Puccio‐Den, Deborah. Mafiacraft: an ethnography of deadly silence. 294 pp., bibliogr. Chicago: Hau Books, 2022. $32.00 (paper)

Deborah Puccio-Den's book Mafiacraft is an attempt to approach the (Sicilian) Mafia through their silences.Compared to much of the existing scholarship, the study represents an innovative contribution to the anthropology of the Mafia, taking a fresh perspective on this notoriously opaque phenomenon.A key reason for this lies in the conceptual shift away from viewing the Mafia as a clearly bounded social organization and towards understanding it as a phenomenon fundamentally constituted through silence, ambiguity, and unspeakability.Puccio-Den coins the term 'Mafiacraft' to capture this novel ethnographic approach and analytical framework.Drawing explicitly on anthropological studies of witchcrafttraditionally linked to the power of words -she inverts this comparison to emphasize the lethal power of silence.She understands silence not as mere absence of words but as a productive force, a form of agency, and a regime of action that sustains the Mafia's social and political realities.Silence, in Puccio-Den's account, is central to the Mafia's existence, its practices and forms of communication, and dealing with this silence by legal actors and anti-Mafia movements has also promoted forms of knowledge production and public discourse on the subject.