Mafia, Antimafia, And the Plural Cultures of Sicily

Mafia, Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of SicilyAuthor(s): Jane Schneider and Peter SchneiderSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 4 (August/October 2005), pp. 501-520Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431529 .Accessed: 09/05/2011 06:53

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005� 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4604-0001$10.00

ERIC R. WOLF LECTURE FOR2004

Mafia, Antimafia, andthe Plural Cultures ofSicily1

by Jane Schneider andPeter Schneider

Sicily has long been represented in literature and in historicaland social science texts as a place that is burdened by culturalvalues and practices that resist modernity: clientelism and cor-ruption, familism, patriarchy, and lack of trust are said to con-demn the island to backwardness. Sicily’s association with themafia adds a further negative image to these representations, animage of organized criminality that is conflated with Sicilianculture in general. Much as in the “Southern Question” dis-course in Italy and similar constructions of otherness elsewhere,novelists, scholars, and public intellectuals present these charac-teristics as essential traits—as if there were a homogenized“Sicilian culture” that reproduced itself consistently throughtime. Eric R. Wolf was a brilliant critic of this way of thinkingabout culture, insisting, rather, that complex historical processesproduce differentiated sociocultural forms over time in any givenlocation. Inspired by his example, we trace the differentiated his-tories of the mafia and antimafia forms in Sicily, analyzing thecontrasting values and practices that are specific to each. Ourpurpose is to represent Sicily as culturally plural and to generatea framework for recognizing and combating the all too commontendency to criminalize entire populations believed to have acommon culture.

j a n e s c h n e i d e r is Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Anthro-pology at the City University of New York Graduate Center (365Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10016-4309, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1938, she received her Ph.D. from the Universityof Michigan in 1965. She is the coeditor with Annette B. Weinerof Cloth and Human Experience (1987) and the author of severalessays on cloth and clothing. Her anthropological field researchhas been in Sicily and has led to three books coauthored withPeter Schneider. In 1998 she edited Italy’s Southern Question:Orientalism in One Country, and in 2003 she edited, with IdaSusser, Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in aGlobalized World. Her current research interests concern crimeand criminalization in global perspective.

p e t e r s c h n e i d e r is Professor of Sociology at Fordham Uni-versity, College at Lincoln Center. Born in 1933, he was edu-

1. This paper was delivered on October 11, 2004, in Vienna, Austria,under the sponsorship of a Wittgenstein Award to Andre Gingrich,Austrian Academy of Sciences (2000), the Department for Socialand Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, and the Inter-national Center for Cultural Studies, Vienna.

cated at Antioch College (B.A., 1956) and the University of Mich-igan (Ph.D., 1965). He has conducted research in Sicily since1965 and is coauthor, with Jane Schneider, of Culture and Politi-cal Economy in Western Sicily (New York: Academic Press,1976); Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology ofClass in Sicily (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); andReversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Pa-lermo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,2003). His present research interests concern organized crimeand processes of criminalization.

The present paper was submitted 25 i 05 and accepted 25 ii 05.

From our graduate-school days, when we were studentsof Eric R. Wolf, we remember his appreciation of An-thony Wallace’s (1970) call to think about culture as “anorganization of diversity” rather than “the replication ofuniformity.” Wolf’s teacher Ruth Benedict had cham-pioned the “Culture and Personality” school, accordingto which whole societies—the Kwakiutl, the Zuni, theDobu—and even whole nation-states—Japan or Russia—could be characterized by discrete clusters of culturetraits reproduced through time by the psychological con-ditioning of children. Wolf’s discontent with Benedict’scultural theory shaped his anthropological writingsthroughout his career.

For example, his rethinking of the peasant concept inthe 1950s hinged on a trenchant critique of Robert Red-field’s equating peasant culture with “folk society,” de-fined as value-saturated, timeless, and homogeneous(Wolf 1966; see Silverman 1979). In his extended essayAnthropology (1964) he explored the implications ofNorbert Elias’s history of German society in the sev-enteenth and eighteenth centuries and in particular itsunusually sharp division between bourgeoisie and aris-tocracy. The inward-looking bourgeois emphasized theuniqueness of their German spirit or “culture,” whilethe aristocrats preferred to celebrate their participationin a cosmopolitan, specifically French, “civilization.” Inother words, culture served as a counter to the philo-sophes’ “march of reason”—an opposition that FranzBoas imported into American anthropology, where itfound a special home among the psychologically orientednext generation of Boasians, especially Benedict.

Wolf noted that the idea of culture as interior and“ours” came to the fore in Europe at a time when someEuropean nations were contending for dominance whileothers were struggling to achieve separate identities andpolitical independence. The proposition that each nationpossessed a distinctive society, animated by a specialgeist, served to legitimate the aspirations of nations seek-ing to become states. Elites advancing this political pro-ject exploited the notion of discrete and integral cultures,each with its own emotional profile or identity. An ar-dent opponent of nationalism’s excesses, Wolf feared themisuse of a culture concept more attuned to emotionthan to reason.

In his major work Europe and the People Without His-tory (1982), Wolf advocated locating all societies in “his-torically changing, imperfectly bounded, multiple andbranching social alignments,” and he redefined cultureas follows (p. 387):

502 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

In the rough and tumble of social interaction, groupsare known to exploit the ambiguities of inheritedforms, to impart new evaluations or valences tothem, to borrow forms more expressive of their in-terests, to create wholly new forms to answer tochanged circumstances. . . . A culture is thus betterseen as a series of processes that construct, recon-struct, and dismantle cultural materials in responseto identifiable determinants.

Envisioning Power, Wolf’s last book (1999), takes upthe issue once more. The introduction traces the role ofideation in human interactions, reiterating the difficul-ties of an overly culturalist position. Although sharinganthropology’s inexorable romance with cultural varia-tion—perhaps to a greater degree than in his previousworks—Wolf nevertheless remains cautious, as is sug-gested by the way he presents the French anthropologistof India, Louis Dumont. Working at the level of wholesocieties, Dumont had developed a compelling contrastbetween non-Western and Western ideological systems,labeling the contrast as one between homo hierarchicusand homo equalis. Although inspiring many interestingstudies, Dumont, in Wolf’s view, “neglects alternativevoices and traditions that competed with the exemplaryprotagonists . . . and concentrates on ideas without ref-erence to the patterns of behavior that helped institu-tionalize these ideological forms. In this emphasis, idealpatterns of thought seem impelled by an internal logicof mind” (1999:59).

Anthropology has come a long way since the 1950s;Wolf appreciated the efforts of Gramsci, Bourdieu, andFoucault to raise our awareness that processes of powerunderlie even the most taken-for-granted instances ofshared cultural practice. Yet he continued to worry, inEnvisioning Power, that the idea of culture remained ripefor misuse. Advocates of the culture concept tend tothink that commonalities of language, traditions, andways of being automatically produce “sentiments ofidentity, social solidarity, love of country, aversion tocultural others,” but in fact such effects are never a fore-gone conclusion. They must be “mobilized and rein-forced to come to fruition, with the requisite energiesemerging from the turmoil of politics and war” (1999:65). Far from assuming that custom maintains itself, wemust rather investigate the instrumental, organizational,and ideological forces that underwrite the search for co-herence and continuity. It is in the spirit of Wolf’s dualadmonitions—to trace the institutionalization of ideasand to recognize alternative voices and traditions—thatwe offer our reflections on the mafia, the antimafia, andcultural pluralism in Sicily.

Since Italian Unification, outside observers have rep-resented Sicily as a timeless island whose inhabitants,although buffeted by foreign tides, cling to homegrownpassions, homegrown habits of crime and corruption, andhomegrown pessimism about change. Many Siciliansthemselves subscribe to the same stereotype, giving iteven greater weight. The resulting “myth of Sicily”evokes a primordial, racialized past, more or less outside

of history; it encompasses Sicilians in their diaspora aswell as at home, and it purports to account for Sicily’snotorious institution, the mafia. The myth also furthersthe mistaken assumption that Sicilian movements forsocial and political change—peasants’ struggles for landreform or, more recently, the urban movement againstthe mafia and political corruption—depend for their co-herence on ideologies of modernity imported fromoutside.

In this essay, we first outline the main social and cul-tural features of the Sicilian mafia and then review theconstruction of the myth of Sicily as a framework forinterpreting its origins and tenacity. Guided by Wolf’salternative approach to culture, the next section will re-late mafia development to agrarian capitalism and Italianstate formation as they interacted in Sicily in the latterdecades of the nineteenth century. The myth of Sicily,we will argue, is partly rooted in the state’s covert au-thorization of mafia violence, which continued into thetwentieth century. Against the assumption that trans-formative social movements are alien to Sicily, we pre-sent evidence that nuclei of Sicilian modernity emergedduring the same period not only in the cities but also inartisans’ workshops in the interior rural towns. Artisansand their educated offspring energized both the peasantstruggle for land reform of the 1950s and the antimafiacampaigns of the 1980s and ’90s. No less than the mafia,we will argue, the antimafia had genuine cultural rootsin Sicily. Both arguments—that state sponsorship wasconsequential for the hegemony, in Sicily, of a mafia-friendly cultural milieu and that other, diverse strandsof cultural production coexisted with this milieu—ac-knowledge Wolf’s persistent doubts about an essentialisttotalizing conception of culture.

The Sicilian Mafia: An Overview

Sicilian mafiosi represent themselves as “men of honor”who solve problems (their own and others’) without re-sorting to state-established law. The nucleus of their or-ganization is the localized fraternity or cosca (plural cos-che), named for the tightly bundled leaves of anartichoke. In fact, the mafia has always been a predatoryand criminal mutual-aid society that enforces loyaltyand secrecy among its members and supports those whoare arrested, convicted, and sentenced to jail.

Mafia cosche are territorial, usually bearing the namesof their rural towns or urban neighborhoods. Each com-monly extorts tribute (a “pizzo”) from businesses in itsterritory and demands that the territory’s employers hiremafia dependents. At the same time, through entrepre-neurial coalitions that cut across several cosche and in-clude many strategic outsiders, mafiosi pursue more far-flung activities from animal rustling to the commerceof contraband tobacco, arms, and drugs. Meanwhile,their carefully cultivated political connections and ca-pacity for violence give them considerable leverage incompeting for access to and control over public goods.

To some extent, cosca organization reflects kinship

schneider and schneider Plural Cultures of Sicily F 503

organization, for membership may be passed from fatherto son, uncle to nephew. Mafiosi also exploit the fictivekin tie of co-godparenthood, often naming each other asgodfathers to their children. In families where the father,uncles, cousins, older brothers, and godfathers are coscamembers, it is almost obligatory for up-and-coming boysto consider a criminal career. Yet, becoming a mafiosois also a matter of talent. Sometimes a mafioso’s sonlacks the fegato or guts for “criminal reliability.” As hisbrothers receive instruction in becoming “men ofhonor,” he is allowed to go his own way (Schneider andSchneider 2003:88–92).

Not only does the mafia pass over inappropriate kin;some cosche have rules against admitting too many kins-men at a time, believing that mafiosi seeking to inductmore than one son or brother must be planning a grabfor power within the cosca (see Paoli 1997, 2000). Themafia also recruits nonkin; indeed, young delinquents goout of their way to commit petty crimes in order to im-press would-be mafioso sponsors. Antonino Calderone,a justice collaborator (pentito) in the antimafia trials ofthe mid-1980s, put it this way: “Around every man ofhonor of a certain rank is always a circle of twenty orthirty kids—nobodies who want to become something. . . there to do small favors, to be put to the test . . . likerock stars looking up to Madonna” (quoted in Arlacchi1993:130).

All told, although the term “family” is frequently ap-plied to the cosca, it is a metaphor, an evocation of thepresumed solidarity of kinship. Mutual goodwill is fur-ther induced by idiosyncratic ways of speaking, terms ofaddress, and linguistically playful nicknames. Beyondthis, the mafia offers its members the privilege of exclu-sivity and belonging. A symbolically laden rite of entryand effort at lifelong socialization situates them “out-side” normal society and, in their view, “above” it.Scholars in the 1960s, ourselves included, were skepticalthat initiation rituals existed, attributing accounts ofthem to the imaginations of prosecutors and journalists.The depositions of the pentiti who are collaborating withthe state have prompted a reassessment of this skepti-cism, as they consistently describe a ritual in which thenovice holds the burning paper image of a saint whilehis sponsor pricks his finger and, mixing the symboli-cally laden blood and ashes, has him swear an oath oflifelong loyalty to the sodality and silence before out-siders (Schneider and Schneider 2003:82–85).

As might be imagined, the cosca is structured inter-nally along lines of age and privilege, with new recruits,the “soldiers,” being expected to take greater risks andreceive lesser rewards. Generally, the senior bosses mo-nopolize the elected leadership positions, but there arenotable cases of audacious upstarts’ seizing power. Thevarious cosche, present in most of the rural towns andurban centers of western Sicily, tend to be autonomousof one another, although mafiosi are in communicationthroughout the network. More to the point, Palermo andits immediate hinterland have always been a center ofgravity for the mafia and the locus for the establishment

in 1957 of an admittedly fragile coordinating “commis-sion” (Lupo 1984, 1990, 1993).

It is a complicated task to sketch the relationship ofwomen to mafia organization. On the one hand, they arehabitually excluded from certain activities—not onlymeetings but events such as banquets and hunting par-ties in which masculine identity is asserted throughmen’s affectionate, even homoerotic, horsing around.These events have implications for socializing novicesinto the practice of violence, and women’s exclusionfrom them may be fundamental to the bonding that takesplace there. In the 1960s, Peter Schneider attended a se-ries of banquets in which lavish multicourse meals pre-pared by the men were capped by an hour or more ofcarnivalesque entertainment that lampooned the Cath-olic Church and the absent sex (Schneider and Schneider1984). On the other hand, however, the women of ma-fiosi are themselves from mafia families; in Calderone’swords, they have “breathed [that] air since they wereborn” (quoted in Arlacchi 1993:147). Pleased to host herhusband’s friends, a mafia wife also basks in the refine-ments that his money and status can provide and know-ingly shelters his assets from the confiscatory power ofthe state. Her reciprocal involvements might extend toensuring the safety and comfort of fugitives that her hus-band feels compelled to hide or acting as a courier of hismessages from prison. Her sons will most likely join thecompany, her daughters will marry into it, and she par-ticipates in preparing them for these futures (see Puglisi1990, Siebert 1994).

The mafia, in general, looks out for its members’women, supposedly punishing men who “fool around”and caring for the “widows” and “orphans” of impris-oned members. Women’s loyalty is evident in the ve-hement denunciations that some have leveled at closekin who decide to collaborate with prosecutors. Whenthe Di Filippo brothers became pentiti, for example, theirsister publicly disowned them on behalf of herself andher parents: “We cannot open our shutters for the shameof it” (quoted in Jamieson 2000:230–31).

Such contradictions in the position of mafia womenare reflected in the ambivalence toward them of anti-mafia activists. The Palermo-centered antimafia move-ment of the 1980s and ’90s was energized for the mostpart by middle-class citizens with high-school and oftencollege educations. Many of the important leaders werewomen. Various feminist groups continue to play a role,and it is an antimafia goal to transcend the patriarchalstructures and practices of Sicilian society, deemed to bemafia-friendly. In its early years, the movement concep-tualized mafia women as victims, persons to reach outto; more recently, these women have been seen as com-plicit, persons to condemn (Principato and Dino 1997).

Constructing the Myth of Sicily

For many people, both insiders and outsiders, the mythof Sicily is a sufficient explanation for the origin of themafia and its persistence.


Outsider versions of this myth emerged full-force inthe wake of Italian Unification in 1860, as the fledglingnation-state prepared to confront banditry and disorderin its newly acquired southern and island provinces. Aninfluential text was the Tuscan parliamentarian Leo-poldo Franchetti’s 1876 report on the conditions of lawand order in Sicily, which likened Sicilian peasants tothe “savages” of North America, incapable of civilizationunless guided by outsiders (1925). To Franchetti, interiorSicily was a malign place where dangerous brigands andmarauders traversed the “bare and monotonous” land-scape as if some “mysterious and malicious power”weighed on it. Approaching the groves and orchards sur-rounding Palermo, he wrote, tales of violent crime trans-formed the scent of orange and lemon blossoms into the“smell of rotting corpses” (quoted in Moe 1998:65).

This sinister image paralleled commonplace descrip-tions of Sicily as “a paradise inhabited by devils” where“neither customs nor laws can be civil” (Lupo 1990:152;Moe 1998). In the 1880s and ’90s, Europe’s first “scien-tific” criminologists, led by Cesare Lombroso, appliedsocial Darwinist theory to Italy and its regions, which,they lamented, compared unfavorably to Britain, lackingcapitalist industries and colonies. Attributing the gap toa compromised biology, they described southern Italiansand Sicilians as carrying inferior Mediterranean-typegenes, a threat to the progressive northern Italians’ Al-pine, Aryan, or Celtic endowment. Most pernicious, thenew criminologists sought to prove that Calabrian andSicilian men were predisposed to crime, using the vari-able “congenital Latin decadence” to account for thesouthern crime rate (see Gibson 1998).

Meanwhile, Sicilian intellectuals transformed thesenegative images into positive attributes without over-turning their premise. For example, the turn-of-the-cen-tury physician and ethnologist Giuseppe Pitre repre-sented the mafia to northern Italians as an “honoredsociety.” The word “mafia,” he said, referred to “beauty,grace, perfection, and excellence of its kind . . . the ideaof . . . superiority and skill” (quoted in Lupo 1993:6). Themafioso, Pitre added, “is simply a courageous and skillfulman who does not bear a fly on his nose . . . [who] wantsto be respected. . . . If he is offended, he does not rely onthe Law . . . for to obtain one’s rights in this way isconsidered shameful.” For Pitre no less than Lombrosothe mafia was an enduring manifestation of a Sicilian“way of being.”

A complementary stereotype depicts Sicilians as un-able to solve problems, organized crime among them,through collective social action. This aspect of the mythof Sicily is amply illustrated by the U.S. political sci-entist Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work: CivicTraditions in Modern Italy (1993). For Putnam, Sicilianreluctance to change is the fault of governments, datingto the thirteenth century, that were at once feudal, bu-reaucratic, and absolutist—governments that did littlebut attempt to impose “hierarchy” over a potent “latentanarchy” (1993:123–30). As a consequence, Sicilian sub-jects are argued to “lack” civil consensus, public faith,and a “spirit of association” and to be prey to inept and

arbitrary justice, factionalism, and corruption. (Putnamis aware of but indifferent to the fact that his assessmentis reminiscent of Edward C. Banfield’s The Moral Basisof a Backward Society [1958], a much-criticized workthat reduced all of Italian society south of Rome to thesingle behavioral trope of “amoral familism.”)

Here, too, outsiders are not the only observers to per-petuate a stereotypic view; insiders have also empha-sized, indeed celebrated, Sicilians’ deep pessimism re-garding their society’s improvement. Giuseppe diLampedusa’s unforgettable character Prince Fabrizio, theLeopard, contrasts his own authoritarian temperament,moral rectitude, and propensity for abstract ideas, whichhe attributes to his German heritage, with the “mean-derings of the slow pragmatic Sicilian river.” For him,apathy and resignation are essential Sicilian character-istics. In one famous scene, the Piedmontese diplomatCavaliere Aimone Chevalley invites Fabrizio, a manwhose contribution to science would serve the newlyunified nation, to take an honorary seat in the ItalianSenate. Fabrizio, the aristocrat, demurs that he lacks thepolitical optimism for such a responsibility: “In Sicily,”he says, “it doesn’t matter about doing things well orbadly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simplythat of ‘doing’ at all” (di Lampedusa 1963[1958]:145).

In response to Chevalley’s perplexity, the Prince ex-plains: “For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bear-ing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations,all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that wecould call our own. . . . We’re as white as you are, Che-valley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for twothousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony”(1963[1958]:145–46).

And Sicilians never resisted; they simply accommo-dated, making the wound their own. “Our sensuality isa hankering for oblivion,” the Prince declares, “ourshooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languor,our exotic vices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility,that is, for death again” (1963[1958]:146). Finally, heshifts the focus to the climate and landscape. Six feverishmonths of unrelenting sun are broken each year by tem-pestuous rains that set dry river beds to frenzy. “Neverordinary, never relaxed,” the island was not “made forrational beings to live in” (p. 147). In the Prince’s eyes,so violent and cruel a terrain, together with “all thoserulers who landed by main force from all directions,”formed the Sicilian character, laying down a “terrifyinginsularity of mind” in anyone who did not escape by theage of 20 (p. 148).

Leonardo Sciascia, a writer who began his careershortly after Lampedusa’s death in 1957, expressed a sim-ilar outlook. Sciascia found nonreason in his compatri-ots’ excessive individualism, exalted masculinity, pre-occupation with honor, and cult of personal posses-sions—all responses to pervasive insecurity (1961:22–26). Proclaiming his love for Paris and himself as a“Child of the Enlightenment,” he sought to mediate be-tween the mystery of Sicily and the reason of Europe,all the while harboring deep reservations about the ex-tent to which a culture of reason could penetrate Sicily.


One had to go to Paris to breathe this different air (Pa-dovani 1979:viii–ix; Sciascia 1979).

Born in 1921, Sciascia grew up in Racalmuto, in thesulphur-mining zone of south-central Sicily, legendaryfor the exploitation of miners by domineering bosses.Trained as an elementary-school teacher, he never losthis empathy for Sicily’s poor. It was his judgment, how-ever, that despite extreme misery and oppression,Sicilian peasants and miners had only a weakly devel-oped sense of class consciousness. On this he citedGramsci, who portrayed southern peasants as driven bya “‘generic’ hatred [of a] ‘semi-feudal’ rather than moderncharacter” (1971[1929–35]:272–73). For Sciascia therewas a realta Siciliana that gave the regional socialistmovement its own “particular development,” differentfrom the movement of workers in the north (1961:13).Periodic peasant uprisings resembled anarchism morethan socialism—a kind of vendetta or “individual rev-olution” driven by personal “instincts” and ultimatelyself-defeating.

According to Sciascia, the struggles of peasants andminers were further distorted because the mafia wasclosely tied to the baronial class of mine owners andlatifondisti and to their allies who served as parliamen-tary deputies and high officials of the state. His mysterynovels of the 1960s developed this theme, their villainsbeing not so much the mafiosi as the politicians andofficials who used the mafia for their own ends. Someof the plots were modeled on or likely to evoke realinstances of murderous collusion and took much courageto publish. Yet although Sciascia wrote brilliantly aboutthe mafia and political corruption, he did not believe thatreform was likely. The heroes of his early novels whoattempted to get to the bottom of things were drawn asnaive and vulnerable actors, almost inviting martyrdom.

Collusion is indirect, Sciascia insisted. Political elitesrarely need to order a murder or menacing act; their al-liance with mafiosi is sufficient for these events to ma-terialize without explicit direction. Nor do their alli-ances, articulated through networks of friends of friends,pose an obvious moral problem. In this sense, the mafiais invincible—a matter of destiny—and movements thatwould try to repress it risk causing great harm (1961:178–79; see also see Padovani 1979:viii–ix). Before hisdeath in 1989, Sciascia quarreled bitterly with the an-timafia activists of his time. They in turn were repulsedby the Sicilianismo suggested by his 1979 reflection that“in myself as . . . in any Sicilian, the residuals of mafiafeeling are still present and alive,” so that fighting themafia is like fighting “against myself . . . a split, a lac-eration” (quoted in Paoli 1997:66).

The Mafia: Another Approach

In seeking to understand a phenomenon like the mafia,Eric Wolf would turn away from ideas about a Sicilianessence, whether genetic or molded over centuries of badgovernment and a threatening climate and landscape.Rather he would seek its emergence in “historically

changing, imperfectly bounded, multiple and branchingsocial alignments,” at the same time examining “thepatterns of behavior” that helped institutionalize themyth of a Sicilian essence. Let us revisit the mafia’semergence and hegemony in light of this antiessentialistframework.

Its antecedents lay in the period 1815–60, when theNeapolitan Bourbons, then rulers of Sicily, attempted toabolish feudalism, create a land market, and enclosecommon holdings. Their successors, the liberal Pied-montese who unified Italy in 1860, went farther downthis road, expropriating the island’s vast ecclesiasticalproperties and selling them at auction. But the newlycreated Italian state had neither the resources, the mil-itary and policing capacity, nor the patience to build in-stitutions that could govern the transitional chaos. In-stead, it ruled indirectly through the most powerful andoften the most rapacious landowners (see Riall 1998).Because bandits roamed the countryside, these land-owners were vulnerable to theft and kidnapping and hadto employ thieves and kidnappers for protection. Mafiosiarose from the interstices of this situation—within anincipient entrepreneurial class of cart drivers, muleteers,merchants, bandits, and shepherds. Recruited by gentryand noble estate and orchard owners as guards, rentiers,and all-around henchmen, these informal protectorsclaimed to restore order, pointedly condemning kidnap-ping, the bandit practice that elites most abhorred. Andyet they were also a source of disorder, protecting notonly property but also outlaws. Extortion, backed up byviolence and the menace of violence, became their mo-dus vivendi (Fiume 1991; Lupo 1993; Pezzino 1992, 1995;Riall 1998).

Clearly, had the liberal Italian state been motivated tocreate order in Sicily, the mafiosi who intervened wouldhave been redundant. Instead the state relied on them,only pretending to police their unauthorized use of vi-olence. Thereafter, a succession of governing regimes inItaly looked the other way as mafia “families” prolifer-ated, especially along the “bandit corridor” that extendedthrough Sicily’s western mountains and in the com-mercially rich orchard district surrounding Palermo(Lupo 1990, 1993; Pezzino 1995).

During fascism Mussolini appointed a special prefectfor Palermo in an attempt to suppress the mafia as wellas political opponents of his regime, but the British andAmerican invasion of the island in 1943–44 reversed this.The occupying military government sought the adviceof influential landowners, and mafiosi connected tothese elites were appointed to local government posi-tions. Under the subsequent Italian Republic, the mafia,now restored to power and position, protected the landedelite from the reemergent problems of banditry and peas-ant protest, intimidating and even murdering left-wingpeasant leaders, for the most part with impunity (Lupo1997, Mangiameli 1994, Santino 1997).

In 1950 a land reform was enacted, but by this timemafiosi had something new to offer: electoral support forthe national Christian Democratic Party. Referred to as“that wicked deal” (Renda 1987:201–2), this arrange-


ment meant that the Communist Party, the principalbacker of the peasant struggle, would remain excludedfrom participation in governing alliances, both regionaland national (Ginsborg 1990:100–101, 146–52; Lupo1997:28; McCarthy 1995:44). Estimates are that, betweenfriends, kin, and clients, each mafioso could muster atleast 40 to 50 supporters, adding up to 75,000 to 100,000“friendly” votes in the province of Palermo alone (Cald-erone, quoted in Arlacchi 1993:182–84). The quid pro quofor these votes was the mafia’s relative immunity fromprosecution or long jail terms and the green light to pen-etrate several new domains: in particular, the adminis-tration of the land reform, urban produce markets, newhouse construction, and public works. Each domain pro-vided an opportunity for mafiosi to favor clients andfriends, winning over more voters. The state’s failure toprevent the mafia from organizing the global traffic inheroin in the 1970s was perhaps the most consequentialoutcome of the “wicked deal” (see Rossetti 1994:183–85).

In tolerating and utilizing mafia cosche, Italy’s Chris-tian Democratic leaders were aware that American aidfor rebuilding Italy in the wake of war and fascism wouldcease if the Communists were to enter the government(Ginsborg 1990:100–101, 146–52; McCarthy 1995:44). Inother words, they consciously courted mafia votes inresponse not only to domestic concerns but to the pa-rameters laid down by the most powerful hegemon inthe postwar system of nation-states. This can only havereinforced the local presence of mafiosi in the rural andurban communities of Sicily and with this the myth thatthey were there to stay.

Artisan “Universities”

Conducting anthropological research during the mid-1960s in a rural town we have called Villamaura (seeSchneider and Schneider 1976), we encountered both alocal cosca and the cultural dispositions and values thatSciascia identified as the most essential Sicilian “waysof being.” And yet this town, set amidst vast latifundia,with a population around 7,500 at the time, also sup-ported another, substantially less fatalistic and lessmafia-friendly cultural tradition. Contrary to the usualargument that Sicilian peasant politics were imbuedwith the sentiment of personal vendetta, the landless andland-poor laborers of this town manifested a coherentconsciousness of their class situation that they attrib-uted to their long-term interaction with local artisans.The workshops of shoemakers and tailors, the quietercrafts, had served as “little universities,” they told us,where interested peasants could gather in the eveningfor news and political discussion. Participants in this(dare we say) “public sphere” were self-reflectively crit-ical of “Sicilian” pessimism about collective action andsocial change.

During the 1970s we undertook a second study of Vil-lamaura, focusing on its “demographic transition” fromhigh to very low birthrates. Because the town’s different

classes experienced this change in different decades andfor different reasons, we became particularly attentiveto cultural variation among them. We were, in effect,pursuing the alternative voices and traditions that com-peted with the exemplary protagonists, as Wolf wouldhave advocated.

These competing voices and traditions, articulatedmost strongly by local artisans, can be traced to the latenineteenth century. As the new Italian state furtheredthe conditions for a capitalist land market in the 1860sthrough the ’80s, a class of civile landholders expandedin the countryside. In contrast to the nobles who pre-ceded them, members of this emergent gentry were res-ident in the rural towns, not absentee lords living inNaples or Palermo. With passion they embellished theircountry lives in the spirit of cosmopolitan improvement.According to the first house cadastre, compiled in 1881,Villamaura’s streets, although obstructed by stones, gar-bage, and dust or mud depending on the season, weregraced by about 100 civile houses of varying size andgrandeur, from the 4–6-room two-story dwellings of the“little civili” to a few grand palaces of up to 30 roomsaround a courtyard, one of them modeled after the Pa-lazzo Pitti in Florence. Most civili families also acquireda villa on the wooded mountainside above the town andmoved there in August—servants, wardrobes, and somefurniture in tow. Clearly, the florescence of a rural bour-geois class bent on displaying the gentility that evennoblemen would countenance as civilized required elab-orate artisan production, as tailors, cobblers, masons,blacksmiths, and cabinetmakers strove to meet the de-sires of the new elites.

Many local artisans became especially skilled by serv-ing apprenticeships in Palermo, where they learned towork with expensive materials such as ebony and suedeand to copy models in pattern books and journals. Thegraduates of these urban apprenticeships crafted the gen-try’s baroque or rococo mirrored consoles, their ebony-inlaid gunstocks, their boots and shoes, wrought-ironbalconies, and extravagant tombstones. Among seam-stresses, most of whom were married to other artisans,a few learned to cut and follow patterns in Palermo.

As if to mark their arrival, the gentry created a circolocivile, an exclusive men’s club, occupying the comfort-ably furnished ground-floor rooms of a small palazzo onthe main street. By 1902 the artisans had founded theirown club—the Circolo degli Operai—on the oppositeside of the street. This circolo, furnished with a mirror,a clock, petroleum lamps, spittoons, four gaming tables,81 chairs, and daily newspapers, was the context for ar-tisans’ evolving discussions about class and social jus-tice. Sicily’s agrarian regime had careened from a decade(the 1880s) of drastically falling wheat prices to an island-wide uprising known as the Sicilian Fasci. The severerepression of this movement in the early 1890s ended inthe mass transatlantic migration of artisans as well aspeasants to the United States.

Artisans made up around 20% of Villamaura’s popu-lation in the early twentieth century. Our study explored,in particular, the initiative they took to practice birth


control with a commitment that was thorough, ideolog-ical, and surprisingly respectful of women. The contextfor their shift from high to low fertility—from familiesof 8–13 children to families of 2–3—was the 1920s and’30s, when the United States closed off the migrationsafety valve, disrupting the flow of immigration remit-tances, the government instituted a currency revalua-tion, and the Great Depression destabilized even the gen-try. This combination of events was ruinous for theartisans, whose systems of apprenticeship and creditwith merchants were further devastated after World WarII by the competition of industrial manufactures. By allaccounts, the idea of creating a small, 2–3-child familywas embraced as a way to avoid economic ruin and main-tain social respectability.

As a class of skilled craftsmen and women, literatesince the late nineteenth century, artisans were conduitsof international socialism in the Sicilian interior. In Vil-lamaura they were the vanguard of the local socialistmovement that, in 1913, aided by an expansion of thesuffrage, elected a handful of representatives to the towncouncil. In 1916, 150 socialist-led locals organized oneof the earliest Sicilian protests against World War I. In1919 there were local echoes of larger strikes, especiallynearby Ribera’s “four days of Bolshevism.” Three peas-ant leagues—one socialist, one Catholic, and one com-posed of veterans—occupied several latifundia, and therewere occupations, too, of the gentry’s circolo civile. Fi-nally, in 1921, Villamaura’s socialists spawned a sectionof the Communist Party with a roster of artisans at itshead. Sicily supported 37 such sections with 776 mem-bers in this, the first Communist year.

Persecuted under Fascism, politically engaged artisansnevertheless continued to receive international publica-tions and political tracts, brought to their shops and theircircolo by couriers, and to hide, read, and debate themin these “little universities.” According to elderly maleartisans, the gathered company also engaged in animatedconversations about their preferred birth controlmethod—the highly rationalized practice of coitus in-terruptus, considered by them a French invention andnicknamed marcia-in-dietro, “reverse gear.” At the time,artisans felt well-informed about France because manyof their number had worked alongside French artisansas employees of the Ducrot Company, a French cabinet-making firm that had major building contracts and fur-niture workshops in Palermo.

Artisan discourse characterized the French as piu ev-oluto, more “evolved,” than Italians and France as “ori-enting Italy” toward smaller family size. “The French,”we were told, “could pick up a glass of water, drink halfof it, and put it down again, in contrast to us Sicilians,who couldn’t stop before the glass was empty.” Sicilians,alas, were “hot types,” whereas the French (and the En-glish) were “clever” (scaltro). (“The more scaltro theywere, the smaller their family.”) Nevertheless, in theworkshops those assembled convinced themselves thatcoitus interruptus was a skill they too could acquire, andin collaboration with their wives.

In our interviews with artisan families, both men and

women made a point of saying that sexual satisfactionwas important to women as well as men; artisan wiveswere appreciative of their husbands’ sacrifices, usingwords like “honest,” “attentive,” and “careful” to de-scribe them. Several aspects of the artisans’ way of life(different from that of the peasantry) contributed to thisseeming mutuality between women and men. Shoemak-ers, cabinetmakers, blacksmiths, and tailors pursuedtheir crafts close to home, in a bottega or shop on theground floor of their dwelling. They ate their main mealat midday, seated at table with wife and children. Peasantmen, by contrast, ate after sundown, following an ex-hausting day in distant fields, and possibly without theirother family members present. The artisan conjugal pairalso cooperated in work. Many artisans’ wives werethemselves artisans or ran small shops, and most helpedout in the training and discipline of apprentices. Ifwomen were unequal partners in their husbands’ activ-ities, they at least participated in them to a greater degreethan did the wives of the agricultural classes, includingthe gentry.

A comparison with mafia families is especially apt. Asnoted above, in rural Sicily, mafiosi had roots in the com-mercial, mediational, and animal-herding sectors of theagrarian economy. Although some “talented” artisanswere recruited into the mafia, the two categories wererelatively discrete. Moreover, they presented contrastingcultural models to their local community. Patriarchalnorms and patterns of behavior not only characterizedthe mafia model; they were amplified and celebrated inthe mafia traditions of hunting and banqueting wherewomen were lampooned. Mafia wives, although capableof handling their husbands’ affairs, did so to meet emer-gencies of criminal prosecution, not as a right, and werekept in the dark about many things (often to give themthe protection of deniability). Autobiographical ac-counts, still few, poignantly suggest that mafia women,suspecting many things that they were not supposed to“know,” were robbed of meaningful communicationwith other women. Silenced from expressing their manyanxieties, in conversations with female friends and rel-atives they dwelt on the superficial: new purchases, chil-dren, and the weather. In contrast, artisan women in-teracted intensely around their respective crafts.

Artisans also enjoyed a unique pattern of leisure. Manymen knew and loved opera and themselves played mu-sical instruments, performing in the municipal band.Among their fondest memories were the evenings ofdance and song that were held in each other’s houses,eating pastries and preparing the way for class-endoga-mous marriages among their children. Compared withpeasant laborers, artisan men spent relatively little timein the dozen or so bettole or taverns scattered throughVillamaura’s neighborhoods; frequenting such placesmeant stooping to mix with the “hopeless poor,” whodrank too much and beat their wives. The Monday gath-erings, although exclusively male, were hardly a threatto companionate marriage; of all the local classes, arti-sans pursued the most gender-balanced and cooperative


of marriage arrangements, easing their path to modern“family planning.”

Artisans embedded in peasant communities in Sicilycharacteristically viewed themselves as bearers of a civ-ilizing mission. For reasons of their work, travel, and wayof life, they harbored a particular affinity for the ration-alizing culture of the French Enlightenment—a culturethat many intellectuals of the time felt strongly attractedto but did not think their fellow Sicilians could share.Certainly in Villamaura craftsmen and craftswomen con-sidered themselves as models for the rural populationthat, instead of discussing worldly affairs, “coped withthe urine of animals.” Artisans, after all, practiced artsthat “refined a people” and “coupled them with othernations.” As artisan men turned to coitus interruptus,it was not merely to limit family size; they were alsoconvinced of the civilizing potential of smaller families.Hence their judgment that the peasants who drank inthe taverns were having children “like animals.”

As we have suggested, peasants spent a lot of time withartisans, on whom they depended for many goods andservices. They frequented the shops of shoemakers, bar-bers, tailors, and carpenters for news and gossip and asa passatempo. Most important, artisans were among theleaders of the peasant leagues that occupied large estatesafter World War I and were prominent in the foundingof local sections of the Socialist and Communist Parties.Both artisans and peasants shared the experience of thefascist repression of the left, including political impris-onment and exile.

At the same time, peasant women were able to observethat the artisan wives of their neighborhood were nolonger always pregnant, while peasant men began to talkthemselves out of their original, incredulous response tothe idea of withdrawal, becoming committed practition-ers of “reverse gear” in the 1950s and ’60s. In otherwords, the rationalizing culture of rural-town artisanryin Sicily spread beyond its own boundaries, furtheringSicily’s cultural diversity (see Schneider and Schneider1996).

Artisan Culture and the Struggle against theMafia

Our most recent research in Sicily took place in Palermoduring the late 1980s and 1990s, when we studied theantimafia process (see Schneider and Schneider 2003).The struggle has been a difficult one, unfolding on sev-eral fronts simultaneously. One is the front of police andjudicial investigation. A cohort of dedicated Sicilianprosecutors led by Giovanni Falcone demonstrated animpressive sociological imagination, grasping the con-tours of what had formerly been a much-mystified phe-nomenon. The work was dangerous, and eventually Fal-cone and others were assassinated, but not before theyhad developed two critical investigative strategies: “trac-ing the money” and turning some mafiosi into “justicecollaborators.” Their efforts produced an astonishing

amount of new knowledge in a short period of time andyielded an impressive number of arrests, convictions,and fugitive captures. At the same time, supporters ofthe magistrates demanded government transparency andthe removal of elements of the state that had historicallygiven aid and comfort to the mafia. A similar approachwas taken in other institutions—the banks, the church,the health care system, the unions, the university—allarenas in which reformers pressed for change.

Sustaining these efforts was the movimento antimafia,a multifaceted citizens’ social movement. Catalyzed bymafia violence, it poured its energy into volunteer workpromoting the values of democracy and civility. Anti-mafia projects in the public schools and the recuperationof Palermo’s degraded historic center—long the victimof the mafia’s corruption of real estate and construc-tion—are examples.

It is important to understand that participants in theantimafia movement share both location and historywith the mafia. Dedicated to the struggle, they are alsoproud of their Sicilian identity and in some cases bur-dened by a past of ambiguous social relations. The re-sulting uncertainty and moral anguish have been themore troubling because all Sicilians are so often treatedas a stigmatized category by the wider world. Yet, an-timafia activists coped with their anguish and remainedcommitted, so much so that Sicily is today a remarkablydifferent place—changed in ways that no one thoughtpossible a decade and a half ago. This has happened, webelieve, because their struggle is grounded in Sicily andno more a cultural borrowing from outside than werethe peasants’ and workers’ movements of the past.

Put somewhat differently, the antimafia effort tochange society has roots in an indigenous cultural milieudifferent from the renunciation and pessimism that somany commentators, inside and outside, regard as in-tegral to a so-called Sicilian essence. Most contemporaryantimafia activists belong to the educated middle classesof Palermo and other cities, but many of their familiesoriginated and still have roots in the artisan traditionsof the interior agrotowns. This is because, followingWorld War II, artisans as a rule sent the sons and daugh-ters of their now quite truncated families to study andfind employment in government service and the profes-sions, especially in Palermo, thus contributing substan-tially to the ranks of the urban educated. It should alsobe noted that, although Palermo is the gravitational cen-ter of antimafia activism, numerous rural towns havesupported initiatives against the mafia led by local may-ors, teachers, priests, and public employees, themselvesquite possibly the sons and daughters of artisans.

Speaking more generally, whether rural or urban, an-timafia reformers have inherited the submerged historyof the peasant struggles. They know about the martyr-dom of the more than 50 peasant and union leaders whowere killed by the mafia at the height of the peasantagitation for land around 1950 (see Santino 2000). Andthey know the legend of the “little universities” wherethe role and machinations of the local cosca entered po-litical discussion. In other words, the “public sphere” of


artisans’ workshops and circoli in the rural Sicily of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries generated a home-grown modernizing tradition oriented toward informeddebate and confident about social change. Here we seeits significance for the antimafia process of today.

Plural Cultures and the Myth of Sicily: AConclusion

Of course, the antimafia movement provoked a backlash,fed by the opposition of some who represent the old re-gime and by the uncertainty of others who fear the po-tential for abuse of due process by the newly empoweredpolice and magistrates. Critics accuse antimafia activistsof being self-interested careerists, overly eager to trampleon those who do not agree with them. It is almost as ifthey were invoking Prince Fabrizio’s admonition that“the sin that we Sicilians never pardon is simply that of‘doing.’” Significantly, the backlash also sounds a Sici-lianist chord, implying that the effort to repress the mafiais influenced by outsiders’ alien values and naive opti-mism about the possibility of change.

During the 1980s, Sciascia, the courageous author ofnovels and commentaries exposing the collusive entan-glement of the mafia and corrupt politicians (see Sciascia1960, 1964, 1966), made a series of public statementshostile to the magistrates who were prosecuting mafiosi.His words were shocking to movement activists, whoaccused him of betraying his own past, but they helpedto crystallize the Sicilianist opposition to antimafia in-itiatives (see Schneider and Schneider 1998). Currently,antimafia activism is being undermined by the Berlus-coni regime, some elements of which are accused of col-lusion with the mafia. Berlusconi is also outspokenlycritical of the judiciary. It would be a mistake, however,to conclude that this moment of apparent retreat—Si-cilians call it a “return to normalcy”—demonstrates thevalidity of the myth of Sicily. In the words of the Sicilianhistorian Salvatore Lupo, “The memory of the path wehave followed and the victories that were achievedshould remain very much alive as proof of the fact thatone can win. . . . that so many efforts, and so manysacrifices—even of human lives—count for something.Because I would not like to see us return to cultivatingthe paralyzing myth of a mafia not only invincible butindeed untouchable” (2004:15).

As Eric Wolf insisted, culture is best understood inhistorical context and in relation to the “alternativevoices and traditions” that would challenge the domi-nant ideological forms. That these voices and traditionsprovoke regressive measures is a lesson in how the pro-tagonists of the dominant forms seek their reinstate-ment. At the same time, the continued commitment ofSicilians opposed to the mafia and its entwinement withpolitics demonstrates that the history of Sicily is the fruitnot of myth but of struggle and that the mafia weddedto political corruption is not its inevitable destiny.

Comments

stanley r . barrettDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology,University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada NIG 2W1([email protected]). 19 iv 05

If the main purpose of this paper is to challenge “themyth of Sicily”—the viewpoint that the island has beenand always will be captive to a culture of violence, frozenin time, inimical to the values of the Enlightenment, auniform essence incapable of internal change—the au-thors have been decidedly successful. They launch theirattack on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Draw-ing from the writings of their eminent teacher Eric Wolf,they describe culture as a process rather than a finishedproduct, marked by struggle, division, and competingvoices—the obverse of an unchanging, homogeneous es-sence. This version of culture, they argue, illuminatesthe Sicilian case, notably the recent anti-mafia move-ment, a home-grown movement that contradicts the pes-simism evoked by “the myth of Sicily.” To a very greatextent, the anti-mafia movement developed out of anartisan class that emerged in the late 1800s, a forward-looking, enlightened group whose ideas and activitiesspilled over onto the landless labourers, generating classconsciousness.

In this paper the Schneiders have capably dealt a deathblow to “the myth of Sicily,” and my main criticism isonly indirectly related to their central argument. Insteadit concerns the concept of culture. I suggest that thispaper would have been just as clear, sound, and insightfulhad culture not entered the discussion at all. The authorsspend considerable effort in distancing themselves fromthe old-fashioned definition of culture embraced by peo-ple like Benedict. However, in the past couple of decadeswe have witnessed the emergence not only of an anti-culture school (for example, Abu-Lughod 1991) but alsoof an anti-anti-culture school (for example, Lewis 1998)in which it is contended that even during the Boasianera culture was defined in such a wide variety of waysthat charges of homogeneity, consensus, and stability arenonsensical. Comparable charges, of course, were leveledagainst the equilibrium model associated with struc-tural-functionalism in British social anthropology and insociology, but it is the rare publication today that re-hearses these dated accusations. If the old (fictitious?)image of culture as a bounded, self-perpetuating entityimplying timeless consensus and harmony continues todominate the discipline to such an extent that its prac-titioners find it necessary to attack it over and over again,then perhaps the time really has come to abandon theconcept.

Consistent with the approach taken in Blok’s (1973)classic on the mafia (which contains several referencesto both Wolf and the Schneiders), the authors describemafiosi as middlemen generated by identifiable histori-cal changes and state formation and examine issues of


class, class consciousness, and social movements. Theaddition of culture to the mix does little to advance theargument and indeed may confuse it. In the title we findthe words “plural cultures.” But what are these cultures?The mafia “middlemen” and the anti-mafia “move-ment,” perhaps the artisan “class” and even the land-rich bourgeoisie created in the 1800s, as well as the land-less peasantry? Where is the line drawn? What isn’t a“culture” or “cultural”? Finally, is it more accurate todescribe Sicily today as a complex of plural cultures oras an overarching culture containing subcultures? Thepaper provides no clear answers to these questions.

Let me briefly illustrate my criticism in the contextof nearby Corsica. Since the era of the vendetta and con-tinuing with the violent contemporary independencemovement, there has existed “a myth of Corsica” em-braced at times by Corsicans themselves. This myth sug-gests that Corsicans are pre-Enlightenment brutes, ir-rational and bellicose by nature, incapable of enteringthe modern world. Contrary to “the myth of Corsica,”the island today is a complex place. It has not only athriving independence movement but also an anti-in-dependence movement, as well as two separate women’speace organizations similar to those that emerged during“the Troubles” in Northern Ireland. While the Schnei-ders might want to label “alternative voices” plural cul-tures, culture is a largely expendable concept with regardto Corsica. Much more important are issues of coloni-alism, the transformation from feudalism to capitalism,and economic and political forces manifested in patternsof emigration and immigration and even in gender dif-ferences regarding the quest for independence.

In my judgment, “the myth of Corsica” and “the mythof Sicily” are more profitably conceptualized as discourseor ideas promoting interests, and this brings us to thetopic of power. Although the Schneiders certainly buildstruggle into culture and at least implicitly deal withresistance, had they gone the extra mile and advancedour theoretical understanding of the manner in whichculture is fused to power this excellent article wouldhave been even more impressive.

bojan baskarDepartment of Sociology, Filozofska fakulteta,Askerceva 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia([email protected]). 18 iv 05

Along with other anthropologists who started to studythe Sicilian mafia at roughly the same time (Boissevain,Blok, Hess), the Schneiders were prompted to provide ananswer to the then seemingly inevitable questions of itsexistence, its nature, and its mode of organization. Be-cause exploring the mafia was not precisely part of theiroriginal agenda, this is perhaps another instance of theattraction of this “enigma” confronted on the ground.Many have been tempted to try to resolve it, but fewhave been interested enough to proceed with the long-term observation and analysis.

Adhering to Eric Wolf’s ideas about culture, the

Schneiders quite early questioned the notion that a ho-mogeneous Sicilian culture (or character) was responsi-ble for all the ills of the island. It was primarily thenondeterminist and nonessentialist notion of culturethat allowed them to see the nature and internal orga-nization of the Sicilian mafia more accurately than theircolleagues (who tended to dissolve the mafia into Siciliansocial structure and/or culture and thus to “mafia-ize”the latter); paradoxically, it is precisely they who haverepeatedly criticized their earlier erroneous views. In themid-1970s, explaining mafiosi and their behavior not asan automatism controlled by Sicilian (Mediterranean)cultural codes of honor and omerta but as specialists inmanipulating these very codes required more episte-mological perspicacity than it does today (and probablya particular political sensibility). The precondition forseeing the mafia in this way was the capacity to disen-tangle oneself from Sicilianismo, the pervasive “nativ-ist” ideology which emerged partly as a reaction to out-side Orientalizing discourses on Sicily (that of the“Southern Question” in particular). This defensive ide-ology initially claimed that the talk about the mafia andother alleged vices was no more than the calumny ofmalicious foreigners (especially northern Italians), thuslegitimizing the mafia, denying its existence as an or-ganized criminal association, and representing it as asomewhat exaggerated but authentic expression of theSicilian character. Therefore anthropologists who dis-cussed the existence and the organization and function-ing of the mafia were actually tackling some central is-sues in the repertoire of Sicilianist ideology. The fact thatby the answers they provided they largely fell into theSicilianist trap is partly to be attributed to certain meth-odological limitations of Malinowskian ethnographicfieldwork (again referred to by Eric Wolf), especially its“emicist” bias. Another case in point was the astonish-ing errancy of anthropologists working on Yugoslavia(specialists on Serbia in particular), who were initiallylargely incapable of understanding what was happeningwhen the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina brokeout.

Critical analysis of Orientalist myths of Sicily is onetask on the Schneiders’ agenda of extricating social sci-ence (and other) discourses on Sicily from their usualfatalist and essentialist assumptions. These assumptionsdeserve to become a locus classicus of anthropologicalculturalism even though they do not appear in Ruth Ben-edict’s book. For scholars of nationalism, comparativestudy of the ethnopsychological construction of nationalcharacters and national landscapes has proved rather use-ful in their “deconstruction.” The construction of Sici-lian character may be compared to the redefinition of“Spanish essence” in early-twentieth-century regenera-cionismo. In the same vein, Prince Fabrizio’s explanationof Sicilianness in terms of climate and landscape is strik-ingly reminiscent of the invention of the Castilian land-scape as a national landscape by some regeneracionistas.While Sicilianists (Sciascia included) would often blame“the centuries of Spanish rule” for Sicilian backwardness


and immobility, regeneracionistas were prone to blamesimilar Spanish ills on “the centuries of Habsburg rule.”

Yet Sicilianist ideology is not only ethnic. It has alsobeen a class ideology, serving the interests of local dom-inant classes most conspicuously by legitimizing themafia (which was instrumental in the repression of peas-ant and worker movements) but also by promoting pa-triarchal and masculinist values as authentically Sici-lian. Hence another task undertaken by the Schneidersis to substantiate the “class basis” of an alternative,“non-Sicilianist” culture which reemerged in the im-portant citizens’ antimafia movement of the 1980s and1990s. (Here, again, comparison with similar movementstaking place at the same time, for example, those of Cen-tral and Eastern Europe, might prove rewarding.) I haveto admit that, although not unfamiliar with their work,I was genuinely surprised by the proposition that theearly social base of this alternative culture was the ar-tisans of the interior agro-towns. The argument is largelybased on their ethnography of the town of “Villamaura”and relies heavily on the recollection by local artisan andpeasant families of their past life stretching back to theend of the nineteenth century. It is certainly an intrigu-ing suggestion, but it remains to be examined in moredetail. Why did the peasants so easily accept the leadingrole and “civilizing mission” of their artisan leaders?Given that the Schneiders themselves provide some evi-dence of the artisans’ contempt for agricultural work andpeasant life, was this relationship always so unprob-lematic?

henk driessenDepartments of Cultural Anthropology andMediterranean Studies, Radboud UniversityNijmegen, Postbox 9044, 6500 KD Nijmegen, TheNetherlands ([email protected]). 21 iv 05

Schneider and Schneider offer us a clear and thought-provoking text that deepens our understanding of cul-tural processes in Sicily past and present. Their essaymay also be read as a tribute to their teacher Eric R.Wolf, as a token of their admiration for the achievementsof the antimafia movement, as a retrospective of fourdecades of involvement in Sicilian ethnography, and asa presentation of promising ideas regarding the role ofcraftsmen in the emergence and consolidation of a cul-tural counterpoint.

In their brief discussion of the concept of culture, theypoint to Wolf’s recurrent worries about its potential forabuse, in particular cultural determinism and the essen-tialization of difference. This led him to conclude histwo most substantial books with afterthoughts on thenotion of culture. While some anthropologists (Kuper1999) find in Wolf’s critical statements support for aban-doning the concept of culture altogether, the Schneidersappreciate his attempt to make it more flexible and open-ended and link it to power. Wolf gave a basic reason forrethinking, rather than abandoning, the concept of cul-ture: “It is precisely the shapeless, all-encompassing

quality of the concept that allows us to draw together—synoptically and synthetically—material relations to theworld, societal organization, and configurations of ideas”(Wolf 1999:289). This is an echo of the old ideal of holismthat inspired his teacher Ruth Benedict, albeit in a dif-ferent way.

In their overview of the mafia, discussion of the con-struction of the myth of Sicily, and elaboration of analternative view of the mafia’s emergence and hege-mony, Schneider and Schneider come very close to Blok’s(1973) study (which, oddly, they neglect to mention) ofthe rise, expansion, heyday, decline, and reemergence ofthe rural mafia. Blok’s antiessentialist approach alsoowes much to Wolf’s work, in particular to the latter’sview of the links between local community and widersociety. Evoking Wolf’s notion of tactical power, Blokhints at the role of artisans in providing leadership anda program for the peasant movement that had emergedby the end of the nineteenth century. Artisans combinedtheir relative autonomy and literacy with the develop-ment of extended social networks. Peasants and farmworkers had less access to these sources of power.

This takes us to the core of the two-pronged argumentput forward in this paper: the coexistence of contrastingcultural models and practices represented by mafiosi asopposed to artisans, for instance, with regard to notionsand practices of gender, sexuality/procreation, literacy,time, work, home, and sociability, and the continuity interms of social background, organizational expertise, andvalues between the artisanal counterculture and the an-timafia movement that emerged in the 1980s. The ex-tremely interesting continuity that the Schneiders sug-gest needs, I think, more documentation. There isevidence from Andalusia that supports the assertion ofan artisanal counterculture. This should not come as asurprise, since the structure of Andalusian agro-towns isin many respects similar to that of their Sicilian coun-terparts (Blok and Driessen 1984). In Andalusia the pres-ence of a wide variety of crafts also made possible the“civilized” lifestyle of the gentry and bourgeoisie. Ar-tisans played leading roles in the anarchist and socialistmovements. The workshops of these “men with ideas”were foci of male sociability in which they preachedmoderation in drinking and sex as well as equality be-tween the sexes (Mintz 1982).

Schneider and Schneider claim that artisans viewedthemselves as bearers of a civilizing mission and thatthey furthered Sicily’s cultural diversity. How does thisself-perception and variation relate to the general notionof civilta (or cultura in Andalusia) celebrated by agro-urban elites? Is it part of the urban ethos which scholarshave linked to the compact agrarian settlements ofsouthern Europe? Did artisans indeed prop up the urbanway of life in the countryside? In a recent study of ar-tisans in the Cretan town of Rethymnon, Herzfeld (2004)documents a rich variety of artisans’ workshops in whichapprentices are forced to learn their trades by harsh train-ing. He argues that this practice reinforces the stereotypeof artisans as rude and uncivilized, as bearers of a back-ward tradition threatened with obsolescence by factory


production and globalization. Has this also been the fateof artisans in Sicily and Andalusia? In preindustrial timesCretan artisans were respected and their crafts a sourceof worth. Herzfeld does not mention the role of crafts-men as pioneers of the labor movement. Did they per-haps play a different political role in Crete? Schneiderand Schneider have tapped a rich source for further re-search into cultural diversity and its connections withpower.

chris hannMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, P.O.Box 11 03 51, 06017 Halle/Saale, Germany([email protected]). 18 iv 05

For several decades the work of Jane and Peter Schneiderhas offered a welcome corrective to the influentialstrands of American social science writing about south-ern Italy which have emphasized the prevalence of“amoral familism” (Banfield 1958) and the lack of “civilconsensus” (Putnam 1993). In place of essentialist gen-eralizations about Sicily, the Schneiders have paid at-tention to the changing political economy of the island:both internal structures of production and power and thewider dependencies. Their oeuvre is an outstanding ap-plication of the anthropological vision of Eric Wolf, andit is highly appropriate that they should have been in-vited to deliver the present contribution as a public lec-ture in his honor.

The arguments are persuasive. In this comment I con-centrate on the vocabulary in which they are developed,in particular the use of the term “culture.” It seems tome that the Schneiders, along with Wolf before them,fail to resolve the perennial dilemmas surrounding thisconcept. They open by citing their teacher’s antiessen-tialist perspective: “A culture is thus better seen as aseries of processes that construct, reconstruct, and dis-mantle cultural materials in response to identifiable de-terminants” (Wolf 1982:387). While this approach mayindeed be viewed as an “alternative” to the vision ofRuth Benedict, Wolf’s own teacher, it amounts arguablyto little more than a restatement of the mainstream Boa-sian perspective. As the Schneiders note, Wolf’s lastmajor work of 1999 was very much a celebration of “an-thropology’s inexorable romance with cultural varia-tion.” But, having drawn attention to the cultural vari-ation to be found within Sicily, the Schneiders theorizethis at the end of their article as a case of “plural cul-tures”: does this not risk contradicting the Wolfian def-inition cited above of “a culture”?

The danger of the singular usage is clear: in this caseit plays into the hands of all those, including staunchand creative critics of the mafia, who wish to hold on tothe idea of a deep and pervasive spirit of Sicilianismo (itis not made clear what status, if any, the term “culture”has in local discourse or whether Leonardo Sciascia him-self uses it in explaining the realta Siciliana). TheSchneiders contest this “essentialist totalizing concep-tion of culture” by drawing attention to the material

foundations and institutional structures which shapeconflicting worldviews and practices. In the end, how-ever, they retain the concept by identifying a second cul-ture, exemplified by artisans, which stands in oppositionto the dominant culture and “myth” of the island’selites. But how far can this method be pushed? Insteadof calling for pluralization and raising the question ofhow many cultures Sicily might possess, could theSchneiders’ case be more effectively made by dispensingwith this term altogether? What would be lost if thenoun or adjectival form were simply omitted in phrasessuch as “The antimafia had genuine cultural roots inSicily”; “less mafia-friendly cultural tradition”; “Theypresented contrasting cultural models to their local com-munity”; “the rationalizing culture of rural-town artis-anry”; “a cultural borrowing from outside”; “an indig-enous cultural milieu”?

The article raises a few issues that seem to need fullerinvestigation. That the artisans’ clubs established aroundthe turn of the last century have had an influence on theantimafia movement of recent decades is asserted ratherthan proven. The Schneiders attack one “myth of Sicily,”but in places they might be accused of constructing analternative myth—that of the modernizing artisans, thetransmission mechanism for all good things from so-cialism to coitus interruptus and “companionate mar-riage.” Why exactly has the other myth apparently beenmore easily disseminated and internalized in the longterm by the island’s inhabitants, as evidenced by therecent strength of anti-antimafia sentiment and the pop-ularity of Forza Italia in Sicily? How exactly is the “sub-merged history” of earlier struggles passed on? Some ofthese questions are of course addressed in the Schneiders’recent book (2003), where I note with pleasure that theterm “culture” is not considered significant enough toappear in the index.

thomas hauschildInstitute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology,Tubingen University, Tubingen, Germany([email protected]). 25 iv 05

The Schneiders offer a good example of a new kind ofmaterialism which could become the “post-postmodern-ism” anthropological paradigm. They do not entertainthe illusion of being able to return to the idyllic era of“pure facts,” but they also do not subscribe to the ideathat every attempt at the study of Mediterranean cultureis just a phantasmagorical act of “Mediterraneanism”(Herzfeld 2005:63). By analyzing cultural data as hybrids(Latour 1999), moving back and forth between anthro-pological and auto-stereotypes and between the raw factsof socioeconomic organization and historical conjecture,they direct our attention to the processes that “con-struct, reconstruct, and dismantle cultural materials.”They present evidence of Sicilian cultural ambiguitieswhich allow the development of both mafia and anti-mafia behaviour. Especially their description of their ex-perience with the liminal situations of a series of bur-


lesque mafia banquets and their analysis of elementsof civil society in various artisans’ “salons” signal theend of an anthropology of Sicily and southern Italy ded-icated mostly to the idealistic themes of mentality, thehistorical longue duree, and quasi-genetically coded“culture” (Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti 1992, Banfield1958).

I would like to expand the argument a bit. The Schnei-ders write: “In seeking to understand a phenomenon likethe mafia, Eric Wolf would turn away from ideas abouta Sicilian essence, whether genetic or molded over cen-turies of bad government and a threatening climate andlandscape. Rather he would seek its emergence in ‘his-torically changing, imperfectly bounded, multiple andbranching social alignments.” Yet, on the pages leadingup to this assertion they merely present substantial ar-guments against mentalist, quasi-genetic, culturalist,and historicist-idealist interpretations of Sicilian dispos-itives of power. The “threatening climate and landscape”have not previously been mentioned as part of the litanyof essentialisms, and I conclude from this that geography,space, and landscape remain unresolved points in theargument.

Sicily as a set of geostrategical, geomorphological, andgeographical (infrastructural and economic) categorieshas yet to be examined in the light of an anthropologycritical of mentalism and essentialism. If the mafia andthe anti-mafia movement have their origins in the samecultural processes, the question when and how the pen-dulum swings from violence to non-violence and backis open for discussion. I am not arguing in favour of acrude geomorphological materialism. My idea is to crit-icize and rethink Banfield’s, Sciascia’s, and Putnam’s his-toricism in reference to raw, often quantitative data.Given that cultures of every sort allow for violent andnon-violent interpretations, is it not possible that rawfactors, after many cultural and political elaborations,have the last word? Among these factors I would includedegrees of viability in a landscape—losses to the econ-omy due to damage caused by landslides, drought, earth-quakes, and the geostrategical position of landscapes. Isthere a constant “cost” to be paid in the face of seeminglycontingent factors such as geography and demography, a“cost” in terms of degrees of violence and casualties? Isthere a way to calculate the violent and non-violent char-acter of local and regional cultural processes in relationto degrees of infrastructural and natural disaster (MunichRe-Group 2005)? On the map of risk and natural disastersthe Mediterranean is an all-red area contrasting with amuch calmer Central and Western Europe. Does thishelp to explain the fact that similar Euro-Mediterraneandevelopments in civil law and civil society lead, in aspecific frame of historical and technological develop-ment, to very different cultures of violence and peace?Central recent discussions of the reliability of the con-cept of the Mediterranean as a culture area seem to pointin this direction (Horden and Purcell 2000, Albera, Blok,and Bromberger 2001).

To sum up, the Schneiders’ new, refined materialismopens up new vistas even for the reintegration of some

arguments that they discard, such as Leonardo Sciascia’son the different degrees of freedom from violence andcontrol in Sicily and in Paris. Space is at stake. The newanthropology of the Mediterranean, after a period of self-reflection and sometimes exaggerated fragmentation ofargument, now has the chance to return to the discussionof geographic limits, the study of social and territorialas well as cultural “reserves” (Hauschild 2002:11–12,641–42). This could lead to a new universalism and re-gional realism (Albera 1999, Bromberger and Durand2001, Harris 2005) that would be much more differen-tiated and self-reflexive than the old concepts of the“Mediterranean countryman” (Braudel 1972, Pitt-Rivers1963) and superior in explanatory value to the 1990s pol-itics of deconstruction (Herzfeld 1987).

andrew kipnisDepartment of Anthropology, Research School ofPacific and Asian Studies, Australian NationalUniversity, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia([email protected]). 17 iii 05

I suspect that few anthropologists would disagree withwhat the Schneiders call Wolf’s antiessentialist ap-proach, though the setting for this lecture perhaps elim-inates the possibility of a serously critical attitude to-wards Wolf’s scholarship and the debates he had over theyears with Marshall Sahlins and others. In any case, the“myth of Sicily” deserves a good debunking, and thislecture has provided the Schneiders an opportunity toundertake one. In the process they give an interestingaccount of the institutionalization of various aspects ofSicilian mafia and antimafia cultures and their repro-duction across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Schneiders begin with an opposition between cul-ture conceptualized as “an organization of diversity” andculture conceptualized as the “replication of unifor-mity.” What I find fascinating in their article is the his-torical replication of a particular form of opposition cap-tured in the mafia/antimafia dualism. This replicationoccurs during a period in which Sicily is undergoing whatmany would consider the classic processes of moderni-zation. A demographic transition, though embraced atdifferent moments by different societal sectors, has en-gulfed the entire island, and it is accompanied by therise of compulsory education. While the Schneiders showthat the artisanal/middle-class cultures embraced edu-cational opportunities most quickly, I suspect that themajority of children of even peasant/proletarian classbackgrounds are now literate and attend school for closeto a decade. Finally, there is an increase in the scale ofthe economy. Labor out-migration to the United Statesand northern Italy, international trade in drugs and otherlegal and illegal substances, and the consumption of me-dia of both national and international origin must havebroadened the horizons of almost all Sicilians. But de-spite these seemingly uniform forces of change, themafia/antimafia cultural dualism is reproduced.

This reproduction appears to reflect the constant util-


ity of a mafia culture that can partially control the localstate by means of threatened or actual violence, under-ground alliances, and bribery. Though the types of eco-nomic activities enabled by such control have shiftedover the years, there has always been some profit to bemade. The opposition to mafia activities is reproducedin part because there have always been some people whowould have been better off if the local state had not beencaptured by mafiosi interests. The artisanal/middle clas-ses have taken the lead here. The reproduction of themafia/antimafia is further supported by the divergentpatterns of gendered family interaction. On the mafiaside there are rituals of male bonding and the cultivationof the capacity for male violence, while on the artisanalside there are practices that privilege the conjugal bondand nonviolence. For the peasants/proletarians, the pic-ture is mixed. Though their patterns of gendered familyinteraction may be conducive to producing some youngmen who are eager to join the mafiosi, I suspect that themajority of this class would, like the artisans, be betteroff with a non-mafia-controlled local state.

The article also seems to suggest possibilities forchange. More determination from the central state incontrolling mafia excesses may be one factor here. An-other may be the spread of an education system thatproduces more people with middle-class dispositions.

Given that the Schneiders take the mafia to be an in-stitutionalized reality instead of a myth, I wonder if thereis any way to measure the extent of mafia activity or theextent of mafia control of the local state. Something akinto the mafia exists, to a greater or lesser extent, almosteverywhere in the world. For those with little knowledgeof Sicily like me, some sort of data illustrating the extentof mafia activity in Sicily would help convince us thatthere really is a problem rather than just an Orientalizingmyth. More important, demonstrating that the extent ofmafia activity has waxed and waned over the years wouldgive further support to the Schneiders’ nonessentializingargument and further hope to contemporary antimafiaactivists.

lutz musnerInternazionales ForschungszentrumKulturwissenschaften, Reichsratstrasse, 17, A-1010Wien, Austria ([email protected]). 15 iv 05

Jane and Peter Schneider’s paper offers a marvelloussynopsis of major research results elaborated in theirrecent book Reversible Destiny (2003). It not only de-scribes the dialectics of mafia and antimafia and theirorigins, histories, and present manifestations in Sicilybut also reveals the pluralistic and responsive char-acter of cultural ensembles. Their approach echoes themethodological spirit of Eric Wolf’s cultural anthro-pology and his effort to perceive culture as mutablestructures reflecting multiple and branching socialalignments, embedded in a chorus of alternative ar-ticulations and traditions and thereby also challengingsocial hierarchies and hegemonic formations of power.

By adopting this perspective, they manage to decon-struct a double myth: the myth of the opaque andtimeless character of an essentialist Sicilian cultureentirely shaped by climate, geography, insularity, andpolitical despair and the myth of the necessity to im-port social reform and modernization solely from out-side. By shedding light on the dissenting forces andvoices in Sicily’s history they are able to demonstratethat social transformation emerged within the cul-tural milieu of skilled labour and artisans and that noless than the mafia’s criminal organization the move-ment against it has genuine roots in Sicily.

The most impressive part of the paper is the inves-tigation of the unique life-world of Sicilian artisans,shoemakers, tailors, and other skilled craftsmen whocreated a micro-world of enlightenment and rationalconduct implementing birth control, family planning,and political self-organization that made them, in co-alition with peasant movements, forerunners of socialemancipation and leftist politics. The Schneiders con-vincingly show that the artisan “universities” func-tioned as a motor of civil society and constituted thehistorical nucleus of the antimafia movement. Con-temporary antimafia activists have inherited either byfamily roots or historical transmission the submergedtradition of peasant and artisan struggles for betterliving conditions beyond poverty and crime. The lib-eral atmosphere of the artisan workshops, overcomingcultural pessimism and political apathy, generated alocal tradition of modernization and reformist thoughtthat questioned the myth of Sicily’s eternal fate andmade people confident that social reform was not justa utopian but a real, manageable perspective.

What is missing in this paper is a careful in-depthassessment of the manifold role of religion and theCatholic Church, whether as a collaborating agency,a neutral authority, or a source of opposition to themafia. For a long time the church kept its distancefrom the criminal domination of society or was re-luctant to voice criticism of mafia activities. Only aslate as 1993, while on a visit to Agrigento, did PopeJohn Paul II denounce the mafia as a regime of op-pression and death—a significant step for an institu-tion which has long functioned as a pillar of Sicily’sarchitecture of power.

Nevertheless, the paper is a brilliant and nuancedanalysis of the plurality and specificity of Sicily’s cul-ture between mafia hegemony and emancipation fromit and exemplifies the great advantage of an approachthat is historically well-informed, careful in investi-gating the interaction between dominant and hiddentraditions in society, and open enough to account forthe contingency of social alignments and symbolic ar-ticulations. It is testimony that Eric Wolf’s concept ofhistorical anthropology still offers tremendous intel-lectual potential for excellent scholarship.


susana narotzkyDepartment d’Antropologia Social, Facultat deGeografia i Historia, Universitat de Barcelona, c/Baldiri i Reixac s/n, 08028 Barcelona, Spain([email protected]). 20 iv 05

Jane and Peter Schneider’s article is an excellent exampleof the centrality of history to the understanding of socialand cultural realities that are prone to being essentiali-zed. Such is the case of the Sicilian mafia when treatedas a part of the nineteenth-century myth of Sicily per-petuated by the writings of Franchetti, Lombroso, Pitre,and, more recently, Sciascia and Putnam. The authorsreveal that “state sponsorship was consequential for thehegemony of a mafia-friendly milieu” and that, contraryto the essentialist view of Sicilians as homogeneouslycharacterized by primary instincts, the cult of “honour,”and fatalism, there are strands of cultural production thatare locally grounded. They show us the diverse perspec-tives that converge in the myth of Sicily, which appearsas an ambivalent and heterogeneous construction ofwhich the common thread is the notion of a Siciliancharacter that is resistant to change. They also point toa corollary of this notion; that change of any kind comesfrom the outside. I would be interested to see them ex-pand on this ideological proposition.

In Catalonia, where I have done fieldwork, the histor-ical development of a nationalist discourse in the nine-teenth century produced a myth of Catalonia which isalso ambivalent and heterogeneous. As a corollary thereis a bifurcation of the notion of “change.” “Good” changecomes from within the complementary forces of tradi-tion and risk (with their emotional corollaries seny, “rea-son,” and rauxa, “passion”) that structure Catalan so-ciety around the metaphor of the household. Thismetaphor structures the nation’s “common good”around economic and power differentiation, fostering anorganic view of the social. Therefore intellectuals andpoliticians of various persuasions tend to credit indus-trial development, artistic creativity, political maturity,etc., to internal cultural characteristics of Catalan so-ciety, innate or (as in the case of immigrant “success”stories) acquired. “Bad” change comes from the outside,when the “harmonious” Catalan civic space is pene-trated by labour immigrants from other regions in Spainor, more recently, from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.Significantly, labour unrest and the discourses that gen-erate it are often credited to foreign ideas and people(Narotzky 1997:177–89). This is a common idea in or-ganic corporatist models of society and is generally di-rected as an ideological weapon against labour organi-zation. Although the Schneiders seem to hint thatsomething parallel is at work in the Sicilian case, thisstrand of the myth of Sicily could, I think, be moreclearly interwoven with the historical struggles for landreform that they describe.

In the discussion of these struggles, artisans are pre-sented as acquiring an enlightened culture in the citythat they then bring to rural towns, creating a “publicsphere” for debate in their Circoli degli Operai. They

seem to become the “organic intellectuals” of the ruralsubaltern classes, whose class consciousness appears tobe tied to interaction with them in their “little univer-sities.” I am curious to know whether there were any“peasant” local cultures of resistance and dissent andwhat connection the Schneiders see between a “ration-alizing” culture and a “civilizing mission” capable oforganizing struggle. In my opinion there is a Gramsciansubtext here that should be made clearer by analyzingthe production of connections between peasants and ar-tisans in concrete struggles such as those spurred by landreform. Although the Schneiders inform us about theparticipation of artisans and peasants in the land occu-pations of 1919, the dynamics of the production of a“collective will” are not clear. I am afraid that theremight be an underestimation of local peasants’ abilityto organize some form of collective struggle. MartınezAlier (1968) pointed to the culture of solidarity that theday labourers of Andalucıa—many of them illiterate—created at the turn of the century and to their ability toproduce a “public sphere” of debate around social andlabour issues that generated a practice of land occu-pations.

Finally, the coalition of “multifaceted” citizens in theanti-mafia movement is described as “having inheritedthe submerged history of the peasant struggles” and thusas descending from a long-term alternative “culture.”This argument seems to support a simple dichotomy be-tween two distinct local “cultures” that can be histor-ically traced to the political economic struggles of theformation of the Italian state, the demise of the landedaristocracy, and the rise of a local agrarian bourgeoisie—two cultures that reproduce confrontation through time.Even if there is a direct relationship between the artisanculture and the anti-mafia reformers, however, it is im-portant to unpack the active process of keeping certainstrands of memory alive that produces a particular senseof coherence and helps orient the present movement.

The Schneiders have pointed to the centrality of his-tory in explaining present-day social movements and,more important, contributed to demonstrating that “thehistory of Sicily is the fruit not of myth but of struggle.”

gustavo lins ribe iroDepartment of Anthropology, University of Brasılia,Brasılia, DF 70 910-900. Brazil ([email protected]).5 v 05

Schneider and Schneider’s piece is an outstanding ex-ample of the strength of Eric R. Wolf’s views on culture.Both authors have consistently been influenced by Wolf’swork and have made a number of remarkable contri-butions to the understanding of the mafia and Sicily.Here I want to highlight two of their achievements inthis article. First, they show that, in spite of the efficacyof stereotypes, the anthropological approach and critiquecan always reveal that social, political, and cultural cat-egories are more intricate than they appear to be. Thisis a very Wolfian stance. Wolf himself would never ac-


quiesce in reducing complexity to simplicity or triviality.As Sydel Silverman recounts (personal communication),when Wolf (considered an enemy alien) was interrogatedby an English tribunal in early 1940 and asked whetherNazism was pure evil, he answered, “It’s more compli-cated than that.” The more-complicated-than-that per-spective is the basis of anthropological approaches. An-thropologists have a trained eye for seeing specificities,their entanglements, and their unexpected results. At thesame time, Wolf’s Marxian theoretical sophistication—and the Schneiders’ article is a tribute to this—made himhighly aware of the sociological and historical con-straints structuring any situation subject to anthropo-logical inquiry.

The second achievement is related to a larger set ofstudies whose sedimentation has been steadily increas-ing in the past two decades in ways that are not neces-sarily similar to their own theoretical concerns. I referto discourse analysis, especially of the kind that has be-come associated with Edward Said’s notable work onOrientalism (1978). The impact of Orientalism or, rather,of moves towards de-orientalization in anthropology hasyet to be ascertained. This is no surprise. Anthropologistshave long been dedicated to the critique of ethnocen-trism; the difference, by no means unique to Oriental-ism, is that its power is predicated upon the power ofEurocentrism, which in turn rests on the power of cap-italist expansion.

Ethnocentrism and its excesses are related to powerasymmetries everywhere. The Yanomami can be por-trayed as the fierce people or Muslim countries inevi-tably associated with terrorism. Sinister images of peoplehave historically coincided with the denial of their hu-man qualities. The histories of colonialism and nationbuilding are full of attempts to legitimate dominationthrough the use of taxonomies that give dominant elitesthe right to exercise power over savages, primitives, orinferior, irrational, and uncivilized people. Jane and PeterSchneider show how southern Italians and Sicilians wereturned into “inferior” peoples and thus contribute to thedemystifying of stereotyped discourses on subalternizedothers. However, although they stress the roles of nationbuilding and class structure and its changes, I see a needfor more consideration of the relationships between the“myth of Sicily” and Sicily’s particular position withinan expanding European capitalist system.

There is another angle I want to explore. When theyturn to an analysis of the mafia, the productiveness ofthe historical approach is apparent, but I wonder howilluminating comparison or juxtaposition with othercases might be. In other situations—Brazil is a case inpoint—powerful rural elites have acted as brokers rep-resenting the interests of a weak and distant centralstate. In some scenarios there have been peasant rebel-lions, in others messianic movements. Violence has beenpresent in politics and in the regulation of class struggle.In various senses, patron-client relationships have madean imprint perceptible in many areas to this day. WhatI am implying by this brief allusion to Brazil is thatWolf’s methodology and approach in his last book, En-

visioning Power (1999), as well as in Peasant Wars of theTwentieth Century (1969), are extremely rich sources ofinspiration that condense a perspective simultaneouslysensitive to complexity, diversity, history, and compar-ison/juxtaposition.

The mafia, as Jane and Peter Schneider know muchbetter than most of us, has become a metaphor for allsorts of illicit collective activities carried out with dif-ferent degrees of sophistication, violence, and resilience.It would be interesting to see what global anthropologicalstudies of “mafias” as inspiring as the Schneiders’ workin Sicily would tell us about these social networks thatdefy state power while negotiating with it.

Reply

jane schneider and peter schneiderNew York, N.Y., U.S.A. 31 vi 05

As an anthropologist reading Marx, Eric Wolf felt espe-cially engaged with the detailed descriptions of laborersproducing particular commodities (gold, linen, woolentextiles) under specified relations of production, theserelations at once shaped by historical context and shap-ing the possibilities for struggle and change. In Marx’srich accounts, Wolf discerned differentiated laboringgroups creating differentiated cultures—values, prac-tices, and meanings related to their entire round of life,including its material reality and the social reproductionof their working arrangements through time. But (contraHann’s suggestion) Wolf did not, in effect, transpose theholism of his teacher Benedict to the “subgroups” ofcomplex societies. His integration of “material relations,societal organization, and configurations of ideas” was,as Driessen emphasizes, open-ended and flexible; cul-tural production, occurring in “rough-and-tumble” in-teraction with other groups, generally of unequal power,involved reworking available elements and inventingnew ones as circumstances changed.

Driessen is right to call us to task for not acknowl-edging Wolf’s influence on Anton Blok, whose researchin Sicily in the 1960s resulted in a classic text on therural mafia from which we learned a great deal. It maybe of interest that at the time none of us appreciated theextent to which the mafia engaged in its own culturalproduction, distinct from the wider practices and valuesof agrotowns like Blok’s “Genuardo” and our “Villa-maura.” Baskar notes our argument of the 1970s thatmafiosi ideologically manipulated the codes of honor andomerta for purposes of their own, but he perceptivelyrecognizes how close we were to conflating “the mafia”with a (thereby “mafia-ized”) Sicilian milieu. Our andBlok’s reluctance to accept police reports at face valueregarding, for example, mafia initiation rites kept us fromdiscovering what subsequent testimony, accumulated inthe recent antimafia investigations, has made quite clear:mafiosi do not simply “use” derivative forms; they make


up their own. Similarly, we explicitly denied the unityof the mafia as a translocal organization until we wereforced to change our minds by the cumulative evidenceand argument of late-twentieth-century journalists, his-torians, magistrates, and police investigators.

This takes us to another dimension of Wolf’s under-standing of the link between culture and power. Thevalues and practices produced by specific groups out ofthe conditions of their round of life and the changingcircumstances affecting them may become models in-fluencing cultural production in other groups. How andwhy this happens is a complex question that we havenot ourselves well resolved, as several commentatorspoint out. Barrett considers this lapse to be a brief forchucking the (outmoded) “culture concept” in favor ofterms like “hegemony,” “ideology,” and “discourse”that better capture the propagation of ideas by one groupover others. Hann asks if the culture concept appears inlocal discourse—if Sciascia used it, for example. The an-swer is yes but under different labels, namely, realta Si-ciliana or Sicilian modo di essere, “way of being.” Bas-kar, Narotzky, Driessen, and Hann ask for moredocumentation of the processes through which the ar-tisan model may have influenced peasants’ values andpractices and, eventually, informed the antimafia socialmovement. Musner, kindly, rewords our proposition: thedissenting voices of artisans, rooted in their “unique lifeworld,” constituted a “motor” for civil society, “over-coming cultural pessimism and political apathy.” Bothhe and Driessen suggest that artisans have played a sim-ilar role in other places, for example, Andalusia. Kipnisis likewise accepting, although he is more inclined toview education as the “motor,” following a moderni-zation paradigm.

We are reluctant to abandon the culture concept as itwas understood by Wolf, and not simply because ouressay originated as a tribute to his work. That corpus ofwork suggests an understanding of cultural practice thatcomplements but goes beyond the concepts of hege-mony, ideology, and discourse because the latter are notso much anchored in the material life worlds of partic-ular groups as honed and disseminated by intellectuals,think tanks, media, publications, schools, churches, andvarious “bully pulpits.” Power and money amplify theireffects; so, too, do charisma and the strategic choice oflanguage and images. Through the power-saturated op-erations of words and pictures, dominant groups in so-ciety become what Wolf called the “exemplary protag-onists” of particular “traditions,” institutionalizingselected values and practices while silencing or margin-alizing others. That such protagonists so often hold swayis in part because what they glorify or vilify connectswith the lived experience of some of the groups theyintend to order or rule. That the protagonists are alsoalways vulnerable to unanticipated bursts of resistanceis in part because other groups have all along been gen-erating contrary “ways of being.” In Envisioning Power,Wolf (1999) focused on “exemplary protagonists” of aparticularly nasty sort who, in the context of politics andwar, worked energetically to turn putative cultural sim-

ilarities into “sentiments of identity, social solidarity,love of country, aversion to cultural others.” It remainsimportant—and a contribution of anthropology—toshow wider publics that there are much more fruitfulways to think about culture. Baskar, having analyzedhow the ethnopsychological construction of nationalcharacters and landscapes served some unfortunate na-tionalisms in Central and Eastern Europe, would, wethink, agree.

There remains the issue of the cultural influence ofSicily’s artisans. Chris Hann is correct to suggest thatour essay overplays their homogeneous concreteness asa group. The building trades would be a good case inpoint. In our book and other publications we discuss indetail the development of the Sicilian construction in-dustry in the decades after World War II. Following onthe heels of the land reform of 1950, this sector, togetherwith emigration, became the foremost destination foragricultural labor displaced by machines. It also absorbeda host of artisans, whether because their skills were rel-evant or because they were ruined (as Driessen guesses)by industrial manufactures. And it heavily involved ma-fiosi, many of them also of agrarian origin. Of particularinterest, some of Sicily’s left-wing party and union lead-ers participated, as did all the other parties and unions,in rampant, mafia-influenced corruption that entwinedbuilding contractors and speculators with local govern-ment officials, above all in Palermo. Numerous artisans,children of artisans, and “graduates” of the artisans’ littleuniversities must have been complicit. Were we to at-tempt to “prove” rather than assert that artisan culturehas influenced Sicily’s antimafia process, we would haveto take contradictions such as this into account. At pre-sent, our best effort is to highlight the leadership of ar-tisans in pre-1960s antimafia efforts and the resonancethat contemporary antimafia activists, feminists in-cluded, have had in the rural towns of western Sicily,historically the loci of the strongest mafia traditions. El-ements of these towns, perhaps the majority, have ofcourse celebrated the “exemplary protagonists” of theanti-antimafia backlash referred to in our essay, buttheirs are not the only voices being heard.

Narotzky raises a further point about artisan influencederived from her own research on peasant resistance.Have we attributed to Sicily’s day laborers and share-croppers the cultural pessimism and political apathy thatprotagonists of the “myth of Sicily” have long pinned onthe island population as a whole? Have we underesti-mated the peasants’ organizational capacity? Were we tolook more deeply into the public sphere of the artisanal“universities,” we would perhaps discover a two-wayflow in which peasants’ experiences of extreme exploi-tation and injustice influenced shoemakers and cabinetmakers’ political ideas and participation much as thehorrible conditions of factory labor in northern Italy inthe 1960s influenced the politics of (real) university stu-dents. Short of tracing how “concrete struggles for landaffected relations between peasants and artisans,” per-haps these considerations can qualify what Narotzky


worries may be a “simplistic dichotomy” in our presen-tation.

Two commentators—Barrett and Ribeiro—draw atten-tion to the dramatic power asymmetries of capitalist ex-pansion, colonialism, and imperialism as critical to thehistory of the mafia and antimafia struggles in Sicily. Wecould not agree more and have addressed this issue inour broader work. Both also remind us that Sicily is farfrom alone in having generated organized crime forma-tions in modern times (Barrett references Corsica, Ri-beiro Latin America). In light of Wolf’s commitment tocomparative case studies, it is worth considering, as Ri-beiro suggests, when and where oppressive landlordism,political corruption, and arrogant dispossession provokeextreme unrest and when and where unrest veers towardone or more of the following possibilities: messianicmovements, revolutionary movements, banditry, and or-ganized crime. Because political authorities, intent onreasserting order, typically criminalize all manner of pro-test, banditry and crime are extraordinarily hard to de-lineate. (Kipnis, indeed, seems unconvinced that themafia is an institutionalized reality in Sicily apart fromthe myth that criminalizes all Sicilians.) But we can try,and doing so brings us to Hauschild’s tantalizing inter-vention. Although we would not want to go too far downthe road of “geostrategical, geomorpological, and geo-graphical categories” underlying “particular cultures ofviolence and peace”—the Mediterranean climate andlandscape were rendered far more harsh and erratic as aconsequence of aggressive deforestation, while the ap-parently calmer Central and Western Europe producedthe Holocaust—it is nevertheless striking, as ThomasGallant has argued (1999), that banditry, piracy, and gang-sterism have identifiable geographies. Generated out ofthe violence of asymmetrical power—for example, en-closures, occupations, abrupt disinvestment, and com-modification—they also appear to flourish in terrain thatis very expensive if not impossible to police.

It is interesting, in this regard, to learn from the newhistoriography of the Sicilian mafia (see especially Lupo(1984, 1990, 1993) that, already in the late nineteenthcentury, a geographical fault line had appeared betweentwo overlapping yet discrete instances of mafia forma-tion. The cosche of the orchards to the north and westof Palermo were closer to and heavily involved in thecity’s produce markets and port. Strongly territorial inorientation, their members specialized in guarding crops,commercial mediation, and the control and distributionof water; extortion was their premier crime. Supportingpoliticians electorally, they received protection fromthem, but they organized their own, inter-cosca relationsmore or less independently of this political shield.

In contrast, the cosche of the south and east were lesscoherent. Much of this zone was also given over to or-chards and gardens, but these were interspersed withlarge towns of the sort that characterize the latifundistinterior. Moreover, the entire zone was a gateway to theinterior—the main pathway over which rustlers drovestolen livestock for clandestine butchering and sale inPalermo. Significantly, robbery, kidnapping, and animal

theft were the premier crimes of this zone. Elastic re-lationships between local mafias articulated well withthese crimes, as did the lesser concern of mafiosi withstrictly territorial activity. At another level, political pa-trons enabled a certain degree of integration amongcosche.

In the early twentieth century, these divergent ten-dencies deepened as the coastal and orchard mafiasgained advantage from their greater commercial inter-action with relatives in the United States. Constitutingan economic and ecological substrate of mafia formation,they resurfaced after World War II in the “mafia wars”related to narcotics trafficking. Returning to Hauschildand following Wolf, we might hypothesize subtle differ-ences in the cultural production of the mafias of thesetwo zones, possibly affecting their modality of violence,in which the materiality of the environment (interior andcoast) as well as the materiality of reproducing a liveli-hood played a role.

Finally, there is Musner’s question whether the Cath-olic Church was a “collaborating agency, a neutral au-thority, or a source of opposition to the mafia.” Indeed,it was all three. Historically, the Sicilian church wasclosely allied with the Christian Democratic Party, inturn the architect of “that wicked deal” with the mafia.In the 1960s, the archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Ruf-fini, an “exemplary protagonist” if ever there was one,famously insisted that anyone who spoke of the mafiawished Sicily ill. The clergy, however, experienced manycross-pressures; although subordinate in an institutionalhierarchy, its circumstances were varied and changing.In Villamaura, one parish priest, a notorious vote-getterfor the party, loved spreading the story that Ruffini “diedon the field of battle”—namely, on his way to the polls.But another priest, influenced by Vatican II, identifiedwith left causes and eventually left the priesthood to jointhe Communist Party—this despite the fact that hisbrother, with whom he was very close, was a leader ofthe local mafia. Perhaps it is significant that this priestand his comrades on the left were all the sons and daugh-ters of artisans. (So, too, was the brother.) Eventually, inthe 1980s and ’90s, radical priests from all over Sicilylent their energy to the antimafia movement, even astheir bishops (and the pope) urged caution. Courageousactions such as promoting youth activities in mafia-dom-inated neighborhoods and discouraging parishionersfrom selecting mafiosi as godparents could jeopardize apriest’s career; in a few cases, priests have been martyredby assassination. We cover some of these developmentsin our book.

We thank all who took the time to read and respond.

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Documents

Mafia, Antimafia, And the Plural Cultures of Sicily