How the Crisis Helped Informality Re-enter the Temple: A New Sicilian Custom

This article builds upon ethnographic material collected mostly in the Sicilian coastal city of Messina and in its provincial area over the last twenty years. Through an examination of how publishers have changed their book launches, selling behaviour and venues following the global economic crisis, I suggest that a multilevel uncertainty produced by ambiguous practices has slowly turned informal transactions into culturally accepted norms within the community, as well as penetrating loci, both sacred and profane, previously denied to them.