Study of Civil Society and Criminal Justice in Palermo, Italy

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9902865SchneiderThis project involves the final fieldwork for a long term study of the changing relationship between the Mafia and antimafia forces in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. The overall project has tracked the criminal justice crackdown on the Mafia, and the antimafia citizens' social movement to change the ways Palermo citizens relate to each other in social settings. The investigators, two cultural anthropologists, will re-interview members of a set of 30 working class families residing in Palermo's poor neighborhoods, conduct follow up interviews with members of the criminal justice system, and conduct participant observation in local churches and trade unions. The propositions to be tested are that the antimafia movement leaders, who tend to belong to the educated middle classes, have lost some support from working class citizens because of the loss of working class jobs in construction resulting from the judicial crackdown on the Mafia's activities, which included construction. The tension between on the one hand the citizens' interest in fostering civil society, political transparency, non-violence, gender equality and the rule of law, and on the other hand the working class families' need for paying jobs and the relation of these jobs to Mafia patronage, will be investigated by the researchers. The general lesson of this research is that civil society rhetoric often may ignore connections between criminal elements and neo-liberal economic development policies and projects, as well as ignore the general issue of the need for redistributive measures on the part of states.