new about how to study mafia was in the making. Since the 1960s, the social study of mafia and mafia-like organizations had experienced a sort of turn. In those years, foreign scholars of Sicily, ‘swayed by that decade’s profound distrust of policing institutions’, began to do research on mafia conceived ‘with a small m and without the definite article’ (Schneider 2008, 550–1). Rather than a criminal association with clear boundaries, rules and goals, mafia was now seen as the sum of individual mafiosi wielding power through their skills, including the ability to use private violence. This reading has been highly influential, and we could say that mafia studies definitely came of age in the 1970s with the publication, one after the other, of three outstanding and seminal contributions to the social science literature on mafia in Europe and especially in Sicily: Hess (1970), Blok (1974), Schneider and Schneider (1976). To them we could also add dalla Chiesa (1976) and Arlacchi (1983b [1980]), the two first substantial contributions to mafia studies from Italian sociology after the demise of the discipline in Italian culture (and academia) in the 1920s and its recovery in the 1950s (for a sociohistorical portrait of Italian sociology from its inception to the 1950s, see Santoro 2013).
What had already been happening in the US beginning in the 1950s was also starting to happen in Italy, however. After decades in which it was difficult to even assert the existence of something like the mafia in Italian courts, in the 1980s and 1990s some brave Sicilian prosecutors, responding to the mafia’s assumption of a commanding role in trafficking heroin to the US, were able to ‘turn’ several mafiosi into justice collaborators, eliciting ethnographically rich personal narratives. (Palermo-based Tommaso Buscetta was the first of these, offering testimony to the prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, who was assassinated in 1992.) This and a corresponding citizens’ antimafia movement encouraged new research, much of it by Sicilian scholars, which revealed that the mafia had a greater institutional capacity than had been imagined before (see Jamieson 1999; Schneider and Schneider 2003; Santino 2009; Rakopolous 2017; Ben-Yehoyada 2018). This section is devoted to this double, partly contradictory move.
A German sociologist, Henner Hess published in 1970 what was possibly the first academic book-length text on the Sicilian mafia (and any Italian mafia at all) from a modern sociological perspective – where for ‘modern’ we mean post-Weberian sociology (including some aspects of US functionalism). It was also the first truly empirical study on Sicilian mafia, mainly based on archival sources – something not all social scientists at the time would have considered empirical research, especially in the absence of numbers and statistics. The main argument and general approach of Hess’s book are well captured by the following quotation from the preface to the second English edition:
My theory about the mafia phenomenon is based above all on my most important source material, the Sicilian archival police records and court files which contain nothing about ‘the Mafia’, but a great deal about individual mafiosi … I have used them as criteria to assess other research material and as the basis for the portrayal of the mafioso, the structure of mafia groupings and the functions of mafia behaviour … Mafia has to be understood as a plethora of small, independent criminal organizations rather than as the secret society of common belief. This is the first point I want to make. The second point is that mafia is (or at least was) more than just crime. To treat it as crime alone misses much of its essence and fails to explain the reasons for its strength and durability. To really understand and explain it, we have to see the phenomenon as deeply rooted in the structure of Sicilian society and in its subcultural values. (1998 [1970], x–xi)
Locating the origins of mafia in the political structure of Sicilian society and, above all, in the ‘tradition of dual morality’ which lies at the core of its local, subcultural system, Hess was trying to find a way to encompass both social structure and culture in explaining the genesis of this social phenomenon and grasp its ‘essence’. Although he devoted at least one chapter to the structure of the mafioso groupings, the primary factor in its explanation was played by the regional cultural system, i.e. the subcultural code of omertà – to the point of saying that only mafiosi, with their subcultural values and individual behaviours, exist, and not ‘the mafia’ as a real organization. As Bell (1953) did in the US case, Hess saw the mainspring for mafioso behaviour as lying in people’s aspirations for social mobility within a social structure with limited opportunities but valuable (sub)cultural resources. Clearly, he was reacting to the US debate on ‘the Mafia’ as a single centralized organization. Translated into Italian in 1973 with a preface by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, Hess’s book soon became a central reference in the Italian public and academic debate on mafia. It was, conversely, relatively uninfluential in the American debate, a foreword by Cressey to its English edition notwithstanding.1
However, Hess was only the first of a series of modern social researchers to contribute to the social science literature on Sicilian mafia starting in the 1970s. Anton Blok, a Dutch anthropologist, spent several months during the early 1960s in Genuardo, a village in western Sicily, doing participant observation and archival research. With a preface written by the then Michigan-based sociologist and historian Charles Tilly (who, at the time, was conducting his pioneering research on mobilization and state formation) and opening with a long quotation drawn from Barrington Moore, with strategic rhetorical references to Eric Wolf and Norbert Elias, Blok’s book (1974) positioned itself firmly in a tradition of studies focused on the structural dimensions of social life (see Watts 2016), though it was also very sensitive to history (a legacy of Elias, who had spent a lot of time teaching in Amsterdam where Blok had been studying for his PhD). Indeed, it was under Jeremy F. Boissevain’s supervision that Blok wrote his dissertation and subsequent book.2 Blok’s position towards approaches like those adopted by Hess was very clear: ‘All such arguments in terms of values and subcultures alone are innately circular, and thus beg the very question they propose to answer’ (1974, 176n; the explicit target of this passage, however, is not Hess but Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967). Moving from Elias’s sociology of the state and his theory of social figurations, Blok proposed reading mafia as an aspect of the formation of the state in Italy. His main innovation was to understand mafia and mafiosi as elements in a wider configuration of social relations spanning different localities and an array of subjects, including officials and politicians. What mafiosi furnished, according to Blok, was mainly mediation between the administrative centre (i.e. Palermo at the regional or Rome at the national level) and the periphery:
Villages like Genuardo [the community under study] are part of larger complex societies. Many of their particular characteristics are dependent upon and a reflex of the larger society and can only be explained with reference to their specific connections with it. This is especially true of mafiosi, rural entrepreneurs of sorts, who were until recently [sic] an outstanding feature of peasant communities in Sicily’s western interior. Recruited from the ranks of peasants and shepherds, and entrusted with tasks of surveillance on the large estates (latifundia) of absentee landlords, they constituted a particular variety of middlemen – individuals who operate in different social realms and who succeed in maintaining a grip on the intrinsic tensions between these spheres. Mafiosi managed those tensions by means of physical force. Poised between landowning elite and peasants, between city and countryside, and between central government and the village, they sought to control and monopolize the links between these various groups and segments of society. (1974, xxvi–xxvii)
Like Blok, Peter and Jane Schneider spent months in Sicily in the 1960s studying demographic patterns and fertility, gender relations and land tenure – and this is the background to their book specifically devoted to the mafia as an aspect of class relations and cultural life in western Sicily, published in 1976 in a book series edited by Tilly (who had also written the preface to Blok’s book). Like Blok, the Schneiders had been doing ethnographic research on a small town in western Sicily, called Villamaura.3 Unlike Blok, though, their outlook was more sensistive to constraints rather than choices, to structure rather than agency. They moved from a concern with the ways peasant communities were encapsulated within larger systems (following their mentor, Eric Wolf) and collected ethnographic and historical data to document them until they discovered that Immanuel Wallerstein’s
