab, Greek and African elements remind us is that Sicily, and the Sicilian mafia as well, developed in an area where the globalizing world about which we so intensively talk today was already somehow in place (Abu-Lughod 1989). Sicily existed midway between North and South, influenced by European history but geographically, and even ethnologically, closer to the Mediterranean world, to that southern part of Europe which borders on the northern part of Africa. Using concepts elaborated in northern Europe, at the historical core of the global North, or in the US to understand other parts of the world is an example of what a few years ago Susanne Rudolph (2005) termed ‘the imperialism of categories’ (see also Rudolph and Rudolph 2010). This is also what sociological research on the mafia has typically done, exporting concepts and methods typically rooted in Anglo-American Lockean universal liberalism (sometimes in German neo-Kantian ethical universalism) and applying them to make sense of the mafia’s patterns of social life, that is, a totally different historical, geographical and cultural experience. This alternative, southern location and identification is what this book wants to privilege, grounding our understanding of the Sicilian mafia in situated, local knowledge, and connecting the sociological understanding of the mafia to alternative conceptual repertoires, on the one hand, and to contemporary pleas for the rethinking of the social sciences as a world scale affair, on the other (e.g., Chakrabarty 2000; Alatas 2006a; Connell 2007; Patel 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 2016). This is the object of the Chapters 4–6 of this book, which offers what I would label a political anatomy of the (Sicilian) mafia.
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).
The scope of mafia groups has always been larger than the individual regions from which they take their various names and to which they extend their jurisdiction. In these overlapping networks comprising entire national societies and their borders, imperialistic projects of political control launched from some centre have had to come to terms with locally grounded instances of mobilization and resistance. In many senses, especially when seen from the southern regions of Italy, the same political mobilization that produced Italy as a national state was one of those imperialistic projects launched by a northern centre. The history of the Sicilian mafia runs parallel to that of the national state at least since 1865 – when the term was used for the first time in an official document to identify the troubling local social conditions of resistance to the new government met by functionaries coming from the north of the peninsula. Emerging mafiosi specialized in mediation between local communities and the representatives of the central state. In Sicily, as in other cases, the mafia emerged as a structure of intermediation and communication between variously identifiable centres and their peripheries (Blok 1974; Schneider and Schneider 1976). But mafias interacted and communicated also among themselves. While there is good evidence that mafias developed autonomously in more than one centre of diffusion (Sicily, Calabria, Naples, New York, Hong Kong, etc.), there are also clues that imitation and exchanges of items and practices have been common among the various instances. This is particularly clear in the case of the Russian mafia, whose adepts have often imitated Sicilian mafiosi to legitimize their identities and acquire an effective technology of the self (see Varese 2001; Volkov 2002; Gambetta 2009).
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.
To describe the mafia as ‘a state inside the state’, a ‘shadow state’, a ‘counterstate’, or as ‘the dark side of capitalism’, a ‘deviant form of capitalist entrepreneurship’ and, last but not least, as an ‘industry’ (if this concept is used in its now common economic sense), misses the point, and loses the possibility of capturing the intimate constitution of a phenomenon that normally overcomes the established boundaries of the individual state and does not necessarily follow those of the (transnational) capitalist system. The mafia has an institutional autonomy which is irreducible to both the state and capitalism, two originally European institutions that have largely monopolized the minds of social scientists – including scholars of mafia – since the nineteenth century, and only in the last