Legalità e pensiero mafioso: una ricerca pilota nel contesto scolastico

Abstract

Legality and thought mafioso: a research pilot at school

In this study on the mafia thought, that stays in continuity with other works (Lo Verso, 1998; Lo Verso et al. 1999; Lo Verso, Lo Coco, 2003; Giorgi et al., 2009), the attention is focused on the school as a context symbol of the entrance and the cohabitation in the public space. The research sample consists of students of primary, middle and high schools of some centres in the province of Palermo. Data shows a conception of law reduced to mere compliance with rules, revealing a kind of dogmatic thought which maintains close relations with the mafia fundamentalism. Even the attitude of political action is characterized by a certain rigidity that sets public institutions to an exclusive welfare role according to a relational dynamic of motherly culture typical of the mafia thought. The retreat from public space and the delegation of political function creates a progressive psychic distance that connotes, in a paranoid way, the agora of social life as a bad world and make the Mafia presence to be perceived as naturally inherent to the territory. Social space of the school is still, in our opinion, a preferable place for the clinical intervention especially through the use of clinical social elaboration groups.