The Social Life of Mafia Confession: Between Talk and Silence in Sicily

Rakopoulos, Theodoros

doi:10.1086/697237

Cited by 20 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…In these contexts, “vigilante” neighbors, particularly women and children, control poor women who have interreligious love affairs through surveillance, violence, and public shaming, enforcing coercive “alternative governmentalities” of “urban moral protectionism.” Hackl () examined how Palestinians in Tel Aviv minimize violence against them by deploying tactics of “immersive invisibility” (what we might call “passing” in the United States), a pragmatic means of seeking access to urban space in response to a history of exclusion and dispossession. Rakopoulos () similarly examined themes of concealment and revealing through mafia confessions in Italy.…”

Section: Captivity Borders and Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Captivity has long been central to empire, settler colonialism, capitalist expansion, and imperialism—and the forms of violence and genocide that accompany them—as well as in the anthropological work that examines those themes. In 2018, cultural anthropologists circled around captivity through analytics of enslavement (Lainez ; Wengrow and Graeber ), containment (Cons ; Gershon ; Hamberger ; Stone ), control (Cardoso ; Cooper ), confinement (Besteman, Biondi, and Burton ; Gomez‐Temesio ), compliance (Kazi ), suppression (Berman ; Sen ), constraint (Degani ), concealment (Hackl ; Rakopoulos ), boundary (Elisha ), exile and entrapment (Hinkson ; O'Neill ; Saleh ), and harmony (Yang ).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long-standing themes in cultural anthropology-tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency-even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders?The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long-standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa artículos producidos en las cuatro revistas científicas claves de la Asociación Americana de Antropología a lo largo de 2018, e identifica las formas como los antropólogos culturales aceptaron la invitación de Haraway para "quedarse con el problema" a través de un envolvimiento con las lógicas de la captividad y sus fallas. Este trabajo sugiere atención continua a temas de larga data en antropología cultural -tensiones entre captura y escape, restricción y resistencia, estructura y agencia-aun cuando sugiere que esa captividad y sus fallas ingobernables pueden productivamente llamar nuestra atención a nuevas formas de pensar sobre gobernanza, temporalidad, escala, afecto, economía política, posthumanismo, ontología, cuidado e infraestructura.En esta revisión, pregunto: ¿Qué puede y qué no puede ser contenido en el momento contemporáneo, y qué está en juego en esa contención o en la filtración que supera sus fronteras? La revisión se enfoca en las formas claves en que los antropólogos analizaron estas cuestiones de larga data de nuevo en 2018: captividad y la naturaleza de lo humano, dependencia y exilio, y violencia y fronteras y, por contraste, cambio desenfrenado e incertidumbre, personas rebeldes y afectos, y residuos filtrantes y toxicidad. En general, sugiero que la captividad y la filtración proveen provocaciones productivas para estudio posterior. [año en revisión, antropología sociocultural, captividad, escape, incertidumbre, residuos]

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Section: Captivity Borders and Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…Extant work in the field offers inroads into thinking about first disclosures in a way that force our gaze beyond the air‐conditioned conference room in the Sinaloan desert and onto considerations of different domains and orders of magnitude. For example, in Rakopoulos's (2018) work on the Sicilian Mafia, murders committed by the pentiti , or penitent sinner, bind them to the organization's social body. Through the act of confessing, the pentiti removes the relations and obligations co‐produced by his position within the mafia, which had been held in place by his prior silence.…”

Section: Beyond the Secular Confessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I've never told anyone that before …”

McFee

2023

American Anthropologist

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I met Juan in the summer of 2019 at the Clínica de Comunidad Sinaí, a men's drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Sinaloa, Mexico. His ongoing struggle with methamphetamine addiction formed the prelude to his time at Sinaí, and he had, his mother informed me, gotten carried away with the malos recursos offered by the cartels. Juan's story was certainly one about the kinds of spectacular violence often linked to the cartels. But it had far less to do with the groups than nearly any other story of armed violence that was shared with me during the three months that I spent in the clinic. Nevertheless, the threads that wove their way into the fabric of his life manifested and permuted the epistemes of violence that privilege violence-as-currency in the masculinized neoliberal order in which he lived (Valencia, 2010).My first interview with Juan was just over three hours long and took place about halfway through my time living in the center with the 33 "patients," rotating attending medical staff, counselors, security officers, and a priest. Juan and I sat in the air-conditioned meeting room that served as my workstation while I was there and passed the first 30 minutes in relaxed conversation. He spoke with ease about his childhood experiences-even when the physical violence of his parents marked his remembering of those experiences as they had so long ago marked his body. When he began to talk about his wife of seven years, however, the nature of the interaction decisively changed. He looked at me and started to cough and choke so much that I walked over to the fountain to get him a glass of water. "It was so difficult," he mustered through his repeated throat clearing. He worked to make enough money to support the household, but she wanted to work as well. She had said it was to bring more money in, but . . . I began to suspect other things.He continued to cough, and the conversation paused. I offered to end the conversation, but he waved me off.It's the air conditioning.. . . which would have made sense but for the fact that he had spent the last 30 minutes with no issues at all and only the narratives of his wife's infidelity were those punctuated with coughs and strained airflow.With few exceptions, the next 45 minutes of the interview appeared to be nothing short of excruciating for Juan as he recounted his wife's multiple affairs and his shame as knowledge of them spread throughout his town. The sheer force of physical will that he exerted to get the words out of his mouth was evident in the massive inhalations and exhalations that preceded each increment of his narrative journey. He often paused. For a very. Long. Time. So strange how silence can sound like weight, having a density that attracts in the way that matter does: everything, something, anything but more silence. I acutely experienced my own struggle to not fill those eternal silences with sound. Both in the original interview, and listening again to the recording, it was so clear exactly which kind of pause preceded confessional content.The nak...

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“…With actually spending time around mafiosi , the law enforcers (most often, carabinieri ) achieve better integration within the community, as well as self‐respect and respect by the mafiosi themselves. This grounded work can only be done through participation in the ‘grey zone’, on a borderline position where liminal convergences challenge both categories (Pine 2012; Rakopoulos 2018). When I went to interview Carlo, the carabinieri Marshal of San Giovanni, who took half a day off work to see me, he described to me the ritual through which he obtained information on mafiosi from mafiosi , outside a pentito framework.…”

Section: The Face Of the Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Having fallen from the collective personhood of the mafia (Rakopoulos 2018), after they break the code of silence by collaborating with the authorities and becoming pentiti (‘repentants’), these people are not becoming independent, as they enter a protection phase offered by the Italian state (Dino 2006). There are few phrases signalling dependence more than the ‘witness protection scheme’, as one’s person is literally protected by the state.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two kinds of mafia dependency: on making and unmaking mafia men

Rakopoulos

2020

Soc Anthropol

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This article proposes a movement between two sorts of dependency in the secretive bonds of violent men. The first forges an interdependent set of relations between mafia men, independent of the state; the second arises as a dependency of these former mafiosi on the state in order to break the interdependencies that formerly made them as mafia men. In this ethnographic and oral history narrative, we first witness a dyadic, homosocial relation between two violent men that forges a masculinised interdependence binding the protagonists of this story together as they share a secret. We then encounter the break‐up of this interdependency amid local moral outrage over betrayal and violence, and its substitution by a strong dependence on the state. Through a microsociology that delves into a history of relations, the article thus shows how the subjects of this story shift from one set of dependencies to another. The essay critically revisits discussions of dependency, especially on the state, underscoring the missing element of dependency in the making and breaking of bonds in a secretive male brotherhood.

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The Social Life of Mafia Confession: Between Talk and Silence in Sicily

Cited by 20 publications

References 40 publications

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“I've never told anyone that before …”

Two kinds of mafia dependency: on making and unmaking mafia men

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