Mafia Emergence: What Kind of State?

JANE SCHNEIDER is professor emeritus in anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the co-editor with Annette B. Weiner for Cloth and Human Experience (1987) and the author of several essays on cloth and clothing. Her anthropological field research has been in Sicily and has led to three books, co-authored with Peter Schneider: Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (1976); Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily (1996); and Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo (2003). In 1998, she edited Italy’s Southern Question; Orientalism in One Country. She and Peter Schneider recently published a chapter in the Annual Review of Anthropology titled “The Anthropology of Crime and Criminalization.”