Читать книгу Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro - Страница 17

1  1 It is worth noting that the original Italian subtitle of the bestseller Gomorrah (Saviano 2007) was Viaggio nell’impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra, i.e. A journey into the camorra’s economic empire and dream of domination (see Saviano 2006). In other words, the mafia’s reality is business, politics is in its fantasies.

2  2 So ancient that its elements could be traced back to Ancient Greece: see van Wees (1999, 2001).

3  3 As it is clear, I see no reason to give the label infrapolitics to what is in fact ‘politics’ – for everything except the fact that it is enacted by people not formally in dominant positions.

4  4 A symmetry that is not different from that advanced by proponents of the Strong Program in the sociology of science in asking for the equal treatment of false beliefs and ‘true’ (i.e. not yet falsified) theories as research projects, or from ANT scholars (e.g., Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and others), who claim that human and nonhuman actors embedded in a network should be treated equally and described in the same terms (they call it the principle of generalized symmetry). The rationale for this principle is that differences between these actors should not be presupposed, as they are generated in the network of relations. See in general Latour 2005.

5  5 As Sinisa Malešević has recently observed: ‘Although most sociologists recognize that without group solidarity it would be difficult if not impossible to envisage the existence of social order, this topic still remains under-theorized and under-analysed’ (2015, 86). Considering this lack of studies, it is not surprising mafia scholars usually miss the opportunity to address mafia(s) in what is the main point for their members, according to almost all the available witnesses and the charters of mafia and mafia-like groupings – i.e. ‘group solidarity.’

6  6 As a counterpart to, and condition for, secrecy, communication is clearly a central ingredient of mafia life, where everything has meaning and exists through meanings and symbolic forms (Gambetta 2009). It is because of the centrality of communication that deception plays such a role in the mafia and in mafiosi’s social life. Curiously, this focus on communication has been pursued not through an emphasis on the category of culture, but against it – possibly because of a narrow and outdated understanding of what culture and cultural analysis are in the social sciences.

7  7 In this book I reduce to a minimum the use of visual sources. They will figure more prominently in a book in progress on mafia aesthetics.