“The Mafia? What is the mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the mafia. I have never seen it”. Mafiosi have often reacted in this way to questions from journalists and law enforcement officers, raising the question of the reality of what is unseen, and the relationship between the “name” and the “thing”. It is this semantic relationship that Mafiacraft explores. Researchers who have so far studied the 'mafia' have tried to understand what it 'really' is, thus confusing their interpretative effort with their object of study: a 'black box', an empty signifier. Mafiacraft proposes to undertake a new form of ethnographic enquiry that does not focus on the answer to the question “What is the Mafia?”, but on the ontological, moral and political effects of asking the question itself. Its starting point is not to consider the 'mafia' as a social fact to be unveiled, but as an epistemological knot to be resolved, a problem of knowledge. How to study phenomena that do not exist or cannot be named? Mafiacraft proposes a paradigm that reverses the logic of witchcraft: if it relies on the lethal power of the word, the mafia depends on the lethal power of silence. The task of the anthropologist then becomes to study silence by assuming all the implications of this epistemological choice, as perfectly captured by the contributors to this Symposium .
