LAUSR

What follows is a methodological qualification I wish to add to Theodoros Rakopoulos’s welcome contribution to Mafia studies (2018). From the outset, the article’s title, “The Social Life of Mafia Confession: Between Talk and Silence in Sicily,”muddles a state procedure and the perception of what he calls “Mafia confession” in village conversations. The emphasis of the author on “informal ethnography”masks twomain problems: the lack of informed historical context and the failure to distinguish levels of analysis. Rakopoulos’s fundamental misrepresentation of the political frame of his fieldwork raises challenging questions about the engagement of anthropologists in political life. Words in Sicily are a matter of life and death, especially when they are related to pentiti. Working on “gray areas” should not preclude rigor and precision in identifying our object of inquiry. Because the Mafia itself is rooted in gray areas, the anthropologist needs to fully understand the consequences of adopting a floating position in fieldwork, and especially in his or her production of knowledge. Rakopoulos has chosen to rely solely on his own informally obtained local information to represent “Mafia confession.” However, studying “Mafia confessions” through hearsay or stories collected in cafés and villages is essentially a category error. In other words, the anthropologist has mistaken a cultural analysis of “words” for the actual legal and concrete “thing” constituted by “collaboration with the justice system” (which he calls “Mafia confession”). Unfortunately, the informal discourse that he reports plays a role in the misrepresentation of the pentitismo and is itself an aspect of local political contestation rather than simply an example of folk “symbolism.” Such a misleading characterization, legitimated in an academic article, could provide justification to refrain from the use of pentiti in anti-Mafia investigations, undermining their credibility and reinforcing the gray areas between the Mafia and the state instead of generating critical knowledge.