This study seeks to account for the rural mafia in western Sicily in the 19th & 20th centuries through a detailed examination of the overall social networks of mafiosi of a particular peasant community formed with other individuals.

Refocusing the study of village politics and the mafia by extending rational choice institutionalism to Italian history and politics, Sabetti shows what can happen when those acting for the state regard ordinary people as passive voices in the game of life."--BOOK JACKET.

From Sicily to Elizabeth Street analyzes the relationship of environment to social behavior. It revises our understanding of the Italian-American family and challenges existing notions of the Italian immigrant experience by comparing everyday family and social life in the agrotowns of Sicily to life in a tenement neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century. Moving historical understanding beyond such labels as "uprooted" and "huddled masses," the book depicts the immigrant experience from the perspective of the immigrants themselves. It begins with a uniquely detailed description of the Sicilian backgrounds and moves on to recreate Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan, a neighborhood inhabited by some 8,200 Italians. The author shows how the tightly knit conjugal family became less important in New York than in Sicily, while a wider association of kin groups became crucial to community life. Immigrants, who were mostly young people, began to rely more on their related peers for jobs and social activities and less on parents who remained behind. Interpreting their lives in America, immigrants abandoned some Sicilian ideals, while other customs, though Sicilian in origin, assumed new and distinctive forms as this first generation initiated the process of becoming Italian-American.

This study analyzes the folkloric genres that comprise the repertoire of the marionette theater in Sicily. Here, epic, farce, saints' lives, bandits' lives, fairytales, Christian myth, and city legend offer the vehicles by which puppeteers comment upon, critique--perhaps even negotiate--the relationships among the major classes of Sicilian society: the aristocracy, the people, the clergy and the Mafia. The lynchpin of the repertoire is the Carolingian Cycle and, in particular, a contemporary version of The Song of Roland known in Sicily as The Death of the Paladins, a text which illustrates the means by which the Carolingian heroes--Charlemagne, Roland, Renaud, Ganelon, and Angelica--augment saints, bandits, Biblical figures and Sicilian folk heroes to provide the marionette theater its rhetorical function: the articulation and dissemination of the tools of Sicilian identity.

Intended for the professional academic and graduate student, this book is the first to utilize the methodology of a oeNew Streama legal scholarship in an extended critical a oeexegesisa of Hugo Grotiusa (TM) "De Indis" (c.1604-6). "De Indis" is predicated upon a two-fold discursive strategy: (i) investing a oeprivatea Trading Companies with a oepublica international legal personality, and (ii) collapsing the distinction between a oeprivatea and a oepublica warfare. Governing the operation of textual interpretation is "De Indis"a (TM) status as a republican treatise juridically legitimating an early modern Trans-National corporation (the VOC) that served as an agent of a a oeprimitivea system of global governance, the early Capitalist World-Economy. The application of New Stream scholarship reveals that the republican signature of "De Indis" consists of a discursive a oemicro-oscillationa between the a oethicka ontology of Late Scholasticism (a oeUtopiaa ) and the a oethina ontology of Civic Humanism (a oeApologya ) wholly appropriate to the governance requirements of the embryonic Modern World-System.

The Italian-American mafia has its roots in a mysterious and powerful criminal network in Sicily. While the mythology of the mafia has been widely celebrated in American culture, the true origins of its rituals, laws, and methods have never actually been revealed. John Dickie uses startling new research to expose the secrets of the Sicilian mafia, providing a fascinating account that is more violent, frightening, and darkly comic than anything conceived in popular movies and novels. How did the Sicilian mafia begin? How did it achieve its powerful grip in Italy and America? How does it operate today? From the mafia's origins in the 1860s to its current tense relationship with the Berlusconi government, Cosa Nostra takes us to the inner sanctum where few have dared to go before. This is an important work of history and a revelation for anyone who ever wondered what it means to be "made" in the mob.