Author: Theodoros Rakopoulos
Date: 8.2.2025
What are the boundaries of the field when we think organized crime and its interrelation with civil society? Where does organized crime begin and where does it end? If mafias are about controllo di territorio, would not a return to land as a symbol, as a ballast, as a map offering mafiosi a performative lexicon give us a good sense of where we should be focusing? In my work I suggest two things in this regard: first, thinking with land is not anachronistic, but productive, as a metaphor for the sociological field, when it comes to analyzing organized crime. Second, with territory and map come boundaries – and thinking beyond strict lines of enmity between antimafia and mafia is equally productive, not least analytically.
Sicilian boundaries imprint a history of violence on the landscape and divide people along categorical lines. However, they also reflect histories of inheritance and kinship, while providing points of contact and an unexpected moral order of neighborhood relations. A focus on borders shared between plots managed by “antagonistic” social groups exposes emergent relations of conflict and solidarity between their owners and urges us to think beyond an implicit methodological nationalism in mafia and antimafia studies and action. We need, instead, to think of the extremely local and the openly international, when thinking about these issues.
Sadly, one instrument in this arsenal is underdeveloped and this is confiscations of assets internationally. We have now a good sense of the need to deterritorialise the mafia. We have not managed to look at how this is done using the Rognoni-La Torre experience in practice elsewhere. While I was in the field in Sicily 15 years ago, there was enthusiasm that the law would be institutionalized on an EU level and that it was brought to the attention of the EU Parliament as a huge success of the Italian Republic.
The provoking title of the intervention suggests we “set aside” the national level. The phrasal verb to set aside means two things: to suspend, to give up on the one hand; to earmark and assign on the other. I suggest we methodologically, epistemically and even politically start thinking about suspending the methodological nationalism in thinking about mafias and the antimafia phenomenon, while at the same time keep on respecting the intrinsically “national” histories that animate each mafia experience, such the one I have studied in Sicily. I have always considered myself an Italianist; my first publication was at the Journal of Modern Italian Studies; my last in a volume titled New Anthropologies of Italy. But no understanding of conspiracy, silence, betrayal, investment, masculinity, personhood, territory, violence, clanship and kinship – in short, no understanding of mafia as a total social fact can be confined within Italian bounds. They are all issues extremely localized and at the same time global.
