Mafia, antimafia, and the plural cultures of Sicily

Sicily has long been represented in literature and in historical and social science texts as a place that is burdened by cultural values and practices that resist modernity: clientelism and corruption, familism, patriarchy, and lack of trust are said to condemn the island to backwardness. Sicily's association with the mafia adds a further negative image to these representations, an image of organized criminality that is conflated with Sicilian culture in general. Much as in the "Southern Question" discourse in Italy and similar constructions of otherness elsewhere, novelists, scholars, and public intellectuals present these characteristics as essential traits - as if there were a homogenized "Sicilian culture" that reproduced itself consistently through time. Eric R. Wolf was a brilliant critic of this way of thinking about culture, insisting, rather, that complex historical processes produce differentiated sociocultural forms over time in any given location. Inspired by his example, we trace the differentiated histories of the mafia and antimafia forms in Sicily, analyzing the contrasting values and practices that are specific to each. Our purpose is to represent Sicily as culturally plural and to generate a framework for recognizing and combating the all too common tendency to criminalize entire populations believed to have a common culture.