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Deborah Puccio-Den has conducted ethnographic research in Palermo since the mid-1990s, focusing on efforts to criminalize the mafia, both on the part of the criminal justice system, and also by ord...

Since the formation of the Mafia as a criminal organization in late nineteenth-century Sicily, anti-mafia reformers have attacked mafia corruption. If only the state could curtail transactions betw...

De tout temps qu'il y a eu une mafia en Sicile, il y a eu des intellectuels et des responsables qui ont cherche a analyser et a contrer ce pouvoir politique et culturel. Ces multiples voix antimafieuses se sont heurte cependant a un discours homogene que l'on pourrait nomme « sicilianisme », ou particularite culturelle insulaire. Le but de cet article est de presenter trois contributions du mouvement anti-mafia a l'opposition de ce discours sicilianiste depuis la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale. La premiere est d'ordre juridique, ou comment les juges qualifient de mystification le cote heroique « a-la-Robin-des-Bois » accorde aux mafieux. La deuxieme est liee au travail de chercheurs en sciences sociales et d'historiens qui rejetent les origines anciennes de cette organisation, qui serait issue en fait du XIX e siecle et du developpement capitaliste agraire en Sicile. La troisieme contribution, d'un genre nouveau, provient des activistes du mouvement social anti-mafia, tres important a Palerme, apparu au debut des annees 1980

(1999). Native American Student Award Nominations. Plains Anthropologist: Vol. 44, No. 168, pp. 162-162.

In a recent essay in CSSH (16:1) Oriol Pi-Sunyer has joined in debate with our article 'Modernization and Development...' (CSSH 14:3). The thrust of his critique is that our model of social change in the Western Mediterranean leads us inexorably to lump Sicily and Catalonia together with respect to general social and economic developments since World War II. He argues in terms of modernization theory that Catalans long ago developed industry and have always shown a propensity to organize in corporate groups whenever the central government gives them the opportunity to do so. In short, our model is lacking in 'time depth and political sensitivity' (pp. 128-9) since it puts the Catalans in the same class as the Sicilians. We wish here to demonstrate that (1) in our article we discussed the differences between Sicily and Catalonia in much the same way that Pi-Sunyer did in his critique; (2) that, in fact, Sicily and Catalonia have undergone similar processes of social change since World War II, in ways that threaten the historical continuity of these societies, both formed over centuries; and (3) that Pi-Sunyer's misreading of our materials is due to his unfortunate confusion of modernization with development, which is precisely what we tried to get away from in our essay. (1) At the onset of our essay and throughout we take some pains to emphasize the historical differences between Catalonia and Sicily, noting that Catalonia had undergone an industrial revolution, had generated a bourgeoisie long ago, and had generated corporate political institutions

The social structure of Western Sicily emphasizes networks of dyadic relations at the expense of corporate groups. In the past these networks provided the raw material for vertical chains of patron-client relations, known as clientele, whose effectiveness in the mobilization and deployment of political, economic and social resources was notorious. The redistribution of these resources following World War I, provoked the replacement of clientele, not only by newly formed corporate groups such as labor unions, but also by horizontal coalitions which we call actionsets. These sets resemble the clientele in that they are formed out of two-person ties. Yet they are more egalitarian in structure, more fluid in composition, and more specific with regard to task. Their proliferation at all social levels reflects the particular way in which resources have been distributed, and probably also owes something to the etiquettes provided by coalitions of the past.