Abstract
The ’Ndrangheta is often described through crime, violence, and illegal business, but its longevity cannot be explained by criminal activity alone. Its resilience is deeply connected to family structures, kinship, tradition, ritual, upbringing, and the transmission of values across generations. This article examines the ’Ndrangheta as a cultural and social system in which family loyalty and inherited norms become mechanisms of continuity. By looking at historical records, research on Calabrian criminal traditions, and studies of intergenerational transmission, the article explores how culture can preserve not only memory and identity, but also closed systems of power.
FAMILY IS STRONGER THAN ORGANIZATION: HOW TRADITION PRESERVES THE ’NDRANGHETA
In the court records of late nineteenth-century Calabria, there is one detail that seems almost strange. A criminal association is being tried; its members are accused of crimes against persons and property; the investigation describes leaders, subordinates, and internal discipline. All of this is expected. But then the language of the criminal case suddenly changes. The documents begin to mention “sacred duties,” loyalty, respect, mutual assistance, rules of conduct, training in the use of weapons, and punishment for revealing secrets.
In 1890, a court in Reggio Calabria examined the case of a group that called itself picciotti. According to the surviving evidence, it possessed its own hierarchy: at one level were the camorristi, below them the picciotti, while other categories of participants also existed. A person was expected not merely to obey a leader. He was incorporated into a system of relations in which obligations toward other members, internal norms of loyalty, and notions of acceptable and unacceptable behavior already existed.
This begins to resemble something more than a criminal group that happened to come together.
And here a question arises that is far more interesting than another chronicle of arrests: why do some criminal communities disappear after several major police operations, while others survive for generations?
In the case of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, the answer must be sought not only in money, weapons, political connections, or the ability to evade the state.
Part of the answer lies where criminological research unexpectedly intersects with the study of culture: in family, tradition, upbringing, and the transmission of memory.
THE CALABRIAN PARADOX
On the map of Italy, Calabria occupies the extreme south of the Apennine Peninsula — a land of mountains, small towns, rural settlements, and coastline, from which major waves of emigrants departed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Along with people, language, family ties, habits, memories, and forms of mutual support traveled beyond the region.
But migration could also transport criminal forms of social organization alongside ordinary culture.
Europol has noted that Calabrian immigrant communities established in different parts of the world created an environment through which the ’Ndrangheta could develop external connections. This circumstance is crucial. The organization did not spread in the same way that a modern corporation opens a new office by recruiting strangers through advertisements. It could move along already existing human connections.
Geography, in such a case, becomes an extension of kinship. And this forces us to look differently at the very structure of the ’Ndrangheta.
Its basic unit is considered to be the ’ndrina. This is not simply a subdivision in an administrative sense. Sources describe it as a kinship-based clan whose members are connected by blood ties. For this reason, leaving such a system is far more difficult than resigning from an organization or walking away from a group of acquaintances.
Betrayal here means breaking several kinds of bonds at once.
A person does not merely violate relations with accomplices.
He may sever relations with his own family, relatives, childhood environment, familiar circle of trust, and the system of ideas within which his identity was formed.
This is where one of the most unusual characteristics of the ’Ndrangheta lies: the criminal structure overlaps with the structure of kinship.
The organization gains something that cannot be created by command alone — family memory.
WHEN THE CHILD HAS NOT YET CHOSEN ANYTHING
There is a fundamental difference between a person recruited as an adult and a person raised within a particular system.
The first must be taught the rules. For the second, the rules may appear to be the natural order of things.
Criminologist Anna Sergi, in her research on the transmission of mafia culture and the protection of children in Calabria, draws particular attention to upbringing. Within the family, a child receives not only language, everyday habits, and ideas about elders. Along with them may be transmitted norms of silence, responsibility toward the family line, ideas about loyalty, and ways of relating to the outside world.
Sergi uses the concept of “black pedagogy” — a distorted form of education through which the values of a criminal environment may be reproduced as part of family socialization.
The role of parents is especially important here. The father may simultaneously function as the head of the family and as a figure involved in clan affairs. The mother becomes one of the primary mediators between the system of values and the child: it is everyday upbringing that turns abstract rules into habits of behavior. This does not necessarily happen through formal lessons.
Culture is rarely transmitted that way. A child is not given a lecture on how one should relate to family. He observes whom adults trust. He hears what can be discussed and what must remain unspoken. He sees whom people respect, whom they fear, and whom they call a traitor. Gradually, out of hundreds of such episodes, a picture of the world emerges.
This is how language, religious ideas, family legends, and professional skills are transmitted. And criminal subculture can be transmitted in the same way. This is why the problem of the ’Ndrangheta is far more complex than the problem of an individual criminal. The state can arrest a person. But family memory cannot be arrested.
THE SECOND LIFE OF TRADITION
Modern people are accustomed to thinking of tradition as something connected with holidays, clothing, cuisine, crafts, the religious calendar, or national customs. From an anthropological perspective, however, tradition is much broader.
It is a mechanism of transmission. It preserves the answer to the question: “How are things done among us?”
And this is precisely why tradition itself is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. It can preserve a prayer, a craftsman’s skill, a method of growing grapes, or a family recipe. But the same mechanism can preserve blood feuds, rigid hierarchy, or criminal norms for centuries. This is the uncomfortable side of cultural resilience.
People usually admire the fact that a custom has survived for centuries. Yet longevity says nothing about the moral content of what has been preserved.
The ’Ndrangheta offers an especially vivid example of this contradiction.
Research into its internal culture draws attention to rituals, codes of conduct, symbolic representations, and its own hierarchy. Historical documents show that elements of such an order already existed in the nineteenth century. Violations of internal norms could lead to exclusion, while the disclosure of secrets was treated as one of the gravest offenses.
The organization, therefore, protected itself not only physically. It created a norm. And a norm is far more durable than an order. An order works while the person capable of enforcing it is present. A norm continues to operate even when no one is watching. It is at this point that external coercion becomes internal.
“SACRED DUTIES”
The language used by historical sources to describe the rules of early criminal associations in Calabria is especially revealing. Their obligations could be defined as “sacred.” For a scholar of culture, this word matters.
Why would a criminal community need sacred language at all?
Because sacralization turns a rule into something greater than an administrative requirement. If a leader says, “Do not betray your associate because I forbid it,” we are dealing with discipline. If a person is taught that loyalty is connected with honor, duty, brotherhood, belonging, and the fundamental order of his world, we are dealing with a much more powerful mechanism.
This is why research on the ’Ndrangheta sometimes raises the theme of a kind of “practical religion” within the criminal environment — not religion in a theological sense and not an independent faith, but a system of symbols, ritualized norms, and worldview explanations that grant supreme authority to internal rules.
A clear boundary is necessary here.
The use of religious symbolism by a criminal organization does not make criminal practice itself religious, nor does it connect that practice with Christian teaching. On the contrary, what we see is an example of how sacred forms familiar to society can be appropriated by an entirely different system.
A symbol can change its function. What in one cultural context speaks of moral obligation before God and other human beings may, within a criminal subculture, be used to reinforce silence, obedience, and group loyalty. Thus a dangerous substitution emerges: a criminal norm acquires the language of sacred duty.
RITUAL AS A BOUNDARY
Ritual often appears to modern people as a remnant of the past. Yet its social function remains extraordinarily powerful. Ritual marks transition. Before it, a person was one thing; afterward, he becomes another. Baptism, marriage, a military oath, monastic tonsure, a university ceremony — cultures continuously create actions that transform a change of status into an event that cannot be confused with an ordinary day. Closed communities use the same anthropological mechanism.
This is why the rituals of the ’Ndrangheta are interesting not because of their exotic character. It is far more important to understand why they exist. They create a boundary between “us” and “them.” It is not enough for a new member simply to know other people. His belonging must be confirmed by the system itself.
Through repeated forms, symbolic actions, words, and obligations, the collective tells the person: your biography is now connected with ours. What emerges is a kind of machinery of identity. And it works precisely because it uses some of the oldest mechanisms of human culture.
A FAMILY YOU CANNOT RESIGN FROM
An ordinary bureaucratic organization constantly faces the problem of trust. An employee may move to a competitor. A subordinate may reveal information. A newcomer is unknown to the group. His past must be checked. A kinship-based system solves much of this problem before formal agreements even appear. People know one another’s origins. Parents know parents. A person’s history becomes part of the history of the family line.
This helps explain why the family principle is so important to the ’Ndrangheta. Research on family dynasties emphasizes continuity, the education of the next generation, and the accumulation of experience. Knowledge, connections, and models of behavior do not disappear with a single leader: they can be transmitted further.
This mechanism is also well known in entirely legal family enterprises.
Researchers of family business Joseph Lambrecht and Rik Donckels described the formation of a family dynasty as a long-term process extending across several generations. Juha Kansikas and Mikhail Nemilentsev likewise drew attention to the way intergenerational transmission supports the corporate identity of family businesses. But this is exactly where a fundamental conflict of interpretations appears.
On the one hand, we are dealing with a universal mechanism of culture: the older generation teaches the younger, the family accumulates knowledge, family history creates a sense of belonging, and shared values support unity.
On the other hand, the very same mechanism can be integrated into a criminal system. And then family loyalty ceases to be merely a private moral relationship between people who are close to one another. It becomes an infrastructure of power.
NOT AN ORGANIZATION, BUT A DYNASTY
Anna Sergi proposes that the ’Ndrangheta should also be understood through the concept of dynasties. This perspective significantly alters the picture.
An organization is easy to imagine as a pyramid: a leader at the top, several layers of management beneath him, and executors further down. Remove the upper level, and it seems that the whole structure should collapse.
A dynasty works differently. It contains horizontal and vertical kinship, ancestral memory, marriages, children, cousins, family obligations, and inherited relationships. Even if several key figures disappear, the social fabric does not fully disintegrate. For this reason, the ’Ndrangheta can preserve its structure under forms of pressure that would destroy an ordinary criminal group.
But family structure also has another side. If a child is born into such an environment, his belonging begins to take shape long before the possibility of conscious choice appears. This turns the problem of organized crime into a problem of personal freedom as well.
Where does family upbringing end and cultural coercion begin? Can a person freely reject a system if rejection simultaneously means conflict with family, the past, and one’s own identity?
This is precisely why the protection of children occupies such an important place in research on the Calabrian mafia. The issue is not simply the prevention of one specific crime. It is about the possibility of interrupting a mechanism of cultural inheritance.
WOMEN WITHIN THE SYSTEM
Popular culture long portrayed the mafia as an exclusively male world: men hold meetings, make deals, issue orders, commit murders; women remain somewhere behind the door.
Research presents a more complex picture. Even where formal power belongs predominantly to men, women may occupy an essential place in the reproduction of family culture. A mother is present with a child long before the child encounters the formal structure of the clan. It is through everyday life that the earliest ideas of what is permitted and forbidden are formed. The female figure inside a mafia family can therefore have a dual character. A woman may support the existing system by transmitting its norms to children.
But a woman may also become the point at which that system breaks. This is why stories of women who resisted the mafia environment are so important. The book The Good Mothers, which received considerable attention from researchers and journalists, brought to the foreground women who were not merely passive witnesses of the criminal world but figures of resistance to it.
For a scholar of culture, this is fundamental. Tradition is never transmitted automatically. It requires people in order to continue. Therefore, it also requires people in order to end.
THE “UNIVERSITY” THAT DOES NOT EXIST ON A MAP
Another unusual perspective appears in the research of Oleg Maltsev devoted to the Calabrian criminal tradition. He describes the ’Ndrangheta through the model of a kind of “university” — an internal system of preparation in which there are distinct levels, norms, methodology, worldview foundations, and mechanisms for acquiring skills.
The word “university” here, of course, does not mean an educational institution in the conventional sense. It refers to a model for reproducing the kind of person the system requires. This is an extremely important distinction.
It is not enough for an organization to acquire a loyal participant. It needs a person who knows how to act in a specific way, understands the rules, can make decisions within a given worldview, and experiences the requirements of the system as his own. Upbringing therefore becomes no less important than leadership. If such a system truly begins at an early age, then what we are dealing with is not merely a criminal organization teaching people how to commit crimes.
We are dealing with a subculture attempting to produce its own type of personality. And this is another reason for its resilience. A person is not simply inserted into the structure. The structure is placed inside the person.
WHY WE ALMOST NEVER SEE THIS
Open a news feed and search for stories about the ’Ndrangheta. Familiar words quickly appear before the reader: cocaine, arrests, millions of euros, confiscations, murders, corruption. All of these themes are real.
The ’Ndrangheta remains a dangerous criminal organization linked to serious crimes and transnational networks. Any discussion of its culture must not turn into romanticization of the mafia. But the logic of news creates a specific optical effect. It shows events very well. It shows mechanisms much less effectively.
A police operation has a date, a number of arrests, and photographs of confiscated property. Family socialization lasts twenty years and rarely appears in front of a camera. Tons of seized cocaine can be placed on a table before journalists. The transmission of ideas from father to son is far more difficult to photograph.
As a result, the public image of the ’Ndrangheta becomes paradoxical: we constantly see the consequences of the system at work, yet we far less often observe what enables that system to reproduce itself. This is precisely where a scientific perspective becomes necessary. It asks not only the question “What happened?” but a more uncomfortable one:
“Why can this happen again?”
CULTURE DOES NOT ALWAYS SAVE
The history of the ’Ndrangheta forces us to abandon one very convenient misconception — the idea of culture as something that automatically elevates human beings. Culture does indeed preserve memory.
It connects generations. It creates identity. It transmits values. It forms a sense of belonging. It teaches people how they should behave in the world.
But all of these properties are mechanisms of transmission, not guarantees of the morality of what is being transmitted. A family can teach responsibility. And it can also teach silence in the face of crime.
Tradition can preserve a craft. And it can preserve hostility.
Ritual can unite people around faith. And it can reinforce loyalty to a criminal community.
Ancestral memory can provide a person with support. And it can become a cage from which escape is extraordinarily difficult.
This is why the ’Ndrangheta is of interest far beyond criminology.
It reveals one of the fundamental mechanisms of human society in an extreme form: the more deeply a system can enter the family, upbringing, symbols, and ideas of duty, the less often it needs to recreate itself from the beginning.
People begin to reproduce it themselves. In their own homes. In conversation. In silence. In the way they relate to children. In their ideas about honor and betrayal. In the memory of those who came before them.
The state can destroy a criminal network, confiscate its property, and imprison its leaders. But if the mechanism remains capable of producing people with the same system of loyalty, the struggle begins again. For this reason, the most important question in the history of the ’Ndrangheta may not be found in a police report at all. It is found in the family.
What exactly does one generation transmit to the next — and at what point does the inheritance of the past cease to be destiny?
Author: Anna Kaliuzhna
Sources
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