As If You Were Brothers

The criminalization of 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 are powerful). In 1982, Italy criminalized two kinds of association: 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 of Freemasonry, particularly the assumption that this particular kinship term can oblige people’s actions. I begin by examining the tensions within current public and official anti-Mafia perspectives on the Mafia and Freemasonry and the relationship between them. I then recount how such tensions shaped the course of a late 1980s case involving mafiosi 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 the ongoing criminalization of ritual fraternity through concepts from the 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.