Berardino Palumbo, "Where Saints Show Respect: Mafia, Modernity, and Rituals of Power" (Berghahn Books, 2026)

Where Saints Show Respect: Mafia, Modernity, and Rituals of Power is an anthropological exploration of how authority is produced not only through violence or secrecy but also through public ritual. Drawing on more than thirty years of ethnographic research in Sicily, Professor Berardino Palumbo turns our attention to saints’ festivals, processions, fireworks, ritual gestures and moments when power becomes visible, tangible, and socially negotiated.

At the centre of the book is the now well-known practice of saints “showing respect”: statues pausing or bowing during processions in front of particular homes or streets. Palumbo treats these not as traditional leftovers, but as modern political acts through which hierarchy, recognition, and moral worth are publicly visible. Power, he argues, is learned not only through fear or coercion, but through piety, celebration, play, and spectacle.

The English edition is translated and edited by Cornelia Mayer Herzfeld. The book opens with a foreword by Michael Herzfeld, who situates it within broader debates on modernity, Europe, and anthropological critique. It closes with an afterword by Jane and Peter Schneider, placing Palumbo’s work in dialogue with the long tradition of anthropological research on Sicily and the mafia, while highlighting what is novel in his approach.

Rather than treating the mafia as a hidden or external force, Where Saints Show Respect shows how it is woven into everyday social relations, religious life, and shared moral worlds. In doing so, the book challenges readers to rethink modernity, not as the disappearance of ritual, but as its reconfiguration.

This is an invitation to look more closely at how power operates wherever it appears festive, familiar, or “traditional” and to ask what makes us see some rituals as political and others not.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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