Masso-Mafia –Ben-Yehoyada
By Naor Ben-Yehoyada | Published on February 9, 2021
Over the past six years or so, several initiatives have sought to expand the reach of the Antimafia criminal justice project beyond the strictly-defined realm of criminal organizations of the mafia type. As that strict definition constitutes one of that criminal justice project’s fundamental achievements of the 1980s-90s (Puccio-Den 2008; 2012; 2015), this recent turn poses intriguing anthropological dilemmas. Specifically, several legislative and political initiatives have proposed to criminalize associations that promote or coordinate interference with public administration. These initiatives share two things. First, a new approach to the political potential of “deviated” Freemason lodges. Second, they attempt to reframe corruption as an associative crime, rather than as either the transaction between gain-seeking individuals (mafia-related or not) or as the “organic interweaving of mafia and not mafia” best captured by the term “intreccio” on the other hand (Schneider 2018, S19). This shared approach to corruption as an associative crime suggests a new anthropological imaginary of the power of ritual brotherhood to motivate or oblige persons’ action.
The organizational potential of ritual brotherhood for political mobilization has a long history.[1] The political potential that fraternity holds as a kinship metaphor for political relations well predates the French Revolution and hold a promise more universal than that of any one polity (Mahmud 2014; Pitt-Rivers 1977). As others have amply shown, modern political thought is founded on the assumption that the only kinship idiom that has survived political modernity is fraternity (Anderson 1991, 6–7). Familial realities apart, among all the popular kinship categories (cousins, sisterhood, in-laws, milk-kin, godparents, etc.), fraternity has come to postulate the closest, strictest, most equal bond (Minicuci and Palumbo 2001). In European, Middle Eastern, and North African imaginations, brothers are supposed to be similar, close, equal, mutually trusting, and so forth, and should beware of divisive competition, or so go various ideologies of fraternity (Sahlins 2011). This postulated strictness is historically related to the emergence of brotherhood’s ubiquity as a vehicle of political mobilization: invocations of fraternity entail a binary, situational, flattening view of the social world, and produce either reifying exclusions or no divisions at all.[2] Hence the menacing potential of exclusive ritual brotherhood that are smaller than, wider than, or traversing established political communities.
The Italian State has misrecognized and periodically monopolized this thread of claimed sameness, parity and shared fate (e.g. in monastic orders, masonic lodges, and the “Aquile randagie” during fascism). The political assumptions about the illicit potential of ritual brotherhood shaped the official perception of Freemasons and mafias, which substantiated their criminalization as organizations assumed to be binding, mobilizing, and contagious enough to pose a perceived threat to “public order.” Nevertheless, accusations of various types, which cast on the same stage these two ritual brotherhoods, usually reserve the terms “associative bond [vincolo associativo]” to the mafia. This distinction retains for the mafia the anthropological imaginary according to which people act because they are compelled (“vincolati”) as members to do so, not necessarily because they see it in their own individual interest to do so (Pipyrou 2014, 12). In this judicial line of reasoning, Mafiosi, unlike Masons, do what they do because they are who they are—mafiosi. In other words, the social fact of membership “sticks” – it becomes a persevering characteristic of a person.
The anthropological imaginary of mafia, masonry, and the relationship (possible, actual, general) between the two dramatizes ritual brotherhood-based association at the intersection of kinship, friendship, and the law. Fraternity may well be an elementary building block in universalizing projects, but its rise to prominence is a particular Mediterranean story. The legislation of friendship validates “any horizontal alliance with political purview” through its vertical mediation in the sovereign (or seat of jurisdiction; Velasco 2019, 121). Such legislation construes licit friendship (horizontal) as legal subjecthood (vertical) through the idioms of fraternity and brotherly love: for it “constitutes the purest way to present a relationship of affinity as if it were a relationship of consanguinity” (Velasco 2019, 119). In doing so, friendship as quasi-fraternity becomes the hinge of the relationship between kinship at large and the law. In the process, brotherhood becomes “brotherhood,” and it does so in two ways. In the first, people enter one relationship – friendship – shaped in the form “just like” another relationship (in this case, brotherhood). Whatever shape any one relationship takes, the friendship that is modeled after it is said to assume that shape. In itself, this borrowing is not rulers’ (nor monotheistic religions’) innovation. In the second, that relationship is potentially and often scaled up. Differently from social institutions like dyadic blood-brotherhoods (Evans-Pritchard 1933; Beidelman 1963), which only model one kind of relationship (friendship) on another of the same scale (brotherhood), in legislated friendship the lawmaker mediates vertically not just the friendship of any two or more friends, but all friendship.
The legislation of friendship consequently illegalizes some of its forms; at times criminalizing them (recently more frequently). What is being criminalized is not kinship as such but kinship “in law,” or certain forms of friendship. Lawmaking seeks to draw a boundary between two similar rearticulating uses of kinship, that is, between legal and illegal friendship, not between kinship and friendship. It might be worth reiterating. Friendship under law and kinship are not fundamentally opposed, because each side of the dyad is already informed by its opposite. Various forms of kinship already rearticulate other forms of kinship (e.g., milk-kinship and co-parenthood; Parkes 2004; Mintz and Wolf 1950) and friendship incorporates the forms of relatedness of its social surrounding (Pitt-Rivers 2016). So when states criminalize certain forms of ritual brotherhoods and the associations that are based on them, they criminalize earlier or emergent competing forms of association and the idioms of kinship (or, more broadly, the terms of relatedness) that they rearticulate.
This kind of criminalization therefore differs significantly from the way in which the term has been increasingly used by students of the relationship between states and societies. For it revolves on sameness, not otherness. As soon as it caught the attention of legal anthropologists, criminalization took the shape and assumed the function of othering more broadly. For example, for Sally Engle Merry (1998, 15), the target population of “the criminalization of everyday life […] is often envisioned as degraded, indolent, vicious, and licentious as well as racially distinct and inferior. […] Racial fears and social images of disorder take solid form in a procession of convicted and incarcerated bodies.” Against this view, the criminalization of ritual brotherhood appears to unfold between lawmaking projects and those social formations that they view as similar and treat as menacing because of that similarity, not those the difference of which they cunningly recognize (Povinelli 2002, 17). I outlined at the outset the process of the gradual distinction of brotherhood as the paramount politically charged term of relatedness. Nevertheless, the political trajectory of brotherhood is only one in a sequence of moments in which emergent institutions rearticulated, scaled up, and then sought to monopolize each time a different term of relatedness; levirate, for example (Goody 1983, 64–68). These moments pave the history of Mediterraneanists’ attempts to imagine the arc of change from an ancient world imagined as resembling exogamous marriage famous in anthropologists’ work on places considered radically different from Euro-American 19th-20th Century societies. A first phase sees the emergence of endogamy and the grouping sense of identity and superiority that justify it. Here, most famously with Moses’s appearance on scriptural stage, “brothers” is used for the first time metaphorically (Exodus 2:11), yet still only within the bounds of a group that is taken as expandable only through reproduction. In the second phase, brotherhood attains a more spiritual essence, and can thus be mediated no longer through this or that ancestor only. At a later stage, the institutions of spiritual brotherhood seek to scale up and monopolize the devices of relatedness (like marriage, godparenthood, levirate, and adopting) and the political economic moves these permit.[3] At the contemporary end of this chain of monopolizing attempts stand contemporary states. The same rearticulated brotherhood that substantiates their national citizenship as generalized friendship has served other associations, which at times predate their states, and at others claim to survive (if not promote) their demise.[4]
While states seek to monopolize friendship-as-brotherhood, they only recently joined a long historical chain of such institutions, some of which still thriving. The relationship between kinship, friendship, and the law consequently partakes in “the detailed political processes through which the uncertain yet powerful distinction between state and society is produced” (Mitchell 1991, 78). The state appears neither as “as having a monopoly on violence,” as Weber is often misquoted (Martin 2020, 657), nor necessarily as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” as the English translation puts it (Weber 1919, 78). Instead, perhaps it would be more helpful to see states as claiming monopoly over the legitimation of the use of physical force (official and other). What conditions that attempted monopoly is the state’s ability to negotiate with the various other “political associations” their own claims to use both physical force and the terms of relatedness – scaled up and rearticulated – to legitimate it.
Notes
- I refer here to anything from the role of scaled-up brotherhood in monotheistic religions’ contribution to the cosmological conditions of capitalism, through the emergence of speculative fraternities in the enlightenment and the role of clubs and associations in the formation of modern statehood, to the role and menace of organized ritual brotherhood in present-day republican states (Schneider 1990; Mahmud 2012; Lagalisse 2019; Koselleck 1988).[↑]
- Most famously, in tribal feuds, however people describe their relationship, they call each other “brothers” when the time comes to bear arms. But the call is made (and taken) as a situational mobilizing gesture, not a description of political relations (Dresch 1986, 311; Shryock 1997, 77).[↑]
- That is, from the world of “the fate of Shechem” through that “of vigilance and virgins” and “the republic of cousins,” to the 19th Century northwestern European family (Pitt-Rivers 1977; Schneider 1971; Tillion 1983; Goody 1983).[↑]
- See Michael Herzfeld’s forthcoming monograph on Subversive Archaisms.[↑]