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Where Saints Show Respect: Mafia, Modernity, and Rituals of Power

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Volume 14

New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations

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Where Saints Show Respect

Mafia, Modernity, and Rituals of Power

Berardino Palumbo

Foreword by Michael Herzfeld
Afterword by Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider

280 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-83695-336-4 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (February 2026)

eISBN 978-1-83695-337-1 eBook Not Yet Published


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Reviews

“This is a book by a scholar enormously well-read in anthropological thought, capable of achieving a critical distance from normative readings that other disciplines have afforded the mafia by adopting an ethnographic approach to the utmost. Thanks to this Palumbian anthropology, we come to a profound understanding of the specific influences of the mafia on religion.” • Giovanni Pizza, ANUAC 9 (2) (2020): 183-185.

Description

Where Saints Show Respect reveals the penetration of mafia values in Sicilian society. Instead of focusing on sensational criminality, this study considers rituals through which local society learns deep respect – sometimes fearful, but often playful or pious – for those values and their enforcers. State and Church misconstrue these values as vestiges of a society morally damned and left behind in a pagan past. This study draws on three decades of ethnographic research to explore a strikingly different Sicily from the self-congratulatory version of government and religious leaders, where a seemingly obscure set of rural practices offers a critical perspective on modernity itself.

Berardino Palumbo is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Messina. In addition to co-editing two series of anthropological monographs, he is the author of several books and articles on the anthropology of Italy, and Sicily in particular.

Subject: Political and Economic AnthropologySociologyAnthropology of Religion
Area: Southern Europe


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