Theodoros Rakopoulos
Supervisors: Victoria Goddard; David Graeber
Research Project
Anti-mafia Livelihoods: production and social change around workers' cooperatives in Sicily
My ethnographic work explores the implications for the livelihoods of people (in western Sicily) of an attempt for a social transformation project: the application of a law imposing administration of assets belonging to Mafiosi by local people’s cooperatives. Focusing on production, labour, and political institutions, I integrate my own background in Law into a project departing from economic anthropology to examine cultural meanings in legislation and activism. Tracing how the antimafia is a project of ‘development’ shifting away from the material territory and into the national imagination, through continuities and ruptures with mafia, I explore the entanglement of legal and economic institutions within culture.
'Labour, Livelihoods, Legality: An ethnography of antimafia agrarian cooperatives in Sicily', 4th Annual South East European Doctoral Student Conference, Thessaloniki, 6-7 July 2009 [in English]. Conference paper.
'The Anti-Mafia (through ethnographic observation)', journal ENEKEN, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2nd semester 2009 [in Greek]. Publication.
'Omertà and the Market: on the entrepreneurialism and the modern nature of mafias' in: journal Mandragoras, Athens, Greece, Spring 2009 [in Greek]. Publication – presented in Italian at the University of Palermo, corso di laurea Cooperazione e Sviluppo.