A changing Sicily: homage to Jane and Peter Schneider

The research that Jane and Peter Schneider carried out in Sicily, in the little Agrigentine town of Villamaura in the 1970s and later in the area of Palermo until 2000, made an important contribution to the work of social scientists who have chosen Sicily as a site from which to contribute to the debates on the Mafia, codes of honor, reproductive behavior, and the relationship between modernity and backwardness and between society and culture. These studies bring together perspectives that draw on both the anthropology of Mediterranean societies and on historical demography in ways that have developed new and innovative research paradigms and methodologies, and have opened up new fields of research relating to family history, sexual behavior, and the relationship between individuals and Sicilian institutions in the modern and contemporary periods.