list of conflicting dictionary definitions, and explaining that ‘mafia’ probably derives from Arabic. With the indecision proper to a gentleman scholar—one imagines him as a portly man in his late sixties, dressed in a crumpled suit—he refuses to settle on one meaning for the word.
The younger man is much more down-to-earth—the picture in the reader’s mind is of a chunky, middle-aged, flat-faced character in Ray Bans. Despite the respect that he evidently has for his partner in discussion, he cannot disguise that all the scholarly debate just makes him edgy. He prefers to hear that ‘mafia’ is the manly swagger of someone who knows how to look after his own interests.
It turns out, of course, that both men in Sciascia’s story are mafiosi and that their dialogue is a rehearsal in case they are called before a parliamentary commission of inquiry. The older man says he is so confident that he will even ask the commission to let him make his ‘little contribution’—’a contribution to the confusion, you understand’. At some point after 1865, Sciascia is suggesting, the name ‘mafia’ became the Sicilian mafia’s own little joke at the state’s expense.
* * *
If the sources we have are to be believed—and, in the history of a secret society like the mafia, that ‘if’ is inevitably quite large—then the sect emerged in the Palermo hinterland when the toughest and smartest bandits, members of ‘parties’, gabelloti, smugglers, livestock rustlers, estate wardens, farmers, and lawyers came together to specialize in the violence industry and to share a method for building power and wealth that was perfected in the lemon business. These men extended their method to family members and business contacts. When they spent time in jail, they would also extend it to their fellow inmates. This sect became the mafia when the new Italian state made ham-fisted attempts to repress it. Thus by the mid-1870s at the very latest, and in the Palermo area at the very least, the most important components of the mafia method were firmly in place. The mafia had the protection rackets and the powerful political friends, and it also had its cellular structure, its name, its rituals, and an untrustworthy state as a competitor.
The great imponderable is whether, at this moment in history, there was one mafia or many. It is not clear how many of the ‘mafias’ referred to by the authorities in different parts of Sicily in the 1860s and 1870s were just autonomous gangs; they may have been copying methods that were widespread anyway, or may actually have recognized themselves as forming part of the same brotherhood as Uditore boss Antonino Giammona. The problem is how to interpret the historical documents. The authorities often referred to the mafia, but by no means everything that they called ‘mafia’ really was the mafia. Some policemen were evidently too keen to twist the facts to fit the conspiracy stories that their political masters needed to brandish against rivals.
Baron Turrisi Colonna’s 1864 account of the sect carries a great deal of weight on this question because of his close relationship with the mafia—and Turrisi Colonna definitely talked only of a single ‘great sect’. But this belief may derive from his Palermo-based perspective and may not be valid for the rest of western Sicily. There are also, by way of contrast, numerous police reports from the 1860–76 period that tell of different gangs locked in combat against each other in many towns and villages. But these are not a reliable indication that there were different mafias; the disputes referred to could just as easily have been generated within a single association in the same way that Cosa Nostra has internal wars today.
However all this evidence is interpreted, its very existence raises a question. If the mafia was around in the 1860s and 1870s, and if today’s historians have been able to find evidence of it, then all the
The younger man is much more down-to-earth—the picture in the reader’s mind is of a chunky, middle-aged, flat-faced character in Ray Bans. Despite the respect that he evidently has for his partner in discussion, he cannot disguise that all the scholarly debate just makes him edgy. He prefers to hear that ‘mafia’ is the manly swagger of someone who knows how to look after his own interests.
It turns out, of course, that both men in Sciascia’s story are mafiosi and that their dialogue is a rehearsal in case they are called before a parliamentary commission of inquiry. The older man says he is so confident that he will even ask the commission to let him make his ‘little contribution’—’a contribution to the confusion, you understand’. At some point after 1865, Sciascia is suggesting, the name ‘mafia’ became the Sicilian mafia’s own little joke at the state’s expense.
* * *
If the sources we have are to be believed—and, in the history of a secret society like the mafia, that ‘if’ is inevitably quite large—then the sect emerged in the Palermo hinterland when the toughest and smartest bandits, members of ‘parties’, gabelloti, smugglers, livestock rustlers, estate wardens, farmers, and lawyers came together to specialize in the violence industry and to share a method for building power and wealth that was perfected in the lemon business. These men extended their method to family members and business contacts. When they spent time in jail, they would also extend it to their fellow inmates. This sect became the mafia when the new Italian state made ham-fisted attempts to repress it. Thus by the mid-1870s at the very latest, and in the Palermo area at the very least, the most important components of the mafia method were firmly in place. The mafia had the protection rackets and the powerful political friends, and it also had its cellular structure, its name, its rituals, and an untrustworthy state as a competitor.
The great imponderable is whether, at this moment in history, there was one mafia or many. It is not clear how many of the ‘mafias’ referred to by the authorities in different parts of Sicily in the 1860s and 1870s were just autonomous gangs; they may have been copying methods that were widespread anyway, or may actually have recognized themselves as forming part of the same brotherhood as Uditore boss Antonino Giammona. The problem is how to interpret the historical documents. The authorities often referred to the mafia, but by no means everything that they called ‘mafia’ really was the mafia. Some policemen were evidently too keen to twist the facts to fit the conspiracy stories that their political masters needed to brandish against rivals.
Baron Turrisi Colonna’s 1864 account of the sect carries a great deal of weight on this question because of his close relationship with the mafia—and Turrisi Colonna definitely talked only of a single ‘great sect’. But this belief may derive from his Palermo-based perspective and may not be valid for the rest of western Sicily. There are also, by way of contrast, numerous police reports from the 1860–76 period that tell of different gangs locked in combat against each other in many towns and villages. But these are not a reliable indication that there were different mafias; the disputes referred to could just as easily have been generated within a single association in the same way that Cosa Nostra has internal wars today.
However all this evidence is interpreted, its very existence raises a question. If the mafia was around in the 1860s and 1870s, and if today’s historians have been able to find evidence of it, then all the
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