hennerhess@t-online.de Henner Hess Approaching and Explaining the mafia phenomenon. Attempts of a Sociologist Introduction: How I happened to get interested in the mafia I went to Sicily for the first time in 1962, when I was still studying sociology at the University of Heidelberg. The fall of that year I spent in Partinico, a small town south of Palermo, as part of my research on non-violent social action. It may seem a little bit strange to go to Sicily to study non-violence, but in Partinico one could meet and talk to and observe the actions of Danilo Dolci, at the time next to Martin Luther King probably the most famous living representative of non-violence. He had, in 1957, received the International Lenin Peace Prize, and everybody called him the Sicilian Gandhi. In Partinico he had founded the Centro studi e iniziative per la piena occupazione, where he gathered a group of collaborators from Italy and other European countries. His interviews and discussions with common people were assembled in his two most successful books: Banditi a Partinico and Inchiesta a Palermo, both published in 1956. In 1960 he had published Spreco, a collection of studies on the waste of human and natural resources. In this book, he identified three main reasons for the lack of any development in Western Sicily: the passiveness of the people, the corruption of politicians and the violence with which every reformist movement was repressed. To mobilize the people he relied, apart from his writings, on Gandhis favored method, widely publicized hunger strikes. The first time I met Dolci, a tall and heavy, open and very likeable man, he was in the middle of such a hunger strike. All day he rested on a bed in the living room of his small house, where everybody could enter and speak with him. But many did not dare to. Dolci had just started a campaign – of which the hunger strike was part – to dam the river Iato, build an irrigation system and use the water to develop the agriculture of the region. The project was somehow stuck, and Dolci was eager to mobilize the people and have them put pressure on the responsible administrations. The project did not please everybody. Above all, it did not please the owners of water sources, who were able to sell their water at high prices, or the owners of plantations already irrigated, who feared the competition. As Dolci explained, there were mafiosi involved on both sides; some defended the mentioned vested interests, others supported the owners of trucks who would profit from moving earth and building materials. It seemed all rather complicated to me, but one thing was clear enough: the remarkable role violence played in economic and social relations. From Dolci’s books you could, by the way, learn the same main lesson: violence was an everyday phenomenon, while human life and social relations outside of the family were of negligible importance. There are in Spreco twelve pages of an interview which seem to me of great interest with regard do the ambivalent phenomenon of the mafia. Two peasants talk about Genco Russo, the mafia boss of Mussomeli, a small village in the center of Sicily. One of the peasants is a friend of Russo’s, the other just an admirer. They talk about Russo’s career from simple herdsman to powerful landowner, about the crimes which he was reproached for having committed but which had never been proved, about his relations to a number of