ANTIMAFIA COOPERATIVES: LAND, LAW, LABOUR AND MORALITIES IN A CHANGING SICILY THEODOROS RAKOPOULOS Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology Goldsmiths College, University of London DECLARATION I DECLARE AS FOLLOWS: I authorise that the thesis presented by me for examination of the above Research Degrees, if a degree is awarded, be deposited as a print copy in the library and as an electronic version in GRO subject to the conditions set below. I understand that in the event of my thesis being not approved by the examiners, or being referred, would make this declaration void. I am the author or co-author and owner of the copyright in the thesis and/or have the authority on behalf of the author or authors to make this agreement and grant Goldsmiths and the British Library a licence to make available the Work in digitised format through GRO and the EThOS system for the purpose of non-commercial research, private study, criticism, review and news reporting, illustration for teaching, and/or other educational purposes in electronic or print form. That I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the Work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. [If in doubt please contact [email protected].] Rights granted to GRO, EThOS and the user of the thesis through this agreement are entirely non-exclusive and royalty free. I retain all rights in the Work in its present version or future versions. I agree that GRO administrators or any third party with whom GRO has an agreement can, without changing content, digitise and migrate the digital version of the Work to any medium or format for the purpose of future preservation and accessibility. I understand that the thesis deposited in GRO and EThOS will be accessible to a wide variety of people and institutions via the Internet, through the medium of the Internet. Files will also be available to automated agents, and may be searched and copied by text mining and plagiarism detection software. I understand that once the thesis is deposited, a citation to the thesis will always remain visible. Removal of the digital version of the thesis can be made after discussion with GRO, who shall make best efforts to ensure removal of the thesis from any third party with whom GRO has an agreement. I understand that neither Goldsmiths nor the British Library have any obligation to take legal action on behalf of myself, or other rights holders, in the event of infringement of intellectual property rights, breach of contract or of any other right, in the thesis. Theodoros Rakopoulos 27 June 2012 2 Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to all those Sicilians who shared their lives with me for so much time in the context of my ethnographic fieldwork. I hope the narratives in this thesis do justice to their lives. I would also like to thank the members of the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College who commented on my work: particularly my first supervisor, Dr Victoria Goddard, and my second supervisor, Dr David Graeber. Victoria’s work ethos, regional expertise and wider theoretical knowledge pointed me in the right directions and provided rigorous insights in terms of the organisation of this project, as well as regarding my intellectual formation as an anthropologist; her kindness, moreover, framed for me what it meant to have a mentor to look up to. She has left a lasting imprint on this thesis and also on my mind; I am immensely grateful for her help. David’s genial ideas and support guided me after fieldwork and contributed much spirit to the making of this thesis; huge credit goes to him too, for the daring, creative commentary and overall inspiration that he instigated in my work (his prompt, ‘go for the ambitious thought’ will always stay with me). Throughout my PhD, other staff members helped out with ideas and encouragement. I wish to express my deepest thanks to Massimiliano Mollona whose help in the first two years of this project was huge, as he directed my research with commitment; Mao helped me to get involved with the project in the first place and I shall never forget his insight. Also, Sophie Day and Catherine Alexander read and commented on parts of the manuscript: many thanks go to both. Goldsmiths has been a creative place to work and made this intellectual journey worthwhile. Part of this experience was to share ideas with other PhD students. A number of colleagues in Goldsmiths Anthropology and related disciplines, providing a vivid ground for discussion, rendered the writing up process more stimulating and helped with creative 3 debate (some also with coffee and drinks). My thanks go to Olivia Swift, Eeva Kesküla, Sarah O’Neill, Luna Glucksberg, Liz Saleh, Veronica Barassi, Tim Martindale, Martin Fotta, Jessie Sklair, Nandera Mhando, Maka Suarez and Patricia Matos. Special thanks to my sociologist friend Francisco Calafate, whose whimsical humour kept me going. Thanks also go to Anthropology students from other departments, who shared their insights with me: Michael Hoffman, Dimitra Kofti, and Dina Makram. I am grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for funding the fieldwork of this research (and thus for uplifting my spirits), to the Wingate Scholarships for their generous funding of part of the writing-up process, to the Royal Anthropological Institute for the support offered through the Sutasoma award and to Goldsmiths Anthropology Department for the two bursaries towards fees. I should also add Greece’s National Centre for Books’ (EKEBI) fellowship, which implicitly reminded me how right Geertz was in arguing that ethnography can be a literary genre. Without all the above funding, this research would have been impossible. I should also express my gratitude to those people I hold dearest, who barely know anything about the discipline but nevertheless were there in spirit to support my researh process with intellectual rigour and sentimental warmth: first and foremost Angelos and Salomi, who gave me the ζην, as well as a number of friends, who gave me the ευ ζην: Alexandros, Stergios, Antonis and Giorgos amongst them. Kosta, I’m so deeply sorry you are far away and unable to read this. While this thesis was being written, Europe was undergoing radical transformations. The rhetoric of PIIGS – literally, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain – but an anagram that speaks contempt, ‘junk countries’, ‘the idle South’ and similar essentialisations have set off a range of emotional reactions in me that have often hindered the writing process. In the end, developments indicate that there seems to be an understanding that the ‘debt’ crisis, felt so dearly in my native Greece, the guinea-pig of the 4 austerity experiment, can hopefully spark different ways to think about ‘the economy’. This conviction has strengthened the writing of this thesis and my sense that there is more to ‘the economy’ than numbers on screens. In this light, the thesis is dedicated to those Greeks who resist a seemingly never-ending crisis and, politically struggling against it, offer an alternative perspective – and hope – for Europeans at large. 5 Abstract This thesis explores the social, political and economic relations constituted in relation to agrarian cooperatives that work land confiscated by the state from mafiosi owners in the Alto Belice valley, Sicily. It examines access to resources (work and land), and the cooperatives’ division of labour, paying attention to the material changes that the cooperatives (considered in the context of the anti-mafia movement) have brought to people’s lives, as well as the tensions regarding social, labour and property relations that emerged from these changes. The thesis argues that the state’s intervention entailed the promotion of values (‘legality’) and relationships antithetical to those that obtained locally, such as kinship obligations and local reciprocities, as continuities between local workers’ moralities, and practices with mafia codes are seen as contradicting the state ideology of radical change. These tensions are explored in the specificities of the cooperatives’ division of labour, which, informed by class, relatedness and locality, pose obstacles to the development of horizontal, equal work relationships. In this context, the thesis explores the contradictions and unintended consequences of the state policy of ‘antimafia transformation’, creating fissures between the cooperatives’ administrators, the local workforce and the wider community. The thesis provides an ethnographic account of a political project of change that challenged the complex phenomenon of the mafia by radically shifting the conditions of access to material resources. The cooperative project provides alternative values and means of livelihood to those associated with mafia dominance in the area, but largely fails to address the local social arrangements within which the project unfolds. The thesis also addresses debates about horizontal relations in cooperatives, looking at how access to resources (land, labour, reputation) is organised across different moral claims and evaluations, articulated within and outside the cooperatives’ framework. 6 Table of Contents DECLARATION ............................................................................................................ 2 Acknowledgments ..........................................................................................................