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Seminargruppe: The anthropology of corruption, crime, and mafia
Foreleser: Theodoros Rakopoulos
The contemporary world is dominated with issues of security and transparency. State, market and NGO discourses and practices are increasingly occupied with understanding and isolating such “corrupting” and impure forces for social and economic life. In this nexus, mafias and organized crime groups are both a territorial and a transational force. Be it Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, the Yakuza, Mexican or Colombian cartels, the Triads or the “Russian” mafia, such groups exercise a violent, extortive and parasitic enterprise that influences directly or indirectly the lives of millions. While perceived as inherently corrosive and dangerous, the social life of mafias fascinates the popular imagination and imagery, with much literature and visual arts work speculating on the issue.
This course explores precisely the complexity of a phenomenon that is only ostensibly remote and confined in specific sociocultural and geographic circumstances (be those Sicily or Moscow), but is in fact pervasive of global capitalism’s operations. We shall examine the territorial, localized life of organized crime groups, attentive to underline those factors of deep significance to personhood and gender, which make up their ritual life. We shall visit and explain the history of similar but distinctive phenomena (such as banditry), but also make connections to the invisible and international influence of money laundering operations that are driving organized crime today. The centrality of violence will be compared to that of silence, conspiracy and indeed social consent (of persons, but also institutions, such as banks).
Premised on the potential of anthropological critique, the course will problematize the limits of legality and its relation to illegality. It will show how corruption is produced as a power discourse, how crime is a concept central to institutional life, with a stratifying and exploitative life of “its” own. The anthropology of crime and criminalization moves beyond legalistic approaches, in order to provide a fuller understanding of legal systems and their externals, an issue extremely relevant to our lives.
Learning outcomes
Insight into the social life of crime, criminality and mafias
Knowledge of aspects of the anthropology of law and the state
Knowledge of the history and ethnography of organized crime
Significance of law and its opposites to understand contemporary social life.
Skills
Familiarity with approaching central phenomena such as criminality and “corruption”
Appreciating the meanings of transparency, a key feature of public discourse in Scandinavia and beyond
Ability to distinguish and understand different phenomena situated outside the law
Ability to critically analyze legal systems, legislated social life and its pariahs
Critical thinking regarding the exoticization of violence, the mafia and “criminal life”
Competencies
Capability to engage with social scientific debates on crime, corruption and the law, orally and in written
Critically examine links between different significations of law and legality
Achieve an independent critical mind concerning the law and legal systems
Increased ability to reflect critically on issues of corruption
Bok
@ Theodoros Rakopoulos, From Clans to Co-ops: Confiscated mafia land in Sicily. London and New York: Berghahn books.
Online artikler
Jane and Peter Schneider, 2008, The anthropology of crime and criminalization, Annual Review of Anthropology, 37:351–73. jstor.org
Letizia Paoli, The paradoxes of organized crime, Crime, Law & Social Change 37: 51–97, 2002. springer.link.com
Tone Kristin Sissener, 2001. Anthropological perspectives on corruption, CMI Working papers.
Akhil Gupta, 1995. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined, American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 375-402. jstor.org
Sanchez, Andrew. 2010. Capitalism, Violence and The State: Crime, Corruption and Entrepreneurship in an Indian Company Town. Journal of Legal Anthropology (2010) Vol. 1, No.2:165-188. anthropologies-in-translation.org
Michael J. Watts, 2016. The mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860–1960; a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs, by Anton Blok, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, 67–91. Taylor&Francis online
Nancy Ries, 2010, Business, Taxes and Corruption in Russia. aurburn.edu
Jane Schneider (2006) Women In The Mob, Global Crime, 7:1, 125-131. tandfonline.com
Lilith Mahmud, 2012. In the name of transparency: Gender, terrorism and masonic conspiracies in Italy. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4, p. 1177–1208. jstor.org
Anton Blok, 1972, The peasant and the brigand: Social banditry reconsidered, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 494-503. jstor.org
Paul Sant-Cassia, 1993,Banditry, Myth, and Terror in Cyprus and Other Mediterranean Societies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 773-795. jstor.org
James Diego Vigil, 2003. Urban Violence and street gangs, Annual Review of Anthropology, 32: 225-242. jstor.org
Pipyrou, Stavroula. 2014. Altruism and Sacrifice: Mafia Free Gift Giving in South Italy. Anthropological Forum, 24(4): 412-426. tandfonline.com
Nancy Triolo, 1993. Mediterranean exotica and the mafia “Other”, or problems of representation in Pitrè’s text. Cultural Anthropology 8(3): 306-316. culanth.org
Jane and Jean Comaroff. 1999. Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony, American Ethnologist, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 279-303. jstor.org
Deborah Puccio-Den 2001. The Ethnologist and the Magistrate: Giovanni Falcone’s Investigation into the Sicilian Mafia, Ethnologie française, /1 (Vol. 31) pp. 15-27.
Vesco, Antonio. 2017. The cultural foundations of political support in eastern Sicily: Mafia clans, political power and the Lombardo case. Modern Italy, Vol. 22, No. 1, 55–70. Cambridge.org
Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2015. Which community for cooperatives? Peasant mobilizations, the Mafia, and the problem of community participation in Sicilian co-ops, Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 71 (2015): 57–70. berghahnjournals.com
Jason Pine, Economy of speed: The new narco-capitalism, Public Culture 19(2): 357-366. dukejournals.org
Andrew Walsh, 2003. "Hot Money" and Daring Consumption in a Northern Malagasy Sapphire-Mining Town. American Ethnologist, Vol. 30, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 290-305. jstor.org
Jane and Peter Schneider, Mafia, Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of Sicily Author(s): Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 4, 501-520. jstor.org
Renate Siebert, 2000. Mafia and antimafia: Concepts and individuals.ecpr.eu
Seminargruppe: Modernitet, seksualitet, kjønn og slektskap
Foreleser: Marit Melhuus
To nyere monografier danner utgangspunktet for dette kurset: Rucinda Lambergs Given to the Goddess og Aaron Goodfellows Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship. Lambergs etnografi er forankret i sør India og fokuserer (primært) på en praksis der unge dalit jenter giftes bort til en gudinne. De blir gudinnens ektemann, og dette skaper ”trøbbel” i slektskapssystemet. Deres livsgrunnlag sikres blant annet gjennom ulike former for seksuelle transaksjoner, inkludert bordellarbeid. Dette utfordrer lovgivere. Goodfellows monografi er i hovedsak basert på samtaler med homoseksuelle menn og deres opplevelser og omfavnelser av farskap i samtidige USA. Tematikken kretser om hva det betyr å være ”i slekt”, former for intimitet, og i forlengelsen betydningen av en omsorgsetikk. Også deres praksiser utfordrer ”systemet” på ulikt vis, gitt det heteroseksuelle ekteskapets normative forrang. Begge bøkene problematiserer kjønn, slektskap og seksualitet. Begge bøker fokuserer på de bredere sammenhenger og retter betimelig oppmerksomhet mot modernitet, sekularitet, staten og statlige redskaper, for eksempel lovgivning. Dermed legges grunnlaget for en komparativ diskusjon av noen sentrale temaer innen sosialantropologien.
Vi skal lese disse monografiene med et kritisk blikk for hva de forteller om betydningen av slektskap og kjønn i moderne samfunn og i et krysskulturelt perspektiv. Hva frembringer et slikt fokus av forståelser om folks livsverdener og livserfaringer? Hvilke sider ved sosialt liv tydeliggjøres ved å rette det analytiske blikket på slektskap og kjønn? Hva mobiliserer forfatterne av kontekst og teoretiske perspektiver og hvilke diskusjoner plasserer de seg i?
Vi skal også lese monografiene som eksempler på antropologiske tekster. Vi ser da på metodisk tilnærming, etnografiens omfang og forankring, analytisk stringens og bokens oppbygging. Hvilke data mobiliseres for å understøtte analysen? Hvilken overbevisningskraft har boken? Innledningsvis leser vi noen artikler som kretser inn betydning av slektskap og kjønn for samtidige antropologiske analyser.
Kurset baserer seg hovedsakelig på student fremlegg.
Pensum
@ Goodfellow, Aaron. 2015. Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship. New York: Fordham University Press.
@ Ramberg, Lucinda. 2014. Given to the Goddess. South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion. Durham: Duke University Press.
@ Bear, L., K. Ho, A. Tsing and S. Yangisako. 2015. ”GENS: Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism”.
Carsten, Janet. 2004. ”Introduction: After Kinship” and ”Gender, Bodies and Kinship” (chapter 3) in After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McKinnon, S. and F. Cannell. 2013. ”The Difference Kinship Makes” in S. McKinnon and F. Cannell (eds) Vital Relations. Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship. Santa Fe: SAR Press.