This book is an attempt to analyze organized crime from a historical and anthropological perspective. It seems to be based on first-hand interviews and studies of old newspapers which the author conducted while living in the village. I found the author's analysis very unsatisfactory, although his starting point is clear enough: the mafia can exist only as an outgrowth of the modern state. This is a very interesting thesis, but I think the author fails to deepen it in the ensuing analysis.

The first half of the book introduces the village and its agricultural system. The modern state is conspicuously absent from this presentation as it goes into tedious detail on a number of topics which seem more or less irrelevant. The structures of land ownership obviously influence peasant life, but instead of minute details from this particular village I would have needed a comparison to other Italian regions to understand why the Sicilian system favored private exercise of power. The second half of the book recounts a great variety of crimes perpetrated by specific mafiosi for whatever reasons. Again, an analysis of how the modern state influences organized crime is nowhere to be seen.

The author does occasionally touch on greater events in Italian history, especially the world wars, but the majority of the book concentrates on specific events in this village. The stories and fates of specific mafiosi and their victims do not carry any general implications. Various agricultural disputes don't illustrate the workings of the modern state. All in all I was very disappointed with this work because the author does not analyze his subject from a sufficiently broad perspective.

I finished The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, by Anton Blok (1974) this morning. Blok is a cultural anthropologist, or a sociologist (not sure I can tell the difference), so he is more interested in building a theory for how mafiosi fit into some kind of framework, or "configuration" than in telling stories. And given that I've never had much of an instinct for those kind of theories, he does a good job, because I mostly enjoyed it. His basic argument is that mafiosi do not operate as a kind of parallel, private government, but rather as powerbrokers between different groups of people (estate owners and mostly-landless peasants). And he kind of pins it down.

It takes a mental adjustment to remember that this book is about rural mafiosi, and not the more recent urban variant. And yet as I go to describe it, the specifics seem less relevant and the similarities stand out: mafiosi engineer schemes to control and then skim money from employment (in this case, as gabelloti, managers of leased farms) and protection (as campiere, armed guards protecting pastures from rustlers). They also act as arbiters, or strong men, when disputes need settling. Perhaps the strongest example in terms of Blok's sociological argument is the way they maintain links upwards into the realm of the estate owners and government: there are countless examples in the book of people being arrested for assault, theft, homicide, and then being tried and acquitted or the case dismissed for lack of evidence. Hah!

The book is a bit schizophrenic. Half of it is overly theoretical and repetitive, making points about how mafiosi fit into a possible transition from feudalism to a modern State. This is the book's luggage. But the other half contains very local and often colourful stories about the village's history, from the mid 19th-century through to the 1960s. How Guiseppi's uncle lost the mayorship to his rival blah blah in 1895; or, how one day Alessandro laid in ambush for Giacomo on a lonely cart trail... [made-up examples only]. These stories, sometimes horrific, sometimes subtle, are laudably detailed and usually fascinating. They are the heart of the book. And details abound: there are eleven geneaological charts in the back, plus other goodies like tables! There are decent maps in the front but I got a vastly better understanding with Google Earth: the village called "Genuardo" in the text is Contessa Entellina in reality.

Finally, Karl Marx is unsurprisingly not far from the surface of this book. He's even quoted at length at the start. But he's used mainly as inspiration, and in a good way, because clearly the way in which land was owned and managed in Sicily over the past two hundred years is central to understanding mafiosi. Blok is no debauched ideologue.

Main points:

- the Mafia started as armed guards for estate-owners in the chaos between the end of feudalism and the unification of Italy (1812-1860)
- pre-1960 mafiosi were very localised groups of rural powerbrokers controlling and exploiting the necessary employment relationships between peasants & estate-owners
- they were most ubiquitous and influential post-WWI
- the Fascists nearly wiped them out; mass imprisonment in 1926/7 and no activity again until c. 1943/4
- the Mafia were never any kind of secret parallel government: they were part of the existing order ( )