"The criminalization ritual fraternity traverses current writing on crime and criminalization, because it foregrounds not marginalization but a political form of fraternity – that the criminalizing state shares with the targeted social formations (some of which powerful). In 1982, Italy criminalized two kinds of associations: mafia-type organizations and secretive associations. Subsequent investigations and trials foregrounded the role of ritual brotherhood in the political imaginary of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and Freemasonry, particularly the assumption that this particular kinship term can oblige persons’ action. I begin by examining the tensions within current public and official anti-mafia perspectives on the Mafia, Freemasonry, and the relationship between them. I then recount how such tensions shaped the course of a late-80s case involving mafiosi’s membership in Freemasons’ lodges in Southwestern Sicily. I conclude by examining how that case’s ongoing ramifications motivate reconsideration of how the state represses some forms and scales of ritual fraternity while permitting, condoning, or ignoring others. By reconsidering ongoing criminalization of ritual fraternity through concepts from historical anthropology of kinship, we may appreciate the conflictual dynamics through which states claim a monopoly over the legitimation of the use of violence, whether its officials, or others, expend it."

Naor Ben-Yehoyada is Assistant Professor of anthropology at Columbia University and is the author of The Mediterranean Incarnate: Transnational Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago Press, 2017). His work examines unauthorized migration, criminalization, the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean.