Mafia, Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of Sicily

Abstract

Sicily has long been represented in literature and in historical and social science texts as a place that is burdened by cultural values and practices that resist modernity: clientelism and corruption, familism, patriarchy, and lack of trust are said to condemn the island to backwardness. Sicilys association with the mafia adds a further negative image to these representations, an image of organized criminality that is conflated with Sicilian culture in general. Much as in the Southern Question discourse in Italy and similar constructions of otherness elsewhere, novelists, scholars, and public intellectuals present these characteristics as essential traitsas if there were a homogenized Sicilian culture that reproduced itself consistently through time. Eric R. Wolf was a brilliant critic of this way of thinking about culture, insisting, rather, that complex historical processes produce differentiated sociocultural forms over time in any given location. Inspired by his example, we trace the differentiated h...