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"'The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I've never seen it.' Mafiosi have oftern reacted this way to questions from journalists and law enforceent. Social scientists who study the Mafia usually try to pin down what it 'really is,' thus fusing their work with their object. In Mafiacraft, Deborah Puccio-Den undertakes a new form of ethnographic inquirey that focuses not on aswering 'What is the Mafia?' but on the ontological, moral, and political effecs of posing the question itself. Her starting point is that Mafia is not a readily nameable social act bu a problem of thought produced by the asence of words Pccio-Den appraoches covert activities using a model of 'Mafiacraft,' which inverts the logic of witchcraft. If witchcraft revolves on the lethal power of speech, Mafiacraft deponds on the deadly strength of silence. How do we write an ethnography of phenomena that cannot be named?"--Back cove
About the author
Deborah Puccio-Den is a political anthropologist and senior researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in France. Originally from Italy, she has conducted more than twenty years of fieldwork on Mafia in Sicily and lectures on the subject at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She is the author of two books in French,
Masques et dévoilements and
Les théâtres de Maures et Chrétiens.
