Il dono del don. Frammento di una teoria politico-culturale della mafia

In this paper I present the essential lines of a theoretical model that would explain, in a simple and parsimonious way, the vast quantity of facts and qualities that makes up the puzzle called «mafia»: the power, wealth, violence, blood, respect, honour, reputation, silence, friendship, aiding and abetting, marriage, initiations, kinship, rituals, myths, religiosity, absconding, as well as the charm, ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, duplicity, and invisibility (among others) that characterise the mafia universe according to its own members and even outsiders. Moving from a neglected insight of Gaetano Mosca’s early description of the ‘mafia’ phenomenology, I propose to conceive the ‘mafia’ as an institutionalised system of social relations based on what anthropologists call the gift principle. The figure of the gift is central to the theoretical model, allowing us to connect the understanding of the mafia to a consolidated and by now enormous corpus of theory and empirical research developed since Marcel Mauss’s seminal text Essai sur le don.