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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...

The 'Southern Question' has been a major topic in Italian political, economic and cultural life for a century and more. During the Cold War, it was the justification for heavy government intervention. In contemporary Italy, a major part of the appeal of the Lombard League has been its promise to dissociate the South from the North, even to the point of secession. The South also remains a resonant theme in Italian literature.This interdisciplinary book endeavours to answer the following:* When did people begin to think of the South as a problem?* Who - intellectuals, statisticians, criminologists, political exiles, novelists (among them some important southerners) - contributed to the discourse about the South and why?* Did their view of the South correspond to any sort of reality?* What was glossed over or ignored in the generalized vision of the South as problematic?* What consequences has the 'Question' had in controlling the imaginations and actions of intellectuals and those with political and other forms of power?* What alternative formulations might people create and live by if they were able to escape from the control of the 'Question' and to imagine the political, economic and cultural differences within Italy in some other way?This timely book reveals how Southern Italians have been affected by distorted versions of a complex reality similar to the discourse of 'Orientalism'. In situating the devaluation of Southern Italian culture in relation to the recent emergence of 'anti-mafia' ideology in the South and the threat posed to national unity by the Lombard League, it also illuminates the world's stiff inter-regional competition for investment capital.

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...

This chapter demonstrates that Immanuel Wallerstein's reluctance to apply the concepts, "core" and "periphery," to precapitalist transformations is a product of the way he views the luxury trade. The distinction between periphery and external arena rests upon the conceptual separation of essential from luxury exchanges. The chapter argues that the alternative interpretation will prepare the way for future analyses of precapitalist events within a theoretical framework consistent with Wallerstein's analysis of Russia and Poland. According to Wallerstein, the capitalist world-system differs from all previous imperiums, which he describes as world-empires. Precapitalist tribute systems at first glance give the impression that reliance upon luxury goods for the creation and maintenance of allies was indiscriminate. Textiles figure importantly in Wallerstein's account of numerous precapitalist events. The chapter proposes that thinking about a precapitalist world-system will help clarify the Western intellectual tendency to drive a wedge between necessities and luxuries; the same wedge that separates God from the Devil.

In contexts of insecurity and inequality across the world, criminal groups have developed into powerful, state-like organizations. Marginalized citizens in search of protection and support may look to criminal leaders, gangs and mafias rather than to politicians and state agencies. Providing residents with forms of social welfare, security and resolutions for dispute, these criminal organizations have taken on the functions and symbols of the state. But criminals’ positions of power are not only rooted in their social provisioning role, or even in the use of fear and force. Most Wanted illustrates how popular culture is producing the socio-political authority of bosses, gangs and cartels through discussions of Italian, Japanese and Russian mafias, and of criminal groups in Brazil, Ghana, Jamaica, and the United States. The essays collected here analyze different forms of visual, material and performative culture, including street art, film, video games, dance parties, popular music and various everyday objects.

Item does not contain fulltext The steadily growing field of brain–computer interfacing (BCI) may develop useful technologies, with a potential impact not only on individuals, but also on society as a whole. At the same time, the development of BCI presents significant ethical and legal challenges. In a workshop during the 4th International BCI meeting (Asilomar, California, 2010), six panel members from various BCI laboratories and companies set out to identify and disentangle ethical issues related to BCI use in four case scenarios, which were inspired by current experiences in BCI laboratories. Results of the discussion are reported in this article, touching on topics such as the representation of persons with communication impairments, dealing with technological complexity and moral responsibility in multidisciplinary teams, and managing expectations, ranging from an individual user to the general public. Furthermore, we illustrate that where treatment and research interests conflict, ethical concerns arise. On the basis of the four case scenarios, we discuss salient, practical ethical issues that may confront any member of a typical multidisciplinary BCI team. We encourage the BCI and rehabilitation communities to engage in a dialogue, and to further identify and address pressing ethical issues as they occur in the practice of BCI research and its commercial applications. 6 p.

Oxytocin is a high-alert drug for which safety precautions are crucial. Clear communication between nurses, physicians and midwives is vital when oxytocin is used. A collaborative process to updating an oxytocin administration protocol results in trust and respect among health care providers.

The ambiguity of the concept of crime is evident in the two strands of anthropological research covered in this review. One strand, the anthropology of criminalization, explores how state authorities, media, and citizen discourse define particular groups and practices as criminal, with prejudicial consequences. Examples are drawn from research on peasant rebellion, colonialism, youth, and racially or ethnically marked urban poor. The other strand traces ethnographic work on more or less organized illegal and predatory activity: banditry, rustling, trafficking, street gangs, and mafias. Although a criminalizing perspective tends to conflate these diverse forms of “organized” crime, in particular erasing the boundary between street gangs and drug trafficking, the forms have discrete histories and motivations. Their particularities, as well as their historical interactions, illuminate everyday responses to crime and suggest ways to put in perspective the “crime talk” of today, which borders on apocalyptic.

Substantial changes have transformed Sicily over the forty years that we have known it as anthropological fieldworkers. This essay draws particular attention to the appearance of industrial age technologies and related modernizing trends; to a dramatic decline in fertility with effects on family life and civic culture; and to the emergence of an antimafia social movement demanding effective police and juridical restraint of organized crime. It further considers what in retrospect were blind spots in our research, in particular our earlier understandings of the long-term viability of the Sicilian Left and of the organization and regional coherence of the Mafia. The passage of time raises new questions and produces new frameworks for analysis. Based on our recent research in Palermo, we attempt to assess the prospects for the Mafia and antimafia process in Sicily.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, we circulated an essay outlining possible comparisons between the 1980s and 1990s repression of organized crime in Italy and Sicily and the pending repression of the al-Qaeda network. Distributed in several countries, and as a contribution to the Anthropological Quarterly's reflections on September 11, the essay elicited critical and provocative commentary. Respondents questioned, in particular, our neglect of abuses of civil liberties in the antimafia process, our implied conflation of racketeering with religious extremism, and our positive assessment of the role of citizens' social movements in delegitimating terrorist violence. In this article, we address these and related criticisms, in part through expanding and clarifying the original argument. Our premise at the time, that the rhetoric (and pursuit) of a "war" on terrorism distorts what should be framed as a repressive action against a cellular and networked, violent and secretive organization, is reinforced. [Keywords: criminal networks, mafia, social movements, Cold War, revenge]