Where do we go when we follow the money? The political-economic construction of Antimafia investigators in Western Sicily

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper traces the changing role of wealth and movements of money in investigators' evolving anthropological imagination of the social structure of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and its relationship with its surrounding in key moments of Antimafia investigations in one Sicilian province over the past 40 years. The routes of money, which initially marked exchange-based relations between two otherwise mutually extraneous actors, gradually indexed a more complex combination of reciprocity, exchange, and redistribution both within the mafia legally constructed and in its relationship to its surrounding. At the same time, the public and official anthropological imaginary of the mafia-politica nexus permits only exchange between mutually-external parties or reciprocity as an entity-creating internal thread. As a result, the complexity of wealth, which investigations reveal by 'following money,' requires constant reduction to individual bearers of monetary worth and interests.