Mafiacraft

Front matter

Deborah Puccio-Den

MAFIA

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF DEADLY SILENCE f.

Contents

List of Figures xi Acknowledgements xiii

Permissions XV Personages xvii

Introduction: From witchcraft to “mafiacraft”: Shifting paradigms 1

Chapter 1: Does the mafia exist?

The history of a question The birth of the mafia as a criminal offence The Buscetta theorem The ‘third level”

The “white mafia”

Chapter 2: The mafia as a plague From Falcones new theoretical model to the grassroots anti-mafia fight The bloody Palermo Spring Sacrifice for the city The mafia as “martyrdom”

Chapter 3: How to photograph something that does not exist? Anti-mafia photography as a political and cognitive act The ground zero of 1992 The banalization of the mafia

Chapter 4: Bearing witness Pilgrimage to the Falcone Tree The tree Pilgrimage as bearing witness Imago Christi

Martyrs as witnesses viii

31 33 35 37

43 43 49 50 54 57 61

Contents

Chapter 5: The unnamable mafia 105 Crafting the anti-mafia (silenced) memory 105 The “event” 106 Institutionalizing remembrance 110 Remembrance on paper, remembrance in stone 113 Politics of remembrance, poetics of remembrance 116

Part II: Judging the silence 121

Chapter 6: The Falcone method 123 Investigating the Sicilian mafia 123 The ethnographer and the inquisitor 125 The evidential paradigm 128 Heuristics of silence 130 On initiation 132 Constructing the other 137 Returning to the self 140

Chapter 7: The Buscetta theorem 145 On responsibility 145 What does honor make and what is it made of? 150 Silence broken, truth recomposed 163 Honor in the courtoom 169

Chapter 8: The Impastato affair 179 Mafia: state of violence or state violence? 179 From rumor to affair 182 From vendetta to justice? 186 Impastato: From “terrorist” to “mafia victim" 190 Testing the state 198

Chapter 9: The Aiello trial 203 On intentionality in mafia crimes 203 Decision-making in Cosa Nostra 205 Proof of a mafia crime 206 The Cuffaro controversy 209 Consciousness of the crime P Criminal action as a form of social action 214

Chapter 10: The Provenzano code 219 On initiation, again 219 Writing, killing, commanding 225 The silent action of pizzini 228

Conclusion: Invisible things 235

Index 263

List of Figures

Figure 1: Exhibition “Mafia & territory,” 1978: Impastato, center. (Source: Photo Archive, Centro Siciliano di Documentazione Giuseppe Impastato. Photographs displayed on the poster by Letizia Battaglia.)

Figure 2: Cover of the catalogue of the Mafia Oggi (Mafia Today) exhibition. (Source: Photograph by Franco Zecchin.)

Figure 3: National demonstration against the mafia. (Source: Photographs displayed on the poster by Letizia Battaglia.)

Figure 4: Posters bringing people face to face with the mafia. (Source: Photo archive Centro Siciliano di Documentazione Giuseppe Impastato.)

Figure 5: Camorristi, masked as witches, preparing lines of coke. (Source: Photograph by Mauro D’Agati.)

Figure 6: Kids, one of them holding a weapon, play games in a rundown neighborhood of Naples. (Source: Photograph by Mauro D'Agati.)

Figure 7: Tattoos on skin and rocks. (Source: Photograph by Mauro D'Agati.)

Figure 8: "Ihe mafia kills, so does your silence — Peppino Impastato’s comrades," anti-mafia demonstration (Source: Photo archive Centro Siciliano di Documentazione Giuseppe Impastato).

Figure 9: Young Peppino Impastato (front row, third from right) holding the arm of his father (a mafioso), walking alongside one of Baladamenti's brothers. (Source: Family archive Felicia Bortolotta Impastato).

Figure 10: Peppino Impastato’s mother flanked by Felicetta, her daughter-in-law, and Anna Puglisi. (Source: Photograph by Pino Manzella.)

Figure 11: Peppino Impastato” funeral procession: “Driven by Peppino’s ideas and bravery, we will carry on.” (Source: Photograph by Paolo Chirco.)

xii

Acknowledgements

It would be impossible to thank individually all those who have contributed, in one way or another, to making this research life-path called Mafiacraft an incredible experience, intellectually, scientifically, politically, and humanly.

First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to Giovanni da Col for accompanying this project from the outset and giving it a proper life with his coining of the neologism Mafiacraft. The reader of this book will comprehend the critical role of words in bringing an idea to life. More than a word, Mafiacraft is a paradigm for reframing the “mafia” as an anthropological topic.

This paradigm was initially discussed on the occasion of the publication of a colloquium in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, curated by Mariane Ferme and supplemented by insightful comments offered by such prominent and esteemed researchers as Michael Herzfeld, Marco Santoro, Jane Schneider, and Harry Walker: their input prompted stimulating discussions that have substantially enriched Mafiacraft as a research program. The issues they raised have given flesh to the conclusion of this book.

‘The first version of the manuscript was discussed in December 2018 on the occasion of my “accreditation to supervise research” (HDR) defense with the members of its jury: Nicolas Dodier, Béatrice Fraenkel, Michael Houseman, Salvatore d’Onofrio, Catherine Perret, and Daniela Piana. I am grateful for their wise and encouraging remarks.

During the editing process at Hau Books, the manuscript entered a new phase of its life thanks to the accurate and creative work of the reviewers. I could not have dreamt of better commentators than those selected by the members of Hau Books editorial team. One of them, Peter Geschiere, waived anonymity, and Mafiacraft is indeed deeply indebted to the profound renewal of witchcraft, achieved by this eminent anthropologist, for defining the contours of this new paradigm. The editorial collective of Hau Books should also be credited for the improvement of this volume, particularly Hylton White who took charge of the editorial process in delicate times, during which he was able to carry it out despite all the difficulties linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. I also thank Nanette Norris, managing editor, who showed unwavering support for this project, and Caroline Jeannerat, copy editor, whose thorough proofreading of the manuscript was another invitation to improve it. During all the different steps of this path, I could also rely on the constant availability of my English teacher, Andrea Talmud, and of Sébastien Le Pipec, English tutor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, EHESS) in Paris, whose acumen and refined knowledge of the English language were valuable for upgrading my work.

Over the last three years, this research program has been discussed with my students in my EHESS seminar “Anthropologie de la mafia, pour une anthropologie politique du silence.” I warmly thank them for all that their current fieldwork, awareness, and criticism offered to the testing of Mafiacraft as a paradigm for founding a political anthropology of silence. The EHESS and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Center of Scientific Research, CNRS), the institution I am affiliated with, provided strong support for the defense of this set of methodological and theoretical proposals.

Outside France, I was able, in Italy, to rely on the expertise of Umberto Santino, director of the Centro Siciliano di Documentazione Giuseppe Impastato (Sicilian documentation center Giuseppe Impastato, CSD), and of his wife, Anna Puglisi, who both founded the indispensable No Mafia Memorial (Palermo): not only could I count on their skills and on a documentary fount unique in the world, but they also provided me with the historical black-and-white photographs published in this book. I would like to thank them and photographers Paolo Chirco, Pino Manzella, and Guido Orlando for their generosity, as well as artist-photographer Mauro D’Agati, who offered me the copyright of his magnificent photos on the Neapolitan camorra, photographer Franco Zecchin for the right to reproduce his photograph on the catalogue of the exposition “Mafia Oggi,” and photographer Shobha, who agreed that one of

Acknowledgements her photographs would be used for the cover of this work in exchange for a donation to her foundation Mother India School.

I could not have written this book without the commitment and generosity of so many anti-mafia activists, but I am much indebted to the anti-mafia judges, such as Maurizio De Lucia, the public prosecutor of Messina, Gaetano Paci, former prosecutor from the Anti-mafia Directorate of the District of Palermo, Roberto Scarpinato, the public prosecutor of Palermo, and Antonio Balsamo, from 1995 to 2007 judge at the Court of Palermo and now a judicial expert in European law, human rights, and international legal cooperation in criminal matters for the United Nations.

I dedicate my book to Judge Giovanni Falcone and this shall make evident the importance I attach to his vocation as a judge who revolutionized thought on the mafia as a political and social phenomenon. The epistemological gesture I propose by Mafiacraft owes him immensely: may this book be a small offering in recognition of his grand sacrifice.

Permissions

Chapter 1 is based on the article “Juger la mafia: Catégorisation juridique et économies morales en Italie (1980-2020)” published in Diogene (3-4, no. 239—240, 2012), available online at doi: 10.3917/dio.239.0016. Translated and re-edited by Sage Publications as “Judging the Mafia: Categorization under Law and Moral Economies in Italy (1980-2010).” Used by permission of the publisher. Chapter 2 is based on the article “The Sicilian Mafia: Transformation to a Global Evil,” published in Ethnografica (12, no. 2, 2008), available online at doi: 10.4000/etnografica.1763. Used by permission of the publisher. Earlier versions of chapter 3 were presented at the “MAFIA: Realities and Representations of Organized Crime" conference, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, New York, 2014; and at the "Anthropological Legacies and Human Futures" congress, European Association of Social Anthropologists, Milan, 2016. Chapter 4 is based on the chapter "Ihe Anti-mafia Movement as Religion? The Pilgrimage to the Falcone’s Tree,” published in Shrines and Pilgrimage in tbe Modern World: New Itineraries into tbe Sacred, edited by Peter Jan Margry, in 2008. Chapter 5 is based on the chapter "Difficult Remembrance’: Memorializing Mafia Victims in Palermo,” published in Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero, in 2011. Used by permission of Berghahn Books. Chapter 6 is based on the article “Lethnologue et le juge: Lenquéte de Giovanni Falcone sur la mafia en Sicile," published in Ethnologie française (31, no. 1, 2001), available at doi: 10.3917/ethn.011.0015.

Translated and re-edited by Cairn International “The Ethnologist and the Magistrate: Giovanni Falcone's Investigation into the Sicilian Mafia." Used by permission of the publisher. Chapter 7 is based on the articles entitled “De la responsabilité" and “De l'honneur à la responsabilité: Les metamorphoses du sujet mafieux,” both published in L'Homme (3, no. 223-224, 2017). “De la responsabilité" was translated by Cadenza Academic Translations as "On Responsibility” (https://www. cairn-int.info/article-E_LHOM_223_0005--on-responsibility-htm). Used by permission of the publisher. Chapter 8 is based on the chapter “Mafia: état de violence ou violence d’Etat? L'affaire Impastato et la requalification concomitante des groups subversifs et de l’État en Italie (1978—2002)," published in Quaderni (no. 78, 2012). Used by permission of the publisher. Chapter 9 is based on the chapter “On Intentionality in Mafia Crimes,” published in Truth, Intentionality and Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to Crime, edited by Yazid Ben-Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den, in 2017. Used by permission of Routledge. Chapter 10 is based on the article entitled “Dieu vous bénisse et vous protége!’ La correspondance secrete du chef de la mafia sicilienne Bernardo Provenzano (1993-2006),” published in Revue de l'Histoire des Religions (228, no. 2, 2011). Used by permission of the publisher. The conclusion is based on the article entitled “Invisible Things” published in Hau Journal in 2019, available online at doi: 10.1086/706547. Published with permission by the publisher. I warmly thank all the publishers who granted me these permissions.

xvi

Personages

Abate, Ida: schoolteacher, collected testimonies for the beatification of Judge Rosario Livatino

Aiello, Michele: doctor, accused of participation in a mafia association, 2008 Alberti, Gerlando: member of Cosa Nostra

Andreotti, Giulio: Italian politician, charged in 1993 with external complicity with a mafia association, cleared in 2004

Badalamenti, Gaetano “Tano”: mafioso of Cinisi, accused as instigator of the murder of Giuseppe Impastato, 2002 ppe imp

Bartolotta Impastato, Felicia: mother of Giuseppe Impastato

Basile, Emanuele: captain of the carabinieri, worked with Borsellino, killed in 1980

Battaglia, Letizia: anti-mafia photographer

Borsellino, Paolo: anti-mafia judge, killed in the Via d’Amelio bombing on July 19, 1992

Brusca, Giovanni: pentito (repentant mafioso), known for having pressed the detonator of the bomb causing the Capaci massacre

Buscetta, Tommaso: pentito, informant of Giovanni Falcone Calderone, Antonino: pentito

Calò, Pippo: mafia boss accused in the Maxi Trial

Caponnetto, Antonino: anti-mafia judge, creator of the anti-mafia pool

Chinnici, Rocco: anti-mafia judge, inventor of the anti-mafia pool, killed by the mafia on July 29, 1983

Contorno, Salvatore: pentito

Costa, Gaetano: prosecutor, murdered by the Mafia in 1980 Cucuzza, Salvatore: pentito, passed away in April 2014

Cuffaro, Salvatore: politician, President of Sicily 2001-2008, accused of favoring the mafia in the Aiello Trial

D'Agati, Mauro: artist and photographer of a Camorra group Dalla Chiesa, Carlo Alberto: general, assassinated on September 3, 1982

De Lucia, Maurizio: prosecutor from the Anti-Mafia Direction of the Palermo District during the Aiello Trial

Di Lello, Giuseppe: anti-mafia judge, member of the anti-mafia pool Dolci, Danilo: Italian sociologist, anti-mafia activist (1924-1997)

Falcone, Giovanni: anti-mafia judge, killed in the Capaci massacre on May 23,1992

Finazzo, Giuseppe: builder close to Gaetano Badalamenti, suspected of having ordered the murder of Giuseppe Impastato

Giuffré, Antonino: pentito Greco, Michele: Palermo mafia boss, accused in the Maxi trial Guarnotta, Leonardo: judge

Guttadauro, Giuseppe: doctor and mafioso, head of Brancaccio neighborhood

Impastato, Bortolotta: mother of Giuseppe Impastato Impastato, Giuseppe: anti-mafia activist, killed in May 1978

La Torre, Pio: regional secretary of the Italian Communist Party, conceptor of the 1982 Rognoni-La Torre law, assassinated in April 1982

Livatino, Rosario: anti-mafia judge, murdered by the mafia association called Stidda in 1990, beatified in 2020

Meli, Antonino: judge

Messina Denaro, Matteo: considered as the current head of the Sicilian mafia Morvillo, Francesca: magistrate, wife of Giovanni Falcone, killed with him Mosca, Gaetano: jurist

Orlando, Leoluca: former member of Christian Democracy, founder of the anti-mafia movement La Rete, Palermo mayor in late 1980s, 1993-1999, 2012-2021

Paci, Gaetano: prosecutor from the Anti-mafia Direction of the District of Palermo xviii

Personages

Palazzolo, Salvatore: pentito

Palazzolo, Vito: mafioso, accused of the murder of Giuseppe Impastato as accomplice of Gaetano Badalamenti

Palizzolo, Raffaele: Sicilian politician, indicated for the murder of Emanuele Notarbartolo, 1902

Pintacuda, Ennio: Jesuit priest Pitré, Giuseppe (1841-1916): folklorist

Provenzano, Bernardo: mafioso, right-hand man of Totò Riina, head of Cosa Nostra from January 1993 until 2006, when he was arrested

Puglisi, Anna: scholar, wife of Umberto Santino, co-founder of the Centro Siciliano di Documentazione Giuseppe Impastato and of the No Mafia memorial

Puglisi, Pino: priest of Brancaccio, murdered by Cosa Nostra in Brancaccio on September 15, 1993, beatified in 2017

Riina, Salvatore: mafioso, head of Cosa Nostra, arrested January 1993, succeeded in Cosa Nostra by Bernardo Provenzano

Santino, Umberto: anti-mafia activist and scholar, founder of the Centro di Documentazione Siciliano Giuseppe Impastato and of the No Mafia memorial

Scarpinato, Roberto: anti-mafia judge, examining magistrate of the Andreotti trial

Sciascia, Leonardo: Sicilian intellectual and writer

Signorino, Domenico: judge in Palermo who took the first statements from family members in the investigation of the murder of Giuseppe Impastato, committed suicide in 1992

Vitale, Leonardo: Cosa Nostra’s first pentito

Zecchin, Franco: anti-mafia photographer

Introduction

The mafia? What is the mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don’t know the mafia, I have never seen it. —Mommo Piromalli, the Ndrangheta boss*

The mafia? What is the mafia? A brand of cheese? Tell me what it is because I have no idea!

— Gerlando Alberti, member of Cosa Nostra?

Mafiacraft is a neologism pointing to a new method of ethnographical inquiry and a new form of theorizing the mafia phenomenon. Its novelty consists in adopting a stance of methodological agnosticism about what the mafia is and in focusing on how the mafia was crafted—supposing that this crafting, triggered by the silent nature of the mafia and the “mafiosi,” has had ontological consequences for the way it exists. Most studies of the mafia have endeavored to answer the question: “What is the mafia?”! In so doing, researchers in the social sciences have become an integral part of

* Quoted in Nicaso (2010: 12).

+ Quoted in Padovani (1987: 9).

1. I invite the reader to consult in particular Umberto Santino (1995), an important book that summarizes the bibliography on the mafia. More recently, Santoro (2007) has pointed to the overabundance of research studies what they set out to study and define: a cognitive event shaped by silence, a performative non-speech act fed by the endless process of questioning it produces. In these studies, silence is regarded as a veneer (a “veil,” a “blanket,” a “wall”) that conceals the essential reality to be discovered: the Mafia. Overcoming the silence will “expose” the Mafia as it really is. The methodological assumption that informs my own work is that the “mafia” is not a social fact fixed once and for all, ready to be studied or “exposed” by social scientists. I argue that the comforting perspective “that the object already exists in some form of language, only requiring translation from one language to another or from orality into writing” (Hirschauer 2006: 422) does not apply to “mafia studies.” Indeed, the “mafia” can be used as a magnifying glass to tackle one of the social sciences’ conundrums: how do we put into words “the silence of the social” (Hirschauer 2006: 423)? ‘The term “silence” is not used here in terms of its common, everyday meaning. It is rather an analytic framework that refers “to a mute challenge for description to ‘make something speak’ that resists verbalization” (Hirschauer 2006: 423n13). Sociologist Stefan Hirschauer (2006: 423) uses it to draw attention to “verbalization methods [that presuppose] that people have specific knowledge that can be extracted by means of questioning.” But, he asks, what kind of ethnographic relationship is possible when only one side is audible (Hirschauer 2006: 435)? What theoretical and methodological problems emerge when ethnographers cannot access the object itself? Approaching a mute entity such as the mafia through the social sciences entails taking into account the object’s ontology. Dealing with “mafiosi” places us in the same embarrassing position as ethnographers dealing with voiceless beings manifesting themselves by means of meaningless sounds, symptoms, and signals. We cannot expect that mafiosi give an answer to the question “What is the mafia?” We cannot describe the mafia “as it is” by taking a phenomenological approach (Crotty 1996: 202), in view of the difficulty of providing empirical data. As anthropologists, we are required to keep preconceptions at bay, adopting an epistemological stance of “suspension of belief” (Vivilaki and Johnson 2008) about assumed knowledge and assumptions.” But, as ethnographers, we can do something useful: we on the mafia, counting about 450 books published in fifteen years. Santoro (2015) provides an update on contemporary studies of this issue.

2. ‘This is the path followed by medical scientists tackling uncertain physiological phenomena. See Atkins et al. (2013) on medically unexplained physical symptoms.

may seek to grasp the multifarious ways in which all sectors of society have dealt with what is unsaid, what is avoided by means of silence, what is kept silent. It is precisely the attempt to describe this work that is at the heart of the Mafiacraft project.’

I propose that the labor of diagnosing the mafia, which lies at the core of the anti-mafia movement and of anti-mafia justice, forms an inherent part of the mafia phenomenon as a whole. Mafiacraft, thus, includes the analysis of two forms of “work”: the mafia work (or, more accurately, the silence) and the anti-mafia work of interpreting, reading, fighting, and judging this silence. The paradigm thus focuses on interactions between society, the judiciary, the state, and what all these bodies call the “mafia,” rather than isolating the latter as a pathology, a deviance, an anti-state, or whatever is separated from the state as a legitimate way of being and living together. These interactions are characterized by the fact that one of the two parties involved in the communication is silent—we should possibly say “mute”—obliging the other to establish a never-ending diagnosis, always precarious because never validated by the counterpart.

We may compare this situation to the experiences of physicians and patients with medically unexplained physical symptoms. Confronted by an indecipherable illness and suffering “in silence” because of this diagnostic uncertainty, the patient—and in parallel the anti-mafia force— may “create divergent narratives” in order to explain “unfathomable symptomology” (Atkins et al. 2013: 3). Until they have available a proper vocabulary through which they can share their concerns with others, patients “exist in separate silos of awareness” from the medical practitioners—as anti-mafia campaigners exist in “separate silos of understanding” from the mafia—even as both are “tackling the same situation” (Atkins et al. 2013: 5-6). It is to produce such a vocabulary that the cognitive effort or “work” that I name Mafiacraft was launched, with a consistent part of the Italian society, including some mafiosi (the so-called penzifi), in an attempt to find appropriate words and shared categories to describe this undiagnosable,* untreatable, unexplained (and thus devastating) social and political “symptom” called “the mafia.”

This operation recalls the cognitive mapping proposed by Frederic Jameson (1991: 54), an aesthetic and ethical project capable of

3. “Work” is one of the meanings of the word craft in Mafiacraft, which defines the guidelines for my research program.

4. Ina previous work, I analyzed the political and social implications of the nosographic representation of the mafia as a “plague” (Puccio-Den 2009).

“connecting seemingly disconnected or fragmented parts of changing and different experiences into one well focused entity” (Shuqair 2019: 361). In a similar fashion, Mafiacraft is an attempt at cognitive mapping: it aims to describe how a range of widespread illegal practices (aggression, extortion, smuggling, money laundering, fraud, murder) and social phenomena (corruption, poor governance, territory degradation, market deterioration) have been publicly “grouped” or "counted-as-one" (Badiou 2005: 4), by lawyers, artists, activists, politicians, journalists, or plain citizens who identify the mafia as a special kind of criminal association and a mafioso as a member of a mafia-type association. Cognitive mapping and Mafiacraft share another feature: both address a “subject” that “does not exist” (Jameson 1990: 347). Does this mean that mafiosi have a point when they challenge those asking whether they had been part of the mafia (as in the epigraphs above) to produce evidence of its existence? Is it their way of raising the ontological issue of orders of reality in which things and beings exis? Recalling Hirschauer’s (2006: 414) central thesis that “ethnographic writing puts something into words that, prior to this writing, did not exist in language,” we might wonder about the role of ethnographic writing in stabilizing “things” which do nof exist in the language of the very people or groups we study (those we call “mafiosi” do not identify themselves to this social and legal category, neither do they speak about “mafia” when they refer to their association). Nevertheless, the writing process that was undertaken by the anti-mafia movement has had ontological implications for the mafia object that cannot be ignored.

How does the use of speech and silence define social spaces? In a study on public discourse in the 1970s, Shirley Ardener (1975: viii-ix) argues that, because this tended to be characteristically male-dominated and the appropriate language registers seemed “encoded” by males, women were at a disadvantage when wishing to express matters of particular concern to them. One of the contributors to her edited book, Edwin Ardener (1975a, 1975b), drew on the concept of “muted group” as suggested by Charlotte Hardman to speak about womens lack of communication skills to portray their own world in their own words (see also S. Ardener 1975: xii). This notion of a muted group functions as an umbrella term: other groups in society may also be effectively muted. This pioneering feminist work? provides a critical conceptual framework

5. It is noteworthy that, during my first fieldwork on female carnivals and gender construction in Europe, I experienced how women found a way of expression in forms other than direct expository speech (Puccio 2002).

with which to view the mafia as a muted group. Just as the women and men in Hardman’s models and “counterpart models,” the mafia and the state seem to operate in different political and conceptual spaces. This is certainly due to the absence of what Shirley Ardener (1975: ix) calls the "suitable code.” Therefore, what Mafiacraft endeavors to tell are narratives of codes and translations, of encoding and deciphering, of silencing and voicing.

The mafia, as we saw, cannot be directly and empirically perceived. As a muted group, it also has no “independent existence”: it can only take form when “clothed” (Ardener 1975: xx) in cultural patterns of behavior and communication shaped by society and the state. One of these cultural patterns, in my view, is omertà, silence, shaped by the state in order to grasp an elusive language practice on its own terms, one somewhat acritically adopted by “specialists” of the mafia phenomenon, thereby carelessly falling back on conventional moral and intellectual understandings of silence. Mafiacraft, in turn, points out the gap between the academic discourse on the mafia, on the one hand, and the everyday experience of the latter’s silent presence in the life of activists, photographers, citizens, lawyers, and magistrates.

Feminist theory seems to offer possible ways forward in the particular field of research designed as mafia studies. But a distinction must be made. If we simply apply Shirley Ardener’s framework to describe the mafia as a muted group, we run the risk of remaining trapped in a binary model. Mafiacraft is rather based on the assumption that there is a strong interconnection between mafia, on the one hand, and society and the state, on the other. Indeed, Mafiacraft will not consider society and state as separate entities, to ensure that it does not succumb to the pressure of the “state effect” to conceive the state as a “free-standing object, located outside society” (Mitchell 2006: 169). In Ardener’s words, the “dominant group” and the “dominant model” together form the “dominant structure.” It follows that the “muted group” and the “counterpart model” together form a muted or “subdominant structure” (S. Ardener 1975: xxii n 4). Sociological and even anthropological research on the mafia tend to describe it as a “sub-culture,” and omertà as one of the main expressions of this sub-culture, a negative expression of the self, a passive resistance to the state. These studies can indeed be valuable. Nevertheless, by locating the mafiosi in the overall ideological framework of the dominant culture, they miss the specific forms of agency mafiosi may deploy by the performative use of silence. A genuine anthropological survey ought to be concerned with what silence is on the terms of its users:

what is at stake when people use silence instead of words as a social skill, when people “give up on words” (Basso 1970)?

Mafiacraft carefully examines the modalities of action, language, and silence of both the “speaking” and the “muted” groups through the study of their relationships. It is important to underline that this relationship has not been unvarying. It has changed over time, according to specific situations this book describes and analyzes. In 1970, anthropologist Keith Basso analyzed certain types of situations in which members of western Apache society “gave up on words.” These situations—minutely, ethnographically described, where silence appeared as a socially shared behavior—were all marked by ambiguity about the status of the people involved, by uncertainty and unpredictability. This book takes up Basso’s (1970: 214) challenge to study more widely such “acts of silence” and the “social contexts where silence occurs,” by developing them further from the point of view of political and moral anthropology.

Omerta as a folk “act of silence”?

Before embarking on this enterprise, it is necessary to question widely accepted ideas about silence, or its local expression, omertà. In the rhetoric of folklorist Giuseppe Pitré (1841-1916), aimed at defending Sicily against Italian attacks, omerta (the quality of being a man or omu) is a performative, and basically positive, non-speech act against the law and its representatives (demonstrating that a real man does not need to be protected by the law). Mafiacraft conceives silence as a communication tool between mafia and the state, rather than as a local means to resist the nation state. Refusing to talk does not necessarily signal the impossibility of interaction between mafia members and state representatives. Instead, omertà appears to constitute an alternative non-verbal route through which another modality of communication might be established. This modality of political action, the powerful act of non-speech, can be used by mafiosi as a political strategy as well as by members of the state itself. Considering silence as a political practice to be observed and studied is thus a way to de-ideologize it. The very object of Mafiacraft is not “the silence” as such, nor the speech acts and writing events (Fraenkel 2002) aimed at fighting it: it is the meaningful and unexplored realm that lies between these two poles, between silence and speech (Kidron 2009: 19), between the mafia and the state.

Basing her conclusions upon a long tradition, in the wake of Pitré, anthropologist Maria Pia Di Bella (2008: 75-86) postulates that omertà, a mafioso” supreme attribute, has been rooted in a continuum and constitutes the extreme growth-point of a local culture, encapsulated within a relationship of defiance toward a central state perceived as being foreign or inimical. Nearly a century before her analysis, political scientist Giuseppe Alongi ([1886] 1977: 5) declared that the “ways in which the Maffia [sic] seeks to inhibit the legal process"—since the notion of omerta precluded approaching the justice system to resolve disputes— simply exacerbated the reticence of all Sicilians, or almost all of them, to have recourse to the law. As a folk act linked to popular Sicilian culture, omerta blinds us to the fact that power is built not only on language (Barthes 2005: 12) but also on silence. By deconstructing omertà, this cultural category shaped by folklorists, sociologists, and anthropologists, Mafiacraft examines how this unpredictable and unfathomable symptom called “the mafia” was diagnosed by the state and, concurrently, how it was itself occulted by the same ambiguous entity. Here Mafiacraft intersects with “statecraft,” pointing up the powerful techniques through which the state creates /5ings by naming them (Bourdieu 2012, quoted by Santoro 2019), at the same time as obliterating whole swathes of reality by denying them the legitimacy to exist.