The reality of inchoateness

Abstract

Deborah Puccio-Den, working from long ethnographic experience, has provided an intriguing and challenging account of how the mafia effect—which she approaches through her own coinage of “mafiacraft”—spreads its power while resisting reification. The value of this approach would be amplified by contextualizing it more fully in terms of existing research both on mafia and on related phenomena elsewhere, and by clarifying the dynamics of performativity and inchoateness and the observer’s role in reconstructing these dynamics.