Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-262) and index.
Summary:
"'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 cover.
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