Mafiacraft An Ethnography of Deadly Silence

Deborah Puccio-Den’s Mafiacraft is a kind of ethnography that is much needed in our part of the world.

Here’s the abstract of an earlier article. It has recently been expanded into a book-length study:

How to construct an ethnography about such a phenomenon as “the mafia,” shrouded in silence? What methods might anthropologists use to investigate silence and understand the denied, the unspeakable, the implicit, and the unspoken? The ethnographer can begin by indexing the conjectures and speculations surrounding this mysterious entity, describing the social, judicial, or graphic acts made in the attempt to break up the silence in and around this secret phenomenon, and exposing the manifold issues at stake regarding its indeterminacy: impunity, invisibility, unrepresentability. The methodological assumption is that “the mafia” is not a social fact fixed once and for all, available for being studied or “exposed,” but a cognitive event shaped by silence. In the process of producing an ethnography of what has been said or written on this secret and uncertain phenomenon, one comes to realize the imaginative power of silence, giving consistency to special kinds of social facts which draw substance from their indeterminacy. Hence, the need to coin a neologism, mafiacraft, which I discuss as an inverted paradigm of witchcraft: while the latter emphasizes the power of words, the former highlights the strength of silence: how does it resist, fight, or capitulate to the strength of words or to the force of law?

 Mafiacraft How to do things with silence: 

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

The mafia? Is it a brand of cheese? Tell me what it is, because I have no idea! — Gherlando Alberti, member of Cosa Nostra

Mafiacraft is a material history of moral ideas. How to incarnate the invisible, how to provide a body for “something” that you can neither see nor touch, that you can neither “drink nor eat,” that is only a label covering a vacuum: “mafia”? Mafiacraft tries to answer this question, the same question raised by the provocative responses of the two “mafiosi” above—for provocation is always meaningful in the mafia world. Christians have created rituals to drink and eat the Body of Christ, and mysteries to solve the presence of God in his absence. Following the conceptions of personhood prevailing in Western Christian societies, my investigation has considered the process of attributing a name, a shape, a structure, a physiognomy, in a word, a body capable of incarnating the “mafia.” This process is not linear. It unfolds through practices of disavowal, obliqueness, and outright silence by members of the “mafia”; but it relates also to moral values of respect, honor, and obedience that needed to be brought into play in order for people like the “repentant” Tommaso Buscetta to begin collaborating with Judge Giovanni Falcone…

Mafiacraft How to do things with silence

Also relevant:

Dante in Karachi: circles of crime in a mega city

Nichola Khan

Khaled Ahmad: Touching foot in Pakistan

Evelyne Accad; Guns and Roses: On Sexuality and War

Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K JhaThe Lady Vanishes