public.loading

The thread and the plot of the antimafia in Sicily

public.project.responsible_investigator_cria: Simona Tomarchio

public.project.research_group: Circulation and Place-Making


public.project.category

Doctorate Degree Projects

public.project.keyword

Mafia | Antimafia | Violence | Beauty

public.project.institution_funder

Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT)

public.project.state

public.project.open

public.project.start_date

01-10-2016

public.project.reference

SFRH/BD/132227/2017


public.project.abstract

Sicily is referred to as the prototypical case of comparative studies of emerging forms of organized crime elsewhere. Traditional rural and archaic mafia survived and is, nowadays, infiltrated at many levels of the global network society and international scale economy. As a result, the boundaries between the upper world of legality and underworld of illegality have become blurred and have disappeared altogether mainteining in the case of the Sicilian mafia a social and cultural control of the territory (Blok 1974). Antimafia civil movements represent a competing and antagonistic set of values and incontestable drivers of change. During my fieldwork I noticed how the concept of beauty was recurrent and used in contrapposition to mafia. According to this, mafia is the counterpart of something that is beatiful, therefore, morally good and acceptable. Beauty attracts resources, ideas and create synergies contributing to the development of most depressed areas of Sicily.

public.project.team

Jane Schneider (University of New York)

Full members

Miguel Vale de Almeida