Opposition by imitation: The economics of Italian anti‐Mafia activism By ChristinaJerne. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025. 248 pp.

What exactly do we hold in our hands when we take a packet of “Mafia-free” pasta from the supermarket shelf? This question may seem trivial, but as Christina Jerne's book admirably demonstrates, addressing it involves a series of choices that are not only ethical but also epistemological—the latter of which makes this study stand out in the literature on the Mafia. Tackling this question entails defining, redefining, and deconstructing our vision of the economy and its relationship to politics. It requires moving beyond viewing the economy as a sphere separate from politics, “a kind of monolith that travels on a track parallel to politics” (p. 5), and considering it “a site for political action” (p. 164). It also raises the fundamental question: “Just who is in charge of the neoliberal machine?” (p. 8) Is it the nation-state and the framework it imposes on the economy? Or the international bodies that circumvent these norms and laws? Posing the question in these terms avoids depicting consumers as spectators or, worse, as “victims.” This is Jerne's first epistemological choice with political consequences. A similar shift has been made by Italy's anti-Mafia legislation, in how it defines those who pay the pizzo (Mafia tax): not as “victims” of racketeering but as potential accomplices of the Mafia. This is the position taken by activists from anti-Mafia associations like Addiopizzo (ByeByePizzo). One of the strengths of this book—which avoids the greatest danger facing any work on the Mafia or anti-Mafia efforts, namely ideologization—is that it does not frame all Mafia issues as mere components of “the system,” which could lead to traps of determinism, fatalism, and resignation. Here, we see the ethical implications of a theoretical choice: pragmatism requires us to focus on processes rather than ontologies, on perpetual motion rather than static ways of being, on the historicity of phenomena rather than immutable structures, and on studying interactions and exchanges between porous groups rather than isolating binary actors—an option that, incidentally, I have also adopted in the Mafiacraft project (Puccio-Den, 2021). This approach, however, remains in the minority among the multitude of writings on the Mafia, which is why it is worth highlighting the value of this book. If the economy is “a mode of organization through which social struggles can (and already do) take place” (p. 50), then it is important to understand the kinds of actions mobilized and embodied when one conceives, produces, distributes, or buys an item like a packet of Mafia-free pasta. The answer is not straightforward because it involves addressing another question in political and social sciences, one related to responsibility: What constitutes “collective action”? Nested within this question, like a Russian doll, lies another: What makes up a collective? Can we think of a collective as an entity defined by its actions rather than its ontology? Should these actions be recurrent and produce lasting effects that consolidate and stabilize a group, or should they be ephemeral yet spectacular, leaving a strong impression on both collective and individual memories, and even prompting a desire to repeat them, if not a willingness to be identified by them? What happens when the ethnographer leaves the front lines of the arena, where conflicts are clamorously staged, and follows activists in their daily lives, where mundane gestures have a lasting impact on their commitment? Other descriptions of collective action become possible, sensitively attuned to the multitude of beings, human and nonhuman, and to the layering of temporalities that shape the political life of social movements. In her book, Jerne does more than merely study a social movement; she describes a particular form of collective action or opposition: imitation as a tool for combat. This involves, first, taking a broad view of the phenomenon to be combated, that is, “the Mafia,” which cannot be reduced to a form of deviance to be punished. Doing so would rely on the wishful thinking that the Mafia can be eliminated by sending a few dozen or hundred Mafia members to prison. At stake here is understanding “Mafia economies” as a “peculiar form of governance” (p. 20)—one that combines extractivism, human exploitation, and environmental degradation—and challenging it on the same ground, namely that of the assets confiscated by the Italian state under Italian law (No. 109/96). In Mafia territories, many anti-Mafia cooperatives are emerging, producing ethical “Mafia-free” products. These cooperatives incorporate practices, ideas, and ways of thinking about human presence in the world and the bonds human beings can forge with one another and the environment, in stark opposition to those established by the “Mafia.” Here, the definition of this mysterious entity implicitly echoes that given by Italian law (Art. 416 bis), which skillfully defines it in terms of its methods—intimidation, omertà, subjugation. A jar of peach jam is “Mafia-free” because more and more people, including the ethnographer, have refused to be intimidated and have worked the land once controlled by the Mafia to produce goods they proudly display. By creating the discursive conditions for their promotion in the market, they have challenged the Mafia's honor through humor, thus severing the bonds of subjugation (omertà), which is above all a mental (or “cultural,” if you will). To achieve this transformation, the mimicry employed by the anti-Mafia activists proceeds through three joint actions (if by actions we also mean what is accomplished through language and spirit): resignification, rearrangement, and affective reframing. After a brilliant and powerful introduction that clearly sets out both the theoretical terms of the argument and the fieldwork that gives it empirical substance, the first chapter, “Anti-Mafia: A Brief History,” traces the genealogy of this movement, particularly in Sicily, to show what needed to be fought, what types of working or power relationships existed, and what relationships to land or wealth were at stake. This historical detour allows us to understand how the very concept of Cosa Nostra (literally “Our Thing”) is upturned with the use of the “commons” implied by the anti-Mafia economy. It also allows us to measure the successes and difficulties of this undertaking, including for the researcher, who does not shy away from sharing her discomfort or subjectivity but uses them as tools for understanding her research subject. The second chapter, “È Cosa Nostra: Reclaiming Mafia Assets,” describes local efforts to redefine and assign new meanings that challenge the status quo by reshuffling the many relationships, technologies, and skills that constitute Mafia power. Based on Jerne's experience as a volunteer in the E!state Liberi! program on the confiscated Sicilian lands, it provides insight into the ethical and physical commitment of the researcher, who was deeply shaken and who questioned the efficacy and relevance of a legalistic approach to the anti-Mafia field and reality. The third chapter, “Disrupting Structures of Mafia Dependency,” analyzes and explores the concept of rearrangement by retracing the anti-Mafia networks woven around an “unruly jar of peach jam” snatched from Mafia land in the Naples region. This land was first struck by an earthquake and then by an ecological disaster caused by Mafia-style governance, driven solely by profit and destroying the material conditions of existence to maximize exploitation. Desertion is not mere neglect but a policy, a way of governing. The concept of “assemblage” is at work here to indicate the web of interactions that have been thwarted and reworked in creating a package containing not only a jar of peach jam and a book, but also a commitment to reverse the logic of Mafia production, a bricolage that plays on the double meaning of the word pacco (package and trick) to the Camorra (un pacco alla Camorra). The fourth chapter, “Mobilizing Mafia Heritage: Techniques in Critical Tourism,” explores the centrality of emotions and affects in anti-Mafia tourism as a mode of political action that attempts to strike the same emotional, sensory, and experiential chords as the Mafia to create the same effect of consensus. The fifth chapter, “Queering Social Movements,” the true theoretical conclusion of the book, pulls together the multiple strands followed from the onset to conceptualize “collective action” in terms of “assemblage thinking,” a line of thought that, like the queering approach inspiring it, challenges dominant conceptions of economics (capitalocentrism) and politics (state-centrism). The conclusion, “The Shadow Economy,” raises broad ecological issues related to this fieldwork and clarifies the convergences between the anti-Mafia project and the author's project as a citizen “exploring activities that bring more livable worlds” (p. 195). Perhaps this work could have engaged in a closer dialogue with Mafiacraft as “a material history of moral ideas”. Indeed, the points of intersection are many: beyond the epistemological choice to expose a reality that evades knowledge, the “Mafia,” through its resistance, the anti-Mafia, and mimetic processes in Jerne's book could be fruitfully compared with the “isomorphism” I outlined between Mafia justice and state justice. And “Assemblage” is also a creative concept at work in the Mafiacraft project, as highlighted by Rosenberg (2024). But these are intended as prompts for further discussion rather than critiques of this challenging and stimulating book.