The shared boundary: Sicilian mafia and antimafia land

ABSTRACT

This article looks at boundaries as shared points of conflict and sociality in rural Sicily where the mafia and their opponents (‘antimafia’ cooperatives) have lately been at loggerheads. My focus is on neighbourly relations between owners of plots on both sides. This uncomfortable proximity of enemies allows us to see boundaries as more than markers of separation. For sure, Sicilian boundaries imprint a history of violence on the landscape and divide people along categorical lines. However, they also reflect histories of inheritance and kinship, while providing points of contact and an unexpected moral order of neighbourhood relations. A focus on borders shared between plots managed by ‘antagonistic’ social groups exposes emergent relations of conflict and solidarity between their owners. Land boundaries can be markers of proximity and difference between opposed groups who find themselves owning plots next to each other. The boundary underpinning such divisions can make neighbours of feuding groups, rather than confining them to closed clusters.

RIASSUNTO

Questo saggio offre uno sguardo sui confini come punti condivisi di conflitto e socialità in una Sicilia rurale in cui la mafia e i suoi oppositori (cooperative antimafia) sono ultimamente stati ai ferri corti. Il mio studio si concentra sulle relazioni di vicinato tra i proprietari dei terreni appartenenti a entrambi gli schieramenti. Questa scomoda prossimità tra nemici ci permette di vedere i confini come qualcosa di diverso da segni di separazione. Di sicuro, i confini siciliani disegnano una storia di violenza sullo scenario e dividono gli individui lungo linee categoriche. Tuttavia, essi riflettono anche storie di retaggio e parentela, fornendo punti di contatto e un inatteso ordine morale delle relazioni di vicinato. Un focus sui confini condivisi tra i terreni gestiti dai gruppi sociali “antagonisti” espone emergenti relazioni di conflitto e solidarietà tra i loro proprietari. I confini delle terre possono essere indicatori di prossimità e differenze tra opposti gruppi che si ritrovano a possedere terreni vicini. Il confine che marca tali divisioni può rendere gruppi rivali dei vicini, piuttosto che confinarli a meri raggruppamenti prossimi fisicamente.

KEYWORDS:

• Sicily
• mafia
• ‘antimafia’
• neighbourhood
• land
• proximity

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Sicilia
• mafia
• antimafia
• vicinato
• prossimita'

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Keith Hart for helping with editing this article. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. All names of places and people are pseudonyms. The few exceptions are very public figures, like the mafioso Salvatore Riina.

2. I do not suggest that agro-towns and closed corporate peasant communities are alike. Peasant villages have communal land ownership and redistribute wealth, neither of which are normally found in agro-towns.

3. See the notorious example of ‘redlining’ in the formation of Chicago’s Black ghetto.

4. Opposition between mafia and antimafia has a longstanding history in Sicily (Lupo 2015; Santino 2015; Rakopoulos 2017a).

5. My interlocutors live in a grey zone where mafia, antimafia and wider political relations of conflict and alliance congeal in contradictory knots (Rakopoulos 2017a, 2018).

6. The Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori (Sicilian Workers Leagues) of the 1890s were often referred to as ‘the birth of the antimafia movement’ (Santino 2006, 16). The Fasci forced changes in the legal frameworks for rural labor relations in Sicily and Italy. They altered the island’s place in the nation.

7. Passing the ‘Rognoni/La Torre’ law partly resulted from the Sicilian Left’s struggles against the mafia, when Pio La Torre, a PCI MP who was killed by the Cosa Nostra. His partnership with Rognoni reflects a convergence of the two major parties, Democrazia Cristiana (DC) and Partito Comunista Italiano. An antimafia political consensus slowly solidified in the 1980s and peaked after 1994.

8. Fieldwork lasted 18 months in 2008–2009.

9. Data from 2018.

10. Landholding and wage-work had been combined for generations, so that local workers often cultivated small tracts of land (mainly vineyards) while working for wages.

11. I have focused on the inner class divisions of the cooperatives, as they reflect different experience of the local territory and history elsewhere, exploring for instance different associations of kinship (Rakopoulos 2017a, 2017b, 103) or discursive techniques (Rakopoulos 2019). Here, these class differences provide a backdrop to my argument as well as a layer of complexity to the ethnographic analysis, but are not my focal point.

12. At the same time, they should also be contextualized in local networks where kinship offers a major lens of local understanding (an issue tackled at length in Rakopoulos 2017b, as well as in some ethnographic detail in Rakopoulos 2019, 95)

13. Division means separation in order to unify, but we think it means just separating. The Latins divided themselves into three tribes to share cow meat together in a sacrifice (distributio).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Theodoros Rakopoulos

Theodoros Rakopoulos is associate professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Based on ethnography in Sicily, he has published extensively on mafia and antimafia, cooperatives, talk and silence, and food politics. He is author of From Clans to Co-ops: Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily (Berghahn 2017), as well as editor of The Global Life of Austerity (Berghahn, 2018) and co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Wealth (Routledge 2018). He has also worked in Greece and Cyprus and is currently authoring a book on the commodification of citizenship.