Paper short abstract:

Cooperatives cultivating land confiscated from the mafia are a joint venture of the antimafia movement and the state in Sicily. The people involved experience the uncertainties of change, claiming a different engagement with the state's 'domesticating' processes and contesting their consequences.

Paper long abstract:

Antimafia cooperatives are hailed as thriving work-units that allow people to make a living while contesting the mafia in contemporary Western Sicily. The uneasiness of a labour market controlled by mafia patronage has been alleviated through the proliferation of employment opportunities in these cooperatives. The cooperatives utilise land that the state confiscated from local Mafiosi while a public consortium regulates their activity.

However, a series of issues have shaped the experience of 'doing antimafia' as an uncertain one. These include disquiet accommodations of the confiscated land that the cooperatives work on, the fact that mafia is by no means obsolete and the social arrangements of recruitment and work practices of many people involved in the cooperatives. State agents promote 'meritocratic' ideas premised on 'anti-kinship' rhetoric, as kinship links are seen as 'primordial' and 'prone to mafia influence'. Local peasants developed resistance practices to this scheme; indigenous engagements with the project entailed the impossibility of detachment from village nexuses of relationships, including kinship-bound ones.

I analyse this significant instance of social change for Sicily, as a dialectics of continuity and transformation. While legalistic jargon and jural reification of the confiscated plots' statuses push to undermining kinship bonds, local everyday practices trace continuities with an uncomfortable recent past, in constituting the cooperatives. I explore the uncertainties these processes entail for locals and question the 'anti-kinship' rhetoric of the state, showing that the state-building project of the confiscated land's use is itself premised on specific state categorisations of kinship which produce unintended consequences.