Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Opposition is obviously central to any study on collective action.
Trine Mygind Korsby:People take different positions all the time about how they stand in relation to these entities or assemblages that the mafia or criminal groups can be.
Deborah Puccio-Den:Anti mafia judges are pretty convinced that the mafia justice is more satisfying for people.
Christina Jerne:Hello, listener. This is a podcast about economic possibility. It's about collective actions that contrast, prevent and oppose harmful economies from proliferating in Italy. I'm Christina Jerne and I'm a scholar, translator and associate professor in experience economy at Aarhus University in Denmark. And I'm really lucky to be joined here today about this conversation about my book Opposition by Imitation by two wonderful scholars, Trina Cosby and Deborah Puccoden.
Deborah Puccio-Den:Hello, thank you, Christina, for inviting me. I'm very excited to be in conversation with you today around this amazing book. My name is Deborah Aputuredene, I am an anthropologist, I am a research professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research affiliated with the Center of Studies on Politics, Research and Analysis of the USS in Paris, and my research focused on the relationship between the mafia and the state, with an interest on legal issues and how law deals with silence, mafia silence being the paradigmatic example. So our common point I think is this space between state and the mafia, between economics and the politics. I'm very happy to have the opportunity to discuss more about these important and crucial points.
Trine Mygind Korsby:Yes, thank you so much also from me, Christina, for inviting me today. I'm really happy and honored to be in conversation with both you and Deborah about your wonderful and super interesting book. My name is Trine Kossbug. I am an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. And currently, I'm also a Marie Curie Fellow at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Trine Mygind Korsby:I'm also an anthropologist. And for the past several years, I've worked with the research themes of human trafficking and sex work and sex work facilitation and management, also known as pimping, and different kinds of transnational crime and different criminal livelihoods. So I've done field work primarily in Eastern Romania, but also in Italy and in prisons in Portugal. And I'm just super excited to be here to have this conversation with you both, and I've really been looking forward to it.
Christina Jerne:Excellent. Well, I'm the one who's most grateful that you've both accepted to read and engage with my work and share it with listeners from all over the world. So this book started in a supermarket, really. I was browsing the shelves for a package of pasta. I was struck by one particular brand that said that the pasta was mafia free.
Christina Jerne:Now, I had already encountered gluten free pasta and vegan pasta and pasta that was fair trade, but mafia free pasta. What did that mean? That encounter really started my interest in this whole project. So intrigued by this object, I started to dig into this brand. And I soon found out that not only was this brand, but that there were hundreds really of goods and things and services even that were being produced in opposition to the mafia.
Christina Jerne:And there was a whole industry of cooperatives, critical marketing agents, tour operators, social enterprises, volunteering initiatives that operate against mafias. And I also found out that this is actually a very old struggle. I mean, the opposition against the mafias can be traced back to the late nineteenth century in Italy, where indeed it is thought that the mafia has its origins. People have opposed this phenomenon or this type of political enterprise, I guess you might call it through all kinds of ways, protests, collective petitions, hunger strikes, laws, wars, trade union initiatives. But in the past two decades or so, this collective action has taken a more markedly commercial or economic term.
Christina Jerne:And this is really what I find fascinating and what part of what this book is about. But what does it mean to oppose mafia today? So as Deborah's wonderful book, Mafia Craft and Ethnography of Deadly Silence really beautifully illustrates. In different phases of history, Mafia itself manifests in the terms through which it is uttered and especially not uttered. So Mafia means and has meant a very different array of things to those who oppose it today.
Christina Jerne:Mafia is not uniquely a group of criminals. So when you hear the term mafia, you might think of a specific branch of Cosanostra or a bunch of mobsters connected to a specific organization. That's really not only what is at play here. Mafia in the way it's articulated in this collective struggle, it's a much, much broader phenomenon. It includes, for example, corruption, gang mastering, but also problematic EU migration policies that lead to exploitative labor relations.
Christina Jerne:It can mean pollution. The law itself sometimes has been termed as mafia. So essentially, I think to this collective action, mafia means harm, harmful economy, which includes capitalism, it includes clientelism, patronage, misuse of state funds, misuse of European funds, even patriarchy. So I think that's what makes these collective actions interesting because they can be of inspiration to other activists in different parts of the world who are against similar kinds of injustices, which perhaps might not be called mafia at all, but might come under another name. So although they're violent, mafia type enterprises in fact really offer jobs and protection in fact.
Christina Jerne:And as Humberto Santino really underlined, their entrepreneurial talent, I think lies precisely in their ability to create the necessity for these services or to create the illusion that you need protection. And here activists have really realized that mafia is really convenient for many people. And I think one quote from one of my absolute favorite interlocutors really struck me in that regard. And we were in this really dilapidated neighborhood in Palermo and he's an activist, a social worker. And he was telling me that when he goes to these neighborhoods and talks, especially to young children, He says, I can't talk to them about Falcone and Borcellino.
Christina Jerne:But Falcone and Borcellino are two magistrates who have had an enormous success at halting Cosanostra's power in the 1990s and are one of the key heroes in the anti mafia movement. And he said, I can't go to these neighborhoods and talk to them about the law and its successes. I mean, they don't care about the law, they're packing drugs, their father's in prison, their mother's a sex worker. What do they care about the law? We have to show them that anti mafia is convenient.
Christina Jerne:So all of these kinds of enterprises and entrepreneurial activities are really about trying to provide jobs for these people to improve their livelihoods. So essentially they're competing for social consensus, right? So this is where the analytical focus of the book comes from. Said, what kind of a collective action is this? They're copying the mafia.
Christina Jerne:And I thought that's really counterintuitive.
Deborah Puccio-Den:It is so interesting, the way you reframe this issue of anti mafia very, very challenging way. We share minimalistic definition of the mafia, non essentialistic vision of politics that include the vision of the Mafia and of the Anti Mafia as hybrid. I was interested in the way you use this notion of mimesis that resonate a lot for me, because I used in mafia craft another notion that is isomorphism, showing the similarity of form between mafia justice I mean the form of justice that is delivered, administrated by the Mafia and that is convenient for people and the justice and anti Mafia justice. There is similarity of forms that make the mafia justice so convenient for people because it is another form of justice. But I find in your concept of mimesis even more interested than in the concept of isomorphism that is related to DiMaggio's old article because of the dynamic dimension of the concept of mimesis that focused not on the form but on the action.
Deborah Puccio-Den:This idea to reflect on collective action it's so interesting because allowed us to reflect to agency and various sources and metrics of the action that are in some instances like mafia or anti mafia very obscure. This is why we need a mirror to use the concept of hybrid that also is very useful in mafia craft. Mimecis, instead of isomorphism, I think that is more interesting and useful, and I will begin to use it in the future of my research on the Sicilian mafia.
Christina Jerne:Okay. Well, thanks, Deborah. That was a great point. I am happy that you managed to see that my intention with opposition or with mimesis, my use of mimesis is not about content, but is a movement in itself. That's how the book is really structured around different types of mimesis and that is meaning.
Christina Jerne:So how meanings are rearticulated dominant forms of Mafia signification are rearticulated in forms of collective action, structures that enforce mafia power. And this can be anything from how land, for example, is administered and activists, and this is something I explore in the third activists enter terrains that are left unmonitored and are apt for the proliferation of, for example, digging of ditches to get rid of polluted urban and industrial waste. So activists have reclaimed these spaces and really reconfigured land itself and created livelihoods for say, people who are prone to selling drugs, for example, or people who deny perhaps, or are unaware of the existence of these kinds of economies on their territories. And the last chapter is about the rearticulation of desire and emotion, another kind of mimesis, because mafias are really excellent manipulators of emotions. And activists have realized this and have said, Hey, what if we use the same tools, the master's tools, as Audre Lorde would say, to orient people's bodies away from mafia, to make them angry at mafia, to make them repel mafia, to desire anti mafia, or to desire different kinds of economies.
Christina Jerne:So, I mean, in this, they use incredible spatial design. They integrate anti extortion consumer unions that allow tourists to travel through the city and see and only consume or support economies that refuse to pay extortion money. This is just one example. So I guess my intent is to show moments of possibility and success in these entrepreneurial strategies and to think about what is it that these types of economic strategy or these kinds of collection actions make possible and how can this be of use everywhere? So really to highlight the invisible or less visible parts of the way we usually talk about economy, which is GDP and formal trade.
Christina Jerne:But there's all kinds of incredibly diverse ways of doing economy in the world as the diverse economy tradition that I'm drawing on in this book, particularly the work of JK Gibson Graham has made apparent in the last many years.
Deborah Puccio-Den:I think that what is really important, and I'm not sure that is part of our common knowledge about the mafia, it is not pathology of the politics or of the economics, that is sort of physiology. I define the mafia as a modality of political action. I mean it is not everything, everywhere, every kind of action, but it is not a pathological. Your book helps to think about how the mafia was defined that is a crucial question for mafia craft that study the link between mafia and its craft. When you approach this very important thing you also underline that we cannot consider the Mafia as an anti legal but as a paralegal.
Deborah Puccio-Den:I think that it is very important to underline this point because I'm not sure that it is so widespread conceptualization of the mafia and that has a lot of consequences for our way to conduct field work, to describe collective action, to describe political action and economics. One of the consequences is also that you don't consider economic as another sphere of separated and hierarchized from the politics. It's really a very challenging and difficult way, I think, to read and describe the social and political and economic reality. You must focus on all the small interactions between all this level that are also level of analysis. I would like to learn more about the difficulty of this task.
Christina Jerne:Thanks so much, Deborah. That's a really great reading of I'm happy that came through. I really took inspiration from two points, Latour's sociology. So, you know, the humbleness of the position of saying, well, if the world isn't neatly separated in economy and politics, law, not law, mafia, anti mafia, then how do we approach this messiness or these piles of everything as I've called them? That's no easy task.
Christina Jerne:But then I think the task there becomes, if we want to make visible collective actions that matter or collective actions that make a difference to a territory, then what we ally ourselves to as researchers then becomes a political and ethical choice and not a question of representing the world in its entirety or a matter of verisimilitude or truth, but it becomes politics of possibility in itself of illustrating like, hey, you know what, these kinds of criminal enterprises, they operate across the EU and there's people in terrible living conditions or terrible neighborhoods that are interlinked in all these kinds of ways. And then there's the bureaucrat, that's the hybridity of the mafia form. So how do you interrupt that? Well, then you have to be equally creative, which is something I've learned from these activists. They, you know, work on all kinds of scales.
Trine Mygind Korsby:I just wanted to comment on what you're both saying. One of the things that the three of us share in our research is that experience of doing research on themes that are very contested, that are like very strongly discussed politically, that people have very strong moral emotions about, that people have a lot of feelings about. You know, when you mention you do research on mafia, anti mafia, or human trafficking, as in my case, people have a lot of responses and a lot of reactions to it. There are some challenges with that when you do that kind of research. But I think what is really great is also how you bring forth in the book.
Trine Mygind Korsby:And you've also explained it now, this, like the multitude of the meanings of mafia, like all of the things that it can mean. Connected to that is something that I'm also very interested in is like the double sidedness of the effects of these kinds of groups in the local environment. That it's so easy for people who hear about these things maybe in the media or see a movie about it to have like these very like black and white notions of what this is, like what is good and what is bad. And there are some bad guys and there are some good guys. And it's just very neat and all of that.
Trine Mygind Korsby:And I think those of us who actually engage as researchers in these fields, we very quickly realize the messiness of it, all the different effects of these kinds of enterprise that points in so many directions in literally in people's everyday life. And for me, it opens up a lot of thoughts about how we then think about morality, because then it's like, there are all these ideological ideas about good and bad and right and wrong. And then there are the practices on the ground. And then there is what people actually do and what people actually need. And that whole messiness of this.
Trine Mygind Korsby:And often journalists and, you know, in movies and stuff like that, they don't want those nuances because it's better to have a headline article that says something that's very square. And I just really appreciate bringing forth this kind of messiness in the kind of research all three of us do. And I was just curious to just hear a little bit more about your thoughts about, I mean, double sidedness doesn't even cover it. That's a bad word because that's a binary too. But just like the whole box of like whatever it can be, that points people in so many directions.
Christina Jerne:Thanks, Srine. That's a great question and something we've also discussed in other occasions. But yes, I mean, obviously here, one of the main things I had to grapple with was the law. And Deborah also pointed out a lot of the anti mafia struggle is a struggle about enforcing the rule of law in some ways. So, I mean, obviously I followed this and I studied it, but then I could see that in a lot of practical manifestations, activists are really frustrated with the law as well.
Christina Jerne:And not just the content of the law, but the actual bureaucratic aspects of the law, all of the things that the law hinders. So I started to really question whether this binary was even useful to work with. And I really want to thank Seren Ozilkuk for pushing me in this direction. It was actually her that suggested the term paralegal for me. I was really working my way to find, you know, the Mafia uses the law to its own advantage and has used all of these infrastructures of power to manipulate or to create social control.
Christina Jerne:But at the same time, it is against the rule of law. So it's this weird in betweenness. And obviously then if you want to oppose it and win or try to do so, you can't then follow a binary because the mafia is not binary. The mafia is incredibly hybrid. And so activists as well, they break the law.
Christina Jerne:They squat places because the bureaucracy is so slow in order to give people housing. They do all kinds of interesting things. But I think there's a real shyness in addressing the issue of the law, because admitting that the law is imperfect puts one in a really, really vulnerable moral position. If that is not our guiding principle, that's what enlightenment thinking and political theory and every state building project has been about, establishing the rule of law. So what if we don't have that?
Christina Jerne:Where is our morality then? The law is also, and again, I go back to this quote by this activist who said, the law is irrelevant here. The law is a class privilege, in fact, for many people. The law is not possible everywhere. So then where do we go?
Christina Jerne:And then, that's a question of the concrete places and settings. And at least that's for me, how I look at it, what kind of ethics is at play here? And that's where I'm really inspired by the work of feminist political economists. And their ethic is really about care and care for a community, which includes non human beings as well, and others. But what about you?
Christina Jerne:How do you deal with these kinds of ambiguous moralities in your field? I'm curious.
Deborah Puccio-Den:I think that here lies the strength of mafia justice. It's really more effective than justice in a liberal state, and that someone like Giorgio Falcone and other anti mafia judges are pretty convinced that the mafia justice is more satisfying for people. It is a particular law, everyone can go and see mafioso and ask for a solution, particular solution for a particular problem. And that's not possible with bureaucratic law that is quite universal. I think that the mafia action lies in this capacity much more extended sphere of action that is not only illegal, it is also real effective because it is closer to everyday problems.
Deborah Puccio-Den:And I can tell it, I can say it also as a Sicilian, as a citizen of Palermo, you are also Italian. It could be interesting to speak about this position as outsider, insider, as Italian but not living every day in Italy. This position that is also my position as a researcher in France but born in Palermo, it's a very interesting position to think about and its effect in your research and fieldwork of conducting.
Trine Mygind Korsby:Well, yeah, I'm also thinking about in kind of like building on what you just said, Deborah, about different positions that what you asked before, Christina, also about how Deborah and I see these things in our work. I think that if I am to compare it to my own work, there are so many different positions that people also take, like our informants. It's not necessarily, I mean, I don't work with the mafia, as you know, but it's not necessarily just mafia or anti mafia, or in my case, like being part of or supporting a criminal group or not supporting it. The whole point is that there's so many positions to take there and there's so many expectations and so many social ties and commitments that people have. That mean that people take different positions all the time about how they stand in relation to these kinds of entities or assemblages or whatever that the mafia or criminal groups can be.
Trine Mygind Korsby:That at least I've seen that very much in my work in the Romanian communities, that on the one hand, that can be negation of that, you know, that this kind of stuff, these criminal activities are going on, but at the same time, also a huge acceptance of them because they bring in money and they bring in activity to an area that might be struggling with unemployment and poverty and stuff like this. So there are all the positive aspects or like the generative growth related aspects of this kind of activity. So people position themselves, also people not directly related into these activities, position themselves very differently all the time. And I think that multitude of positions is like super, super interesting to look at as an ethnographer and bring forward.
Christina Jerne:No, yeah, absolutely. There are so many different ways of relating to crime and criminalization. I always try to find my own position in the field and I guess my own interest in exploring these economies or this movement. Yes, it began with a package of pasta, but it also began with my own history of being a Sicilian who had to leave, because I felt that my island was unfair. It didn't provide many job opportunities.
Christina Jerne:It was difficult as a young woman. I was raised by my mother mainly, and I'm the eldest of four. And she really struggled so much to make ends meet and the livelihood strategies she had were also ambiguous. Formal employment was not always a possibility. I guess when I left, I never left.
Christina Jerne:And I always hoped that things could change. And this project is also to tell the story of the things that are changing and the things that are possible. Because sometimes when I return or I'm in conversation with people from this very particular and difficult island in the Mediterranean, I hear, well, you left, things are easy for you. You don't really know how hard it is to live here. Like it's easy for you to say that things are good and changing here.
Christina Jerne:And they tell this story about there not being a possibility or the leopard, everything changes so that nothing changes. There's this self image as well of this underdeveloped place or a different story of, yeah, well, you're not really one of us. So you just don't really understand. I mean, this isn't to talk about my own trajectory into this, but it's more, I think a question of, where do we find our ethics and what kinds of stories we ally ourselves with as researchers when we are, I mean, which is my position at least to talk about or to enforce really, because language and writing is also an instrument to enforce different possibilities for a place.
Deborah Puccio-Den:But I think that your work is much more that anti mafia committed woman work. You really open new avenues for thinking about the mafia and the anti mafia in a manner that an anti mafia intellectual committed activist cannot do. And this is also for this position of relative distance you have with your fieldwork. Your framing of the issue of the mafia and anti mafia is really theoretically relevant, not only politically or socially committed. Mafia and anti mafia issues are also threatened by ideologization, and that's always a risk working on the mafia because ideologization is also a mafia tactic.
Deborah Puccio-Den:It is a little bit like a paradox to ideologize in anti mafia because it's the same movement and the same skill that the Mafia use for governing. I define the Mafia as a cognitive act shaped by silence. One of the commentators of Mafia craft, Anat Rosenberg, defined the Mafia action as unknowing, an active rejection of knowledge and ideologization can be an active rejection of knowledge. So we have to make a distinction between commitment and idealogization. I really would like to know how do you deal with that because it's so difficult, and I try every day to be on the right stance, being committed without ideologize my issues on the Mafia.
Christina Jerne:Yeah, well, thanks. That's a great and difficult question. I don't know if I managed to do that. But that's something I agree with that is important. And I mean, it's just also important beyond mafia in general, in a time where we're really seeing a return of ideology in many ugly forms, familiar, but ugly forms.
Christina Jerne:How do you support or how do you enter this kind of field? How can you be in opposition to these things without falling into the same trap? How do we find an ethics or how do we find a politics that is not bound to ideology? Or it's not that there's not limited to ideology in that I'm quite inspired by the work of Jean Luc Nancy and Irias Marion Young, who talk about community in a way that is really non essentialist. So it's not about a community of beings that share a durable substance or a particular idea, but it's simply the act of trying to have empathy with the other and trying to relate with the other.
Christina Jerne:And also, you know, realizing one's own finitude and one's own limit that we find in community. So I think community for me is really essential in that. And then again, driven by process theory. So I'm really interested in looking at the processes that allow for these types of communities that are non essentialist, ideological to be formed. I look at that in different registers.
Christina Jerne:So that can be effective, it can be more material, it can be more about meaning, but essentially it's people who are different that come together and essentially enhance life in some way. I think life is also very essential. Better life, life that is not conditioned by violence of different kinds.
Deborah Puccio-Den:Yeah, but this is the Anti Mafia project. I think that your project is also that, but is also to understand and describe the anti mafia, the relationships between economics and politics, and a lot of other important issues for theory of politics and for theory of economics. My feeling when I read your book: Your project is an intellectual knowledge of a very challenging topic.
Trine Mygind Korsby:I'm also thinking about like one of the things that I really found inspiring in your book, Christina, is it's a very theoretically nuanced book. I really think that if we try to also zoom out a little bit, I think there's so much really strong theoretical thinking about how we can understand then the concept of opposition. Like what is opposition even? Both based on the work that you've done and like theoretically, but also what does that even mean? Like when and how does it create and produce something?
Trine Mygind Korsby:And then when and how does it destroy something? What actually happens when we talk about it that way? What does that mean also methodologically for us, like as a methodological ethnographic strategy to look at and studying something via the opposition like you do in your book. What do we then see and what don't we see? Because that also means that there are some things about the mafia in this case, or what it is that we're studying that we're not seeing.
Trine Mygind Korsby:I would love to hear some of your thoughts, both about that kind of more theoretical part about how we can understand opposition as a concept, but also as a methodological strategy.
Christina Jerne:Right. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. Well, opposition is something that is obviously central to any study on collective action, because it's all about being against something that is harmful, against something that is perceived injust.
Christina Jerne:But I think here I found a lot of inspiration in the work of Gabriel Tad, the sociology of Gabriel Tad, whose universe, sociological universe centers around moments of mimesis, opposition, imitation and then adaptation. Adaptation. So for him, I guess, social life, all actually even universal life, he goes beyond people even, he's really an interesting thinker, is centred around these moments of opposition adaptation and imitation. And so crime is like any other social phenomenon, something that is repetitive, imitative action, which then means the criminal is not antisocial, is not as is often or has been often theorized is not criminal because there's a lack of sociality, but actually the criminal is hyper social. There's an excess.
Christina Jerne:What is more telling about the state of The US than the opioid crisis? What is more telling about Sweden than how full its prisons are of ethnic minority gangsters? Crime is an excess of social order. So then anti criminal culture is on the same social field. It's fighting crime must not be thought of something as parallel to criminal culture.
Christina Jerne:You can't just deport people or put them behind bars. You have to immerse yourself in the reasons, the causes of that same social field. So that's where my real theoretical inspiration comes from. So then these collective actions, and this is not only specific to criminal collective actions, but I think immersing yourself in or realizing that you too are an agent in producing a specific culture, if you're an activist, right? And recognizing the individual agency that people have in reproducing a certain social order is the powerful strategy here.
Christina Jerne:Methodologically for me, has meant really, I mean, I started out this project following an organization. I started out this project aligning myself to an organization that is called Libera, which is the largest umbrella organization that puts, that coagulates a lot of tiny enterprises underneath it. And then, in the process of studying this, I thought, what is more interesting to this struggle to me is not the organization, but the organizing. Then I started to focus on, okay, then what are the moments here of mimesis, of imitation that allow for new orders to be sustained? And I think sustainability in the sense of duration in time has been one of my indicators of success.
Christina Jerne:Is this working? Or the things that I tried to highlight in this book, because there's tons of things that I obviously haven't highlighted, the difficulties, the struggles that people go through to keep these enterprises running have been what kinds of new orders are emerging. And one example, a simple example is the anti extortion movement in Palermo. I mean, it started out as, you know, from a sticker that people started putting around because they were tired of having to put protection money in their budget when they were opening a business. Slowly this, you know, gained momentum and then it became a brand that aggregated tons of other entrepreneurs that didn't want to pay extortion.
Christina Jerne:And then it became a tourist enterprise that brings other people in from all over the world. So it's growing and it's creating new social worlds. So I guess the duration, which is, you know, a really fundamental theoretical concept in Deleuze and Guatari, which I'm also inspired by in assemblage thinking, that's one of my methodological tools. I hadn't really thought about it, actually. So thanks for making me reflect on that.
Deborah Puccio-Den:That generates a feedback action on the Mafia also, because it is not only the memesis is a process that can be borrowed by the Mafia, unfortunately even after a Diopizo or all the laws against Racket and Pizo that changed the quality of the action, changed the status of the person who pay this tax that is not considered as a victim but as an accomplice of the mafia. Now a lot of changes occurred but still I think the majority of people who pay the pizza to the mafia and ask for paying the pizza to the mafia. We have police and magistrates working on this special field gathered evidence for that. That's also because the mafia Cosa Nostra found the way to justify this tax, telling that is just to pay lawyers for people who are in prison. This is not only a way to destroy society but it pretend to be a way to create new links in society.
Deborah Puccio-Den:So all really messy, maybe our work is to find tools and skills and the lucidity to describe all of these messy words that are in mirror and that are mimicking one another and I think that you succeeded in this task with a very balanced way to conduct fieldwork and to describe social reality.
Trine Mygind Korsby:Yeah, I really agree with that. I think that, I mean, I really recommend people who read this book. It's a really, really great piece of work. And I think that it's very unique the way you like the style of the book and the way you bring into play your ethnography. Just one example that really stood out to me was this ethnographic example you have about working on the land and like the agriculture part.
Trine Mygind Korsby:You have on the one hand, you have just some amazing quotes in that chapter, but it's like this work on the clean, but messy anti mafia land versus the dirty, but orderly mafia land. Like that whole kind of that analysis and that point about showing how this goes into like the land that we all walk on and how these politics and ideologies are seeping in there as well. I thought that was really, really brilliant. And yeah, just like a really great example of how this looks in everyday life.
Deborah Puccio-Den:Yes, I may say that there are so many books on the mafia and anti mafia, but I underline this term of unique book. I mean it is not a book like one of the millions book on the mafia and anti mafia published every year. I really suggest to read it.
Christina Jerne:I have no more words, I think. I think I'm ready to end there. I'm really overwhelmed by all your compliments and very touched by this conversation. Thank you.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Opposition by The Economics of Italian Anti Mafia Activism by Christina Jerne is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.