The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860-1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs

If your interest in the Mafia is limited to reading over and over again, Puzo type romances on taciturn godfathers and headless horses, this is definitely not the book for you. But if you are really interested in understanding how it is that a modern state will allow violent criminals literally to get away with torture and murder and will suffer a large region with rich resources to remain so poor that for four years in the 1990s it had no growth but actually went backwards, this is a book to read. And if it occurs to you that it's a very sad thing when, in a rich and beautiful land, the child that was you, along with the friends of your childhood, must quit your families and community to go far away to work long hours in menial jobs, lonely and despairing, then this book will show you how this happens. What is really different about Anton Blok's book, and can make it a difficult read for some people, is that Blok is a cultural anthropologist writing mainly for scholars specialised in his area, but hoping that what he has to say will somehow be picked up by other interested people in the community: basically he studies how people come to live and work together in a society, how they develop different kinds of dependencies on each other, how these dependencies influence the way they conduct themselves with one another, and how this all changes over time. To get their information, anthropologists like Blok go and live in specific communities, listening to the people talking about their worries, hopes, fears, joys, and observing the ways that they respond to things that happen to them: if they have a row with a neighbour do they blow his head off? Or do they go and see a community lawyer? Whichever course they adopt will tell you a lot about the relationships between them and everyone else in their community. Generally speaking, like Blok, you have to follow the land trail back to the beginning. Who were the biggest landsnatchers? Who didn't have any land at all. And what people were in between them, between the top and bottom. And how did they relate to each other. You can be sure the big landholders didn't kiss the hands of those without land. It was the other way round. Who got the guns. Who kept them. Who lost them. Why? When outsiders came along looking for pickings, whom did they make pacts with? The poor landless ones? Would you? And if you were a poor landless one blessed with brains, keen to get on in life, whom would you join? Would you make links horizontally, with people like yourself, or vertically, with people above or below you? If you just sit and think of all the people you have contact with in a week, and then work out what kind of connection you have with them and why, and how stable your connections are, you'll be thinking like Anton Blok and be on your way to understanding the mafia. The only reason I didn't give his book five stars is that he didn't look more closely at the Church's connections with the villagers and the ma