Abstract

This article focuses on the formation of flexible ideas of kinship to accommodate reform ideologies (antimafia) and collective platforms of work (cooperatives) in Sicily. While the anthropology of cooperatives often shows how coops reproduce family work, assessing how flexible kinship idioms accommodate cooperativisation can reveal how cooperatives are constituted around family life. In the Sicilian antimafia, kinship and work are strictly separated, on paper, for fear of mafia corruption. In actual fact, members of Sicilian antimafia cooperatives experience their merging of family life and antimafia cooperativism as a belonging to ‘antimafia families’. This article explicates the tension between this ethnographic finding and antimafia ideology and policy. Antimafia families provide a backdrop for a cooperativism inclusive of kinship. The analysis shows both how antimafia families are mutually constituted with cooperatives and how cooperatives are embedded in the domestic lives of their members. This cooperative-family interplay can help us bridge conceptual separations between workplace and family life.

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.