LIBRO

Understanding mafia

di Joseph Farrell

To the despair of Sicilians, the very name Sicily is, universally and inevitably, associated not with the island's rich literary tradition, unique historical legacy or beauty of landscape but with crime and the mafia. The injustice from the Sicilian perspective lies not in the basic assertion of mafia power in the island, but in the more pernicious belief that mafia and Sicily are synonymous. In any recognisable form, the mafia began to emerge towards the middle of the last century, but if the mafia as a structure is a comparatively recent phenomenon, its origins lie deep in Sicilian history and culture. Mafia violence is far removed both from expressions of an aggressive instinct and from random outbreaks of unaccountable vandalism. The mafia evolved in tandem with the society on to which it battened. It has become conventional among mafiologists to identify three phases: the rural mafia, the urban mafia and the contemporary mafia which is variously characterised as international, financial or entrepreneurial. Tommaso Buscetta has so deeply revolutionised the state of knowledge about the mafia that mafia studies can be divided into pre- and post-Buscetta. The increased violence in Sicily and the awareness of the risks posed by the intermingling of legal and illegal economies finally provoked a reaction from the Italian State, long seemingly immobilised in the face of mafia outrages.