That’s true, but that’s also because in general that mythologising of gangsters makes good fiction, good drama, good cinema or tv, with great roles for actors. Especially when the gangsters are built up to be epic figures and the focus is so much more on family and personal relationships, so that those can become symbolic in their own, regardless of the mafia context.

That kind of dramatisation has nothing to do with the reality of the Sicilian mafia and what it represents to an Italian audience, though. Even in the realm of dramatisation alone, if you see Italian films or tv series (La piovra) made about the mafia and set in Sicily, you’d notice a huge difference with the Hollywood films. The only mythologising is for the cops and magistrates, they are the heroes, together with other ordinary people who suffer the consequences. Like, innocent victims of terrorist-like bombings and assassination plots on politicians or judges, which were not what the mafia did in the US. So the mythologising of the mafia is made impossible by that kind of real context. The settings are a lot less lush and glamorous. There is a lot more space for politics and the mafia corruption of politics. It’s all a lot more drab and realistic and tragic and ultimately unwatchable because it’s so depressing. Just so it’s clear, I’m not suggesting there is a different “moral judgment” on the mafia, just a different history of the mafia in two very different countries, and a different approach in fictional representations of it. Also, different cinema and tv industries.

A series like the Sopranos would have been unthinkable if set in Italy, because it is so detached from the actual context of the Italian mafia. (And, well, because no one makes tv that good in Italy…)

You represent the Robert Parker school of wine and life.
Your paradise sounds like hell to me, and illogical as well.

DSW

It is interesting to note that even presumably well-educated commenters on this thread find it hard to tell where benign personal networking ends and malignant favoritism begins.

The legitimate state and the mafia stuggle for monopolies in violence, the rule of law, and the division of the loot. As so often in human affairs, the end result is a continuing set of compromises, unless, of course, one side should become fatally weakened by the persistent attacks of the other.

Italy, a state formed by revolution that, eventually, had a king to receive Mussolini’s resignation, has a history of parallel governments and urban disorder to charm any historian. Considering the continuing influence of parallel governments, it might be worth studying just how Mussolini was able to get the upper hand of the mafia.

Shouldn’t there be an accent over that last “a”? The -ita ending had me thinking it was a Spanish or Portuguese feminine diminuitive – i.e. a “little gangstress”, if you’ll excuse the coinage.

It relates to how strictly business and the whole society is run by the state vs. “freedom of enterprise”.

Maybe she’d have gone straight to the local hospital even in Sicily, if she hadn’t been a wealthy estate owner with servants and accustomed to getting favours from friends?

Really, I think that reaction says more about her own privileged position than the mafia or ‘raccomandazioni’ mentality. After all this was a small emergency. Even a mafioso would seek favours from friends for bigger things than their children cutting their hands, I’d imagine. So I think even that final nugget is a little too impressionistic.

I live in Italy, though not in Sicily, but I am familiar with the region and would be wary of conflating different things there. First, corruption and favoritism are present in many other parts of Italy too, depending, especially at higher levels of power. They don’t necessarily have to do with the Sicilian mafia or that kind of organised crime. Secondly, going through friends to get something done is not necessarily to do with the mafia or corruption, either.

This sort of social networking can have either good or bad aspects, indeed, the bad ones include combined forms of age discrimination and nepotism. I think Tobias Jones described it rather well. There can be perfectly normal, non-dodgy forms of “raccomandazioni”, such as happen anywhere. Silliest example: you need a plumber or a builder, a friend knows someone who’s good, they recommend it to you. That’s quite different from pulling strings to get someone a privileged job in state tv, just because they’re a relative or friend of someone who has political leverage. So I don’t think the dividing line is between personal and impersonal networks. It’s between regular and corrupt relations; between normal social contacts and getting actual undeserved privileges via abuses of power.

I don’t know if emergency care is so bad in Sicily that everyone would distrust it, I find that hard to believe. Perhaps, again, it’s the author’s privileged position, to be automatically distrustful of state hospitals? Still, I think it’s very callous to describe as “mafiosita” something so harmless as that anecdote describes.

The kind of distrust the mafia thrives on is not simple distrust for ‘impersonal’ relations or institutions, it’s distrust for public authority and politicians and law enforcement, but that’s also because where the mafia thrives, it does so by corrupting local politicians and authorities and law enforcement, so it’s a big vicious circle. Besides, it thrives much more on blackmail than distrust. That’s where the pessimism comes from. It is not so much about people’s mentalities, but more about a closed system designed to perpetuate itself.

Sadly, both the mafia and generalised corruption are not a problem that started or got worse with Berlusconi. Wish it were so. It’d be easier to uproot. It’d been going on for decades, when the former Christian Democrats were in power. The ‘red’ areas of Italy that were locally governed for decades by (former) communists, on the other hand, thrived on the cooperative system, with no or next to no corruption, and they had the most efficient public administration and services.

When I went away to college in the midwest I thought I’d died and gone to heaven to be out of all that. I was furious when other students, who’d never seen that system from the inside romanticized that world and condemned the sterility and hypocrisy of upper middle class Anglo society. Hypocrisy is a great moral leap forward: it assumes that you live in circumstances where fairness, impartiality and honesty are valued and feel guilty or, minimally, ashamed when you behave badly.

I still have a visceral reaction when communitarians get the warm fuzzies for the kind of “traditional society” in which I grew up. Ask almost anyone who grew up in that kind of world and you’ll get the same answer.

Not a shattering insight I know.

I’m gonna side with Henry on this. I think it’s particularly clear if you look at it from a Weberian perspective. These powerful social networks prevent the formal rationalization of social structures—or perhaps, more precisely, provides an alternative, far less effective rationalization.