Abstract

While the past years have witnessed an explosion of cultural studies in sociology, the sociological literature on the Sicilian mafia has shifted towards non-cultural kinds of explanation and conceptualizations. This shift was justified because of the many difficulties of the once mainstream normative, value-based conception of culture, but is no longer justifiable with the new conceptions of culture, agency and structure which have developed in the last years in the fields of the sociology of culture, historical sociology and sociology of organization. Contrary to most sociological interpretations, which sees in the mafia a kind of economic activity or institution, this paper argues also for a reconceptualization of Sicilian mafia as a kind of political culture, different from that of the liberal-democratic state which implicitly constitues the axiological reference of sociological and economic theories on the mafia.