Title: Mafia

General Information about Item:

• Customary folklore: games
• Language: English
• Country: USA

Informant Data:

• The informant is a Dartmouth ’18 female. She is active in the Native American Community on campus, SPCSA, and Sigma Delta. She is a Government and Native American Studies modified with Anthropology double major from Martha’s Vineyard. She went on cabin camping in September 2014, but never led a trip or was on a croo.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context: students will frequently play games while on trips to pass the time. By playing common games from almost everyone’s childhood, tripees have already established common ground. It also provides a little-pressure platform for interacting with each other without having to share a ton of personal information. Hopefully activities like Mafia lay the foundation for students to get to know each other on a deeper level later on as it creates a feeling of familiarity and comfort with each other.
• Cultural Context: Mafia is a group game commonly played among US children in childhood. It allows for participants to practice reading each other by requiring participants to guess who is lying. It also perpetuates American ideals of majority rules (sometimes regardless of the truth) by having participants vote to determine guilt. It also causes players to consider their place within the group of players and their individual goal to be the last one standing. Finally it encourages creativity on the part of the storyteller.

Item:

• Mafia is played as a group. One participant is the omniscient storyteller who directs the game rather than playing as a part of the group. He or she assigns a few group members to be mafia, a few to be policemen, and one/two to be the doctor. Everyone else is a townsperson. During a round, the storyteller will have the town go to sleep (close their eyes) and then ask the mafia to choose who to kill. Then mafia close their eyes and the doctor may pick someone to save. Then the police identify people who they think are mafia members. Finally everyone wakes up and guesses who they think are mafia and vote someone out of the game. Whoever is killed and not saved or voted out of the game is allowed to keep their eyes open for subsequent rounds but cannot speak or vote. The storyteller then tells a story about who got killed, who the doctor saved, and who was persecuted. The game repeats until the mafia has killed everyone or all the mafia have been taken out of the game.

Transcript of Informant Interview:

We played a lot mafia. We actually played so much mafia, because our cabin was pitch black during the daytime too, so if you wanted to take a nap (which we also did the whole time), it was pitch black so we’d play mafia. I was the best at it. It was a fun thing—we wouldn’t have had much to talk about if we didn’t play mafia constantly and come up with ridiculous stories.

Informant’s Comments:

• The informant says mafia was a game that everyone knew how to play and was good for the no-electricity conditions of their cabin. She also mentioned that many aspects of trips were like a return to childhood.

Collector’s Comments:

• The common ground provided by playing a popular childhood game that almost everyone is familiar with seems to allow students to get to know each other without having to really get to know each other. There is also an interesting parallel between engaging in childhood games to get to know each other and students’ own position as newly entering college and not knowing their peers. It makes sense that people would revert to the same techniques used in childhood to get to know others, because for most of them it is likely the first time since childhood that they didn’t know so many of the people that they would be in a community with for the next few years.

Collector’s Name: Clara Silvanic

Tags/Keywords:

• DOC trips, childhood games, mafia game, cabin camping