Scholars apply double standards in dismissing mafia ritual while accepting analogous ones.

Evidence

Scholars themselves are divided. Perhaps under the influence of conventional rationalism or Marxist prudery some authors seem ill at ease when faced with The nonrational and simply ignore the mythology, implicitly considering it irrelevant, a mere drop of superstructural dressing. Substituting disbelief for disregard, others write off the symbolism as pure fantasy, or at most exaggeration by outsiders with a vested interest in inflating the phenomenon, notably journalists and policemen (see Smith 1975, which detects connections between the world of the media and the mafia mystique and Hess 1973: 92ff., which criticizes the all too easy propensity to mythologize a prosaic reality). The latter group accommodates, however, a more extreme position which ridicules as fabrication not just the symbology but the mafia as a whole. As with the case of organization, it appears easy for some scholars to dismiss out of hand evidence they unquestioningly accept with regard to noncriminal agents. Freemasons, for instance, or even Oxbridge colleges engage in ceremonies and rituals of a kind that an outsider, equipped with a narrow and conventionally rational mind, would no doubt find astonishing. Why should mafiosi be, ipso facto, exempt from such activities? — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 332

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Gambetta-model framing: the ritual/symbolic layer is functional for protection-market signaling, echoing Schelling on commitment devices and the credibility such symbols confer.