CaMP Anthropology

Interview by Elliott Montpellier

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208053/a-city-is-not-a-computer

Elliot Montpellier: You write that you questioned how to write about “the frustratingly capricious world of technology” in book form. With this in mind, what inspired you to bring together these pieces in book form and how does it relate to the overarching argument you’ve put forward across the chapters?

Shannon Mattern: First, thanks so much for engaging with A City Is Not a Computer and for inviting me to discuss it. A few weeks ago Alex Ketchum, a faculty member at McGill, invited me to talk about the book as part of her excellent Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Technologies series. I framed my remarks not as a traditional “book talk,” but as a “biography of the book,” which allowed me to engage with a lot of the material “how did this bibliographic object come into existence?” questions you’re posing here. 

The ideas central to this book emerged across a decade of collaboration with Places Journal, an open-access venue for public scholarship on architecture, urbanism, and landscape. As a contributing writer, I’ve published nearly 30 long-form pieces that, because of their accessibility (in multiple senses of the term!), have reached readers in myriad fields around the world. A few years ago Places launched a new short-form book series with Princeton University Press, and I was invited to propose a book that expanded upon my existing articles. I initially wondered not only why I’d want to create a book out of material that I had deliberately made freely available online, but also why and how I would translate and transform my digital writing about timely topics into the static, enduring form of a book. 

I asked around on social media to see if such a transformation would be of use to others – and lots of folks proposed that reformatting this existing work, supplementing it with some new material, and putting these once-separate pieces and disparate issues in dialogue with each other, between the covers of a book, would constitute something new and valuable. The book form also allowed me to show, both rhetorically and materially, how our seemingly ephemeral technologies allow us to ask enduring questions. This mixture of the analog and the digital, or the fleeting and enduring, is also present in the book’s argument: I argue that what we know about cities, and the intelligence embedded and activated within them, comes in a range of material forms. 

In my contribution to Alex’s series I share several other reasons why I chose to write the book, some of which, I’ll admit, were born of frustration. First, as much as I love and feel at home with the essay form, I realize that the monograph is still the primary currency in my various fields of practice. Second, I got tired of some traditional scholars mistaking digital scholarly publications – regardless of how heavily researched and rigorously edited they might be – as mere blog posts or think pieces, simply because they’re online. And third, I was frustrated with the numerous Men With Big Ideas books, themselves super-sized think pieces unburdened with precedent or citation, about cities and technology. I think some of the most exciting work emerges through a mix of fascination and frustration, affection and annoyance.

Finally, I was excited to work with an amazing editor and staff at an exceptionally well-resourced press! 

Elliot Montpellier: The book engages liberally across disciplines – speaking to media theory, library science, science and technology studies, urban studies, journalistic media pieces, and much more. What takeaways do you hope anthropologists, in particular, take away from this cross-disciplinary work? 

Shannon Mattern: While the book does draw on the work of anthropologists and relies in part on ethnographic methods, I really wasn’t writing for anthropologists. Most of the research was completed when I was housed in a media studies department, working regularly with designers and librarians! When the book came out, I just happened to be teaching in an anthropology department, where I was transferred to build a new program in anthropology and design. I was both flattered and amused to see various reviewers and interviewers commenting on the book’s “uniquely anthropological” insights. The book unique approach, if it has one, is really the product of a very undisciplined curiosity! 

I’ve always enjoyed being a mediator between different fields, so my primary interlocutors are the people who, like me, inhabit the interstitial spaces, or who aren’t too concerned about disciplinary boundaries. I think so-called general or lay audiences often fall into the latter category; they recognize that most of our everyday concerns – like urban transit, maintenance, public knowledge, and other themes I address in the book – are inherently overdetermined, intersectional, and uncontainable.  

That said, I hope anthropologists will find in the book some evidence of why it’s useful to read across disciplines (I’ll admit that, over the years, I’ve seen quite a bit of anthropology of media that doesn’t engage with precedent media studies research!); to combine scholarly and applied knowledge; and to recognize popular, mediated discourse as a cultural sphere; an epistemological realm, that’s its own ethnographic terrain. 

And given that anthropology as a discipline has repeatedly questioned the centrality of ethnography to its disciplinary identity, has critically engaged with the ethics and inclusivity of standard ethnographic practice (see for instance the recent exciting activity around patchwork ethnography), and has grappled with the vexed question regarding the validity of autoethnography, I hope readers might see in the book what can be gained by looking at one’s own multifarious practices, one’s personal and professional experiences, one’s teaching and civic engagement, as something approximating a retroactively accumulative auto-ethnography – as forms of knowledge production. 

Elliot Montpellier: To follow-up on that question, your methods and writing-style offer an enriching thickness, appealing to an ethnographer’s sensibilities, but you go about this in a multitude of ways. Some of these are not always privileged in anthropological interventions (let alone the training graduate students receive). Specifically, you speak to numerous community projects and engagements that catalysed or were catalysed by your writing. How do you think anthropologists open themselves up to community collaborations as part of training and knowledge production?

Shannon Mattern: These questions pertain to long-standing ethical questions about anthropologists’ involvement in, and obligations to, their field sites. There’s a whole vibrant tradition of activist anthropology we can draw on here, too. 

I’ve had several enlightening and disheartening conversations with anthropology PhD students who are eager to write about particular topics and phenomena, but who convince themselves that they’re not entitled to do so because they haven’t engaged in formally recognized ethnography. Obviously, scholars in other fields write about a whole host of topics without engaging in ethnography; there are countless other methods one can deploy in understanding the world. That said, so many of these students have years of personal experience – as students, as student leaders, as teachers, as laborers, as neighbors, as activists, as engaged citizens – that we might regard as participant observation within their own communities. Their reflection on and analysis of that experience would ideally be informed by the various critical concepts and frameworks they’ve encountered within anthropology and elsewhere. 

Plus, I don’t think it’s necessary to engage in community projects, to serve your neighbors or your city, through your role as an anthropologist or scholar. Your research might offer you insight or grant you expertise that draws you into particular service or collaborative roles; my published research on libraries and archives has led to invitations to collaborate with these institutions, to serve on boards of directors, etc. But one needn’t serve as an anthropologist, or as someone intending to mine their community for research data.

Ultimately, however, that community engagement might – and, ideally, would — inform your work as a scholar: it can shape an ethos, help you identify a wider network of stakeholders, reveal nuanced social dynamics, and so on, that you can take up in your research. The big ethical and methodological challenge is to determine whether it’s appropriate to bring that experience into your published work. This has been a relatively easy question for me, since I work with public institutions that are committed to public knowledge and transparency; the board meetings I might reference in my writing, for instance, are also publicly documented. In other cases, utilizing behind-closed-doors experiences constitutes a betrayal of trust and a breach of ethics. 

Elliot Montpellier: I’m particularly drawn to your discussion of religion in Chapter 1. The connections you draw from dashboards and technology to talismans, amulets, and users’ faith seem so apt. This is a connection that a few others have made and with all that has been going on in the tech world, I’ve seen several op-eds about the tech Gods falling back to earth, or other clickbaiting titles along these lines. What strikes you as potent about these metaphors? How does the reliance on religious metaphors as integral to critique, not reify secular-religious (or scientific-superstitious) divides, especially as religious worlds themselves are so vital in local and indigenous ways of knowing?

Shannon Mattern: The whole book is in part about the metaphors we use to understand complex sites and systems – and how those metaphors shape the way we conceive, design, build, maintain, administer, and value those sites and systems. As we now see with Elon Musk, whether we regard him as a reckless speculator, a business titan, a skilled engineer, or a divinely inspired Tech Genius determines how users and investors and regulators engage with him and his platform – which, again, because of how they’ve been metaphorized, are now regarded as one and the same. 

In the book I referenced talismans to raise questions about epistemology and belief – particularly our belief that exhaustive datafication cultivates omniscience and positivist truths. This is a central theme in the book: that these ways of knowing are inevitably entangled – and so, in order to appreciate and respond to the complexity of our cities, we have to recognize that the hard and the soft, the quantitative and the qualitative, both provide invaluable insights. 

Elliot Montpellier:Your overarching argument makes the case for greater critical engagement with the hype of the technological present (and pasts). In Chapter 2, you discuss how the slowness of public consultation, deliberation, community input, participation, and so forth was integral to the friction that derailed the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto. And you make the broader case throughout the book that the myriad situated and public knowledges that animate cities comprise the alternative vision to the city as computer. Across the book, I found myself thinking about housing, public and active transport advocacy, each anchored in the urban realm you discuss. Advocates have remarked on how bureaucratic and cultural processes (especially community meetings) have been wielded against communities seeking to enact change toward more embodied ways of interacting in urban worlds. (Similarly, one could argue the same thing about activism around climate change, reparations, land back, and so on) A very broad question, but how might communities (and their academic collaborators) work to ensure that participatory methods aren’t co-opted to reinforce negative majoritarian principles?

Shannon Mattern: One of the case studies I discuss in the book – Sidewalk Labs’ proposed design for a “smart city” development in Toronto – prompted me to address these very questions. So, in 2020, I published an article about the risks of co-opting the aesthetics of participatory design, of using superficial “civic engagement” as a smokescreen for fait accompli planning. I realized then that this question had underlain a lot of my research for the past 20 years. The first article I published was about how the public was conceived in a public design process for an ambitious “public” library. I wouldn’t have told you 20 years ago that I was embarking on a longitudinal ethnographic study of participatory planning processes – but when I looked back on my years of academic research and my observations, as both an engaged citizen and as collaborator, of various participatory design projects, that’s kind of what I was doing, without knowing it! 

So, what’s to be done about this co-optation? A whole bunch of things: making sure we aren’t simply hiring community engagement consultants who regard “participation” as a list of obligations (which is what ESG and LEED have become), making sure we have trusted community-based liaisons involved, making sure we’ve engaged in an inclusive campaign of public education, making sure our methods of community engagement are themselves designed in consultation with community members, and triangulating a variety of methods and deploying a variety of media – each of which will resonate differently with different members of the community. Organizations like the Creative Reaction Lab, the Center for Urban Pedagogy, Colloqate, Measure, and lots of digital and environmental justice collectives have been designing processes that take these factors into consideration. 

Elliot Montpellier: One response to the question above–that I read in the book–was your focus on public infrastructure and knowledge institutions as part of a vital infrastructural network. What role can anthropologists play in supporting these infrastructures?

Shannon Mattern: I’d love to see more ethnographies in public libraries and archives. Dan Green’s The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope is a great example of what one can learn about our misplaced faith in technology – and its profound, long-term impact on policy – by hanging out in libraries for years.  

As I write this, Twitter is imploding, and lots of folks are migrating over to Mastodon, which is prompting some to consider – perhaps for the first time – the danger of allowing an egomaniacal oligarch to control a platform that’s effectively become a critical public resource; the potential for public, federated alternatives; and what new infrastructural topologies and imaginaries this moment of crisis might make possible. Gabriella Coleman’s, Joan Donovan’s, and Sarah T. Roberts’ ethnographic work can shed a lot of light on what’s happening at Twitter – as a cautionary tale. And Christina Dunbar-Hester and Greta Byrum’s ethnographic and policy work can help us understand what’s possible – and what risks arise – when communities design networks that reflect their values. 

I also wish academics – including anthropologists – would be more reflexive about the infrastructures they rely on, often unthinkingly, to do their own work. Are our prestigious journals published by rapacious corporate publishers? Do we depend on research databases and software owned by extractivist organizations that are deeply entangled with surveillance capitalism? (Sara Lamdan’s new Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolize Our Information has a lot to say about this). Are we locked into teaching platforms that deploy a bunch of algorithmic “cop shit” that cultivates adversarial relationships with our students and monetizes their data? Are we relying on infrastructures that construct knowledge as a scarce capitalist good? 

Last semester, in my final teaching semester at The New School – which I’m leaving in part because the institution’s own infrastructures contradict its professed politics – I taught a class called “Redesigning the Academy,” where I invited students to turn an ethnographic eye to these very questions – to ask why academic things are built the way they are, who those structures serve, and how we might do things differently. All of us need to ask those questions much more frequently – and then muster up the will, and demand the resources, to actually do things differently. 

My dissertation is about how middle-class people in the United States economize their everyday life to get economic security. Ethnographically, I focus on two groups of Americans who participate in network marketing. Network marketing is a form of sales in which participants earn money by selling products to customers and recruiting new salespeople to their networks. Network marketing companies primarily attract college-educated Americans who get involved through their social ties: friends, family, co-workers, and their local communities. I found that mundane aspects of network marketers’ daily life – social encounters, routines, and modes of self-representation – became saturated with a capitalist economic logic. They financialized social relationships, imagined “smarter” ways of making money, such as income without working and told confessional life stories as a sales pitch. They did this as a response to a large-scale economic restructuring from post-war regulated capitalism to neoliberal capitalism that has created intense economic insecurity and inequality for many people in the United States. 

Page 99 of my dissertation is part of chapter 4 and is actually representative of the dissertation. On page 99, I focus on a widespread convention among the network marketers with whom I spend time. They presented personal stories to audiences of potential customers as a marketing convention called “testimonies”. These stories followed a rags-to-riches style script, in which the marketers recounted how they struggled physically, financially and emotionally before becoming network marketers. They claimed that their struggles were resolved after participating in network marketing because of the healing effects of dietary supplements they consumed and sold and the income they had earned.

I argue that such practices manifest the expansion of market activity into increased spheres of American’s everyday life so that everyday life becomes a transactional site of buying and selling goods and services. New aspects of everyday life are becoming included and even necessary for market transaction under neoliberal capitalism. Those new aspects include personal stories and traumatic experiences, so that “how I feel and felt,” “what happened to me,” “how I view the world,” and “what my upbringing and family looks like” are becoming instruments for selling.

Page 99

The network marketers’ testimonies were often very confessional and sometimes evoked strong emotional reactions as they teared up and sobbed telling them. They talked openly about their struggles, weaknesses, and tragedies. Some of the marketers’ testimonies also included recounting experiences of depression, death of family members, cancer affecting their children, and suicidal thoughts.

 At the “Sip and Freedom Parties”, Rick and Susan would sometimes video record and live-stream the testimonies on Facebook. When this happened, the stories became public material within their sales and social networks to comment on and for other marketers to share as a way to sell products or recruit new customers. The online circulation of other marketers’ testimonies (without asking for consent) in NatureRise’s chat rooms or to potential customers was a common practice among the marketers I came to know.

Furthermore, NatureRise itself produced hundreds of testimonies with marketers, which they made publicly available on a YouTube channel during my research. Some of those videos were professionally made and featured the testimonies of many of the top income earners. The videos followed Paige’s story structure, described earlier in this chapter. For example, one video featured Elizabeth, a white NatureRise top earner who had trained the San Francisco marketers I knew at the NatureRise University event in Nevada. The video was produced by NatureRise and appeared on Elizabeth’s public YouTube channel.

It began by showing Elizabeth sitting in her living room. She had long blonde hair and wore a floral dress. Her fingernails were painted maroon and matched the flowers on her dress and the curtains behind her. Elizabeth smiled, as she began speaking and looked down at her hands and said: “So, growing up on a family farm in North Dakota.” She paused, looked up, and smiled: “So, where do I start?” she said and laughed. “So many stories…”. 

The scene shifted to a rural setting: a white farm building in the middle of a vast green pasture. The sun was setting, and mellow piano music played as Elizabeth narrated: “My grandpa and grandma actually paid us to milk cows and feed calves at a young age.” A photo of Elizabeth as a child appeared. She was smiling at the camera as she stood next to a cow. “At a young age, they really wanted to instill in us that hard work ethic, you know, is what you are rewarded for,” Elizabeth went on.

Mathias Levi Toft Kristiansen. The Greatest Scam: Network Marketing and the Economization of Everyday Life in the United States. University of Gothenburg, Phd 2022.

Interview by Elliott Wiseman

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo46770602.html

Elliott Wiseman: In the introduction, you establish Mafiacraft as an inversion of witchcraft. What does the connection with witchcraft afford, and what were your intentions in rooting the book in this juxtaposition? 

Deborah Puccio-Den: Mafiacraft indicates a set of methodological and theoretical tools to describe and understand the mafia starting from the forms of struggle it has produced in Italy. The choice of this name echoes the term witchcraft, used to designate the sphere of the fight against the witches. I have often felt a certain unease at seeing mafia trials and witch trials assimilated as if these prosecutions create legal categories – ‘mafiosi’ or ‘mafia’ like ‘witches’ or ‘witchcraft’ – in order to repress elusive social phenomena and groups. This parallel is implicitly underlying many mafia studies, and was explicitly stated in a political struggle against the anti-mafia during the years of the Maxi-trial (second half of the eighties).

My unease in the face of this paradigm, witchcraft, over all these years, was not only of a moral order, but rather of a conceptual order. It seemed to me that something was not working in this scheme not only because the anti-mafia magistrates became the persecutors, and the anti-mafia struggle, instead of a movement for freedom as it has been from the beginning as a peasant movement for lands, became the expression of a liberticidal power. But also, because the ontological premise on which this association was founded contained, and still contains, a categorial error: mafia behaviors and acts were put on a par with the rituals of sorcerers about which nothing was known except the conjectures of the inquisitors. Indeed, for many years, the mafia was a conjecture or was present in the space of political or legal debate as a conjecture. But thanks to magistrates such as Falcone, there has been a huge construction of ‘mafia proof’ that no longer allows us to believe that it is an invention. Mafiacraft relies on this immense work of constructing the evidence of the mafia as a “form of criminal association” which no longer allows the mafia phenomena to be treated as conjectures or legal theories. Precisely because the starting point of Mafiacraft is the epistemological and ontological rupture provoked by the work of the anti-mafia judiciary, supported by the witnessing processes engaged and supported by so many citizens and associations, this paradigm presents itself as an inversion of witchcraft: in the latter, the process of finding the sorcerer or the person to be named as such, the witch, is endless (see James Siegel, Naming the Witch, 2005), like the attribution of precise acts to precise perpetrators; in Mafiacraft, on the contrary, the process succeeds, it fixes meaning to a signifier, it reconstitutes the link concealed by silence between a mafia act and its perpetrator(s) or instigators: the “mafiosi”. It is a work or craft to be started over each time, but it is not a work doomed to failure as in the case of the sorcerer and witchcraft.

Elliott Wiseman: Throughout the book, you draw from various kinds of evidence (photographs, legal writing, pentiti testimony, public memorials, and so on) and social scientific approaches (studies of folklore, ritual, law, religious symbology, linguistic anthropology, and more). Did you begin this project with an interdisciplinary lens, or did it arise later in the research or writing process? What inspired this approach? 

Deborah Puccio-Den: My reflection originated in anti-mafia circles as a social movement, a cultural and moral revolution, and from the very beginning it was a reflection on the anti-mafia movement’s reflection: a reflection on the way in which anti-mafia circles – which were multiple, varied, and sometimes even conflicting – tried to answer the question ‘what is the mafia’ using different media: books, plays, festive devices (in particular the feast of Santa Rosalia in Palermo), writings, photographs, tombstones… Some ten years later, the anti-mafia trials opened up a new phase of research, a series of enquiries into the judicial enquiry that, at the same time, sought to find answers to this same question coming from society: “what is the mafia?”

Mafiacraft is meant to be a material history of moral ideas, portraying the way anti-mafia claims exist in the world, finding, or not, a space in which to live, coming to fill the faults in the cognitive fabric of the mafia: namely the silences. The word mafia is written, imprinted, erased, could remain, or not, in various media that I have studied in their materiality, specificity and function. But the heterogenous nature of the materials and practices analyzed in my book does not make it any less an interdisciplinary work: Mafiacraft is therefore an anthropological project rooted in the intellectual project of judge Falcone to know what the mafia was. To answer this question, Falcone retraced mafia action from the acts, or misdeeds, that allow the mafia to exist and prosper. The Copernican revolution produced in the forms of description of the mafia from the moment it was defined on the basis of its actions, was not the fruit of researchers, but of magistrates, precisely because of their greater proximity to sources that allowed them to understand the pervasiveness and extension of mafia actions, and therefore of the mafia. Since the beginning of the 1980s, legal inquiries have been able to discover the coordinated character of mafia actions in Sicily, and in the world. When the so-called “Buscetta Theorem” prevailed, it was the result of the collaboration between the pentito Tommaso Buscetta and Giovanni Falcone, who used the “pentito” as an anthropologist uses an informant to penetrate a culture. This is the approach I currently use to explore the mafia “from the inside.”

Elliott Wiseman: One important turn in the book is the reframing of pentiti speech as indigenous discourse rather than justificatory myth. Can you say more about this reframing and its implications?  

Deborah Puccio-Den: The Sicilian pentiti were mostly members of the losing families in a war— the Second Mafia War, in the early 1980s—that represented the defeat of the Commission, the place where conflicts were traditionally solved without resorting to violence. It was a war that decimated the Sicilian mafia, killing almost a thousand people in the space of a few years, corresponding to 20% of mafia members, following an extermination plan conceived by Riina and the Corleonese clan to take control of Cosa Nostra. Pentitismo, interpreted as betrayal by mafia members and by a large part of Italian society, was justified by the justice collaborators as a gesture aimed at preserving the mafia’s ancient order. My starting point is to “take seriously” these arguments, submitting them to the same critique, no more and no less, as any other indigenous discourse. This runs counter to an entire scholarly literature in the social sciences that encourages us to consider the declarations of the pentiti as justificatory myths and, on these grounds, to reject them as fallacious.  We must be aware that the justice collaborators had no reason to justify their criminal acts; it was (and is) enough for them to provide reliable information to obtain state protection for themselves and their families. Contrary to popular opinion, rumors, and gossip about the pentiti, that constitute the material substantiating most of the anthropological studies about them, the Italian law governing the condition of Mafia collaboration (conceived by Giovanni Falcone during the Eighties and adopted after his murder, in 1992) imposes a judicial framework based on the notion of “self-incrimination’ (chiamata in correo)- that leads “collaborators with justice” to confess crimes previously unknown to the authorities. As a result, they will be charged for additional crimes, thus lengthening their jail sentences. In these circumstances, saying that mafiosi collaborate with the state for opportunistic reasons (reduction of sentence) makes no sense. Such a misleading characterization, also legitimated in academic works, could provide justification to refrain from the use of pentiti in anti-mafia investigation, undermining their credibility. It not only has the adverse consequence of disqualifying their contribution to anti-mafia judicial inquiry, but also to ethnographic survey, depriving it of access to vital information for a deep understanding of the mafia as a human experience of life, and death.

Elliott Wiseman: You describe the mafia subject as being desubjectified by the expectation of unquestioning obedience and by “an atrophying of language, at least as a means of expressing individual needs, fears, or desires” (pp. 170-171). Is there a relation between omertà and other forms of silencing and desubjectification (of racialized Others or people of marginalized genders, for example)? 

Deborah Puccio-Den: My reflection on the mafia is rooted in a previous reflection on the silence of women (Masques et dévoilements, 2002). In a study on public discourse in the 1970s, Shirley Ardener (Perceiving women, 1975) argues that, because this tended to be characteristically male-dominated and the appropriate language registers seemed “encoded” by males, women were at a disadvantage when wishing to express matters of particular concern to them. One of the contributors to her edited book, Edwin Ardener, drew on the concept of “muted group” as suggested by Charlotte Hardman to speak about women’s lack of communication skills to portray their own world in their own words. This notion of a muted group functions as an umbrella term: other groups in society may also be effectively muted. This pioneering feminist work provides a critical conceptual framework with which to view the mafia as a muted group.

As muted group, the mafia can only take form when “clothed” in cultural patterns of behavior and communication shaped by society and the state. One of these cultural patterns, in my view, is omertà, silence, shaped by the state in order to grasp an elusive language practice on its own terms, one somewhat acritically adopted by “specialists” of the mafia phenomenon, thereby carelessly falling back on conventional moral and intellectual understandings of silence. Feminist theory seems to offer possible ways forward in the particular field of research designed as mafia studies. But a distinction must be made. If we simply apply Shirley Ardener’s framework to describe the mafia as a muted group, we run the risk of remaining trapped in a binary model. Mafiacraft is rather based on the assumption that there is a strong interconnection between mafia, on the one hand, and society and the state, on the other.

Elliott Wiseman: Finally, how do you view the intersection between Mafiacraft and statecraft, and how would you like to see the concept of Mafiacraft applied moving forward? 

Deborah Puccio-Den: Mafiacraft will not consider society and state as separate entities, to ensure that it does not succumb to the pressure of the “state effect” to conceive the state as a “free-standing object, located outside society” (Mitchell, 2006). In Ardener’s words, the “dominant group” and the “dominant model” together form the “dominant structure.” It follows that the “muted group” and the “counterpart model” together form a muted or “subdominant structure”. Sociological and even anthropological research on the mafia tend to describe it as a “sub-culture,” and omertà as one of the main expressions of this sub-culture, a negative expression of the self, a passive resistance to the state. By locating the mafiosi in the overall ideological framework of the dominant culture, these studies miss the specific forms of agency mafiosi may deploy by the performative use of silence. Yet, silence is not here identified only with the mafia, but also with the forms of power it establishes, sometimes with the complicity of the state that makes use of the same weapon. Mafiacraft proposes a way out of the easy identification of silence with omertà, and of omertà with the Sicilian people, showing how this repertoire of action is also available, and effectively mobilized by the state. To consider the mafia as a deviance, a pathology, an anti-state as has been said, is a state-induced error itself, a state effect as Timothy Mitchell used to say, when he warned against polarizing state and society. I have therefore tried to put the focus on the interactions between the mafia and the state, interactions that involve the use of silence, codes, sign language, reading traces. But silence is not only the weapon of the people when they resist the state, it is also an instrument of oppression. I am not thinking only of the Italian state but also of other states marked by a high level of political violence where the use of silence is a technique of terror: Argentina, Chile, their art of making bodies disappear, which we can compare to the mafia technique of the lupara bianca, while with Colombia the mixture is such that we can speak of a ‘mafia state’. We know, and it is no secret, that in Italy the mafia has involved some political representatives. Some scholars consider this intrigue between mafia and politics to be a distinctive trait of the mafia. For my part, I would say that what distinguishes the mafia is the opacity of social action, which can also extend to politics (but not only). This vast zone of opacity is the field in which the tools proposed in Mafiacraft can be tested.