Rituals of Death: The Death penalty in the USA

Anthropologists look at the death penalty as a ritual of death much like the Aztec sacrifice of citizens to the god of the sun:

Lenny Bruce. In a series of articles he authored in “Playboy,” later published in his 1967 posthumous book, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” Bruce observed, “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”

THEN

• (Cooper 1976) looks at the socio-religious foundations of western execution
• state sanctioned homicide  (Camus) felt that it continued because it happened outside of the view of common citizens
• (Turnbull 1978): key is in the RITUAL
• (Lofland 1978) modern executions are emotionless, sterile and cold, and appear human on the surface, but deny the DEATH and strip the accused of the opportunity to die with dignity or courage

NOW

• but what about now that executions are reported and even televised?
• PDF FACTS
• What matters
• race of the VICTUM
• race of the DEFENDENT
• CLASS (marginal members of society)
• Mental capacity
• Who did the Aztecs sacrifice:
• war captives
• children of the poor
• women
• slaves
• Techniques: USA
• hanging
• firing squad
• electric chair
• deadly gas
• lethal injection
• techniques Aztecs
• beheading
• burning
• flights of arrows
• coronary execution

DEATH WATCH: Dead Man Walking

Post mortem: Reasons 

• aztecs: ritual and religious reasons were official explanation for the killings
• USA: more pragmatic reasons given
• punishment for crime
• deterent
• lower cost of execution to life sentence
• justice for victims families
• "social hygiene" clean up the gene pool
• "eye for an eye" (religious)
• "Society is in order, law reigns and god is in heaven"
• universal impulse to do something in times of stress?
• modern capitol punishment is an institutionalized magical response toto a percieved "disorder"  in American culture and society and in the world at large. a solution which has a special apear to "beleaguered, white, God-fearing men and women of the working class" In certain aspiring politicians they find their "sacrificial priests". 

25 societies that practiced human sacrifice

other explanations

human sacrifice among the Aztecs as cannibalism (cultural materialism)

•  Harner said that the “typical anthropological explanation is that the religion of the Aztecs required human sacrifices,” but that “this explanation fails to suggest why that particular form of religion should have evolved when and where it did” (Harner). 
• Instead, he said that the Aztec’s environment–specifically, their increasing population and decreasing amount of wild game and lack of domesticable herbivores (for protein). While there were fish and water fowl, 
• Harner believed the poor did not have access to these, and instead had to rely on scant insects and rodents. He also said the while maize and beans can provide all eight of the essential amino acids, they must be eaten in great quantity and at the same time to gain the reward, which was not always possible. 
• The human body, then, which craves what it lacked, turned toward human meat.
• Ironically! cannibalism was, for the most part, reserved for the elite classes, which also generally had the most access to other forms of protein. However, he stated that “even nobles could suffer from famines and sometimes had to sell their children into slavery in order to survive.” 
• because the humans sacrificed normally were prisoners of war and war is how one could rise to elite status (by brave fighting and obtaining many POWs), the poor were easily rallied to fight–should the obtain POWs, they would not only be able to attain protein for themselves, but they would also find themselves in a new social class.
• Montellano refuted Harner’s hypothesis: Because human sacrifices (and thus, occurrences of cannibalism) were highest at times of harvest and not during times of scarcity and also because the rate of cannibalism was highest in Tenochtitlan, which not only practiced intense, productive agriculture but also received food tributes, cannibalism among the Aztecs cannot be explained by ecological/dietary circumstances. 
• He stated that because protein deficiencies have the most impact on children and adolescents, and because those fighting in wars were adults who would not gain so many benefits from an extra protein ration, “75 percent of the population was supposed to be motivated to fight and die in the expectation of a possible future reward that could only be of real dietary value to their children.”
• the ideology of the Aztecs prompted them to cannibalize their victims. “The acquiescence of the sacrificed victims to their fate [of sacrifice] … is also explainable in terms of their religious ideology” (Montellano). 
• Just as Aztec ideology said that whether a man received rewards in the afterlife depended on his being either sacrificed to the gods or killed in battle, it said that sacrificial victims were sacred.
• “eating their flesh was the act of eating the god itself”  
• That they desired to achieve this union with god through consumption is also promulgated in their consumption of psychotropic plants.

Euthanasia: and Anthropological Perspective

The HIDDEN DIMENSION OF CULTURE

• Proponents of legalization focus on the issues of autonomy and relief from suffering of the individual. Opponents base their arguments on the sanctity of life, concerns about the "slippery slope" and the appropriate role of physicians (as those that save lives).
• The debate is conducted primarily by "experts" in social policy formation. 
• Together, these factors preclude a broader discussion of social norms and ideal and the manner in which legalization will affect social relations. 
• the social consequences of hidden expectations and obligations with respect to access to health care 
• allocation of resources 
• terminal and chronic illness 
• disability and difference 
• suffering
• the nature of death itself

QUESTION: How will our CULTURAL EXPECTATIONS change if we adopt physician assisted suicide?

• Durkheim's "altruistic suicide"
• these "voluntary" acts can be seen as acts of social conformity
• In most cases the abandonment or death was initiated by the old/infirm person, apparently to avoid becoming a burden to the group.  
• eskimo (aged)
• 19th century Sicily (aged)
• Japanese rural society (aged, warriors, shamed individuals)
• appear to increase under circumstances of scarcity
• decrease or increase according to socio-genie forces

"If suicide rates have been genuinely linked to socio-cultural expectations, what is to be gained by altering these expectations in such a way as to favor increased rates of suicide?" 

• Euthanasia from the perspective of the disabled
• proponents suggest that euthanasia is a an act of compassion for those that are in the final stages of a bearable life (assumptions):
• Euthanasia is a "good death" and that all want to end suffering
• that "death with dignity" -life with a profound disability is lacking in dignity
• Are these cultural ideas based in discrimination and stigmatization of the disabled?
• related to the encouragement of abortion for "disabled" fetuses (Down's syndrome, tay-Sacks, Sickle-cell, spina-bifida).
• Disabled consumers view medical professionals as controlling information given to terminally ill patients about future quality of life and prospects for pain and suffering 
• 
  suicide often means the removal of social burdens, including psychological, emotional and or financial burdens imposed by the chronically or terminally ill.
• The American cultural rhetoric, is changing from the language of caring to the language of efficiency and cost (dangerous?)
• independence and self-reliance are valued while dependence is stigmatized as undignified and shameful (problem for the old, disabled, dependent?) 

Seeking to address these concerns, disabled consumers focus on the following ethical and communication issues:

1. Providing severely disabled and terminally ill people with op- tions, including community-based, self-directed care.
2. Ensuring that consumers' decisions to discontinue life-pro- longing treatment or request euthanasia are durable.
3. Ensuring that consumers' decisions are made autonomously and reflect meaningful informed consent.
4. Providing continuity of care and access to universal health care, palliation and social service benefits.
5. Providing access to peer counseling by other disabled and/or terminally ill persons.
6. Developing quality of life criteria which reflect consumer preferences and avoid application of external standards of social worth to the lives of the disabled or terminally ill. 

Abortion and Infanticide

Article

The CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF PERSONHOOD is central to our discussion of Abortion as well as Suicide. (Lynn Morgan)

"Persohhood" is the process by which human lives become valued is derived from many factors:

• cultural divisions of the life-cycle
• attitudes about death
• social systems of descent and inheritance
• social systems of authority and achievement
• extenuating contextual factors mediating interpretation of a "life"

"when life begins" (this early threshold) is just one ISSUE in the larger question about WHO SOCIETY ALLOWS TO BECOME A PERSON, under what circumstances, and why.

Where do we find EVIDENCE of cultural notions of the origins of "personhood"?

• notions of the moral and social value of young children were uncovered through
• burial customs
• naming practices
• birth ceremonies and taboos
• "terms" (language) used to describe fetuses and young children
• In many cultures killing a fetus or a child is considered acceptable if it is not yet considered a "person" (infanticide will look at this debate more fully).

Human-ness versus Personhood: a fetus must first be determined to be HUMAN before it can be considered a PERSON.

• in some societies, the decision about humanness is not made until birth, when features are assessed.
• personhood is a socially recognized MORAL status.
• this may take days or months and it socially binds the child to the community
• IN THE US, there is no distinction in the life-cycle between these two events (humans and personhood) and so the abortion debate in the US, overlooks the fact that the life-cycle itself is socially patterned.

"Killing" Versus "Murder"

• the abortion debate in the US is argued largely through semantic association aimed at making the fetus a "person"
• baby, unborn child, product of conception vs fetus
• Human Life Amendment (1981

The Hogan Amendment

Section 1. Neither the United States nor any State shall deprive any human being, from the moment of conception, of life without due process of law; nor deny to any human being, from the moment of conception, within its jurisdiction, the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Neither the United States nor any State shall deprive any human being of life on account of illness, age, or incapacity.

Section 3. Congress and the several States shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Burke Amendment

Section 1. With respect to the right to life, the word 'person,' as used in this article and in the fifth and fourteenth articles of amendment to the Constitution of the United States, applies to all human beings, including their unborn offspring at every stage of their biological development, irrespective of age, health, function, or condition of dependency.

Section 2. No abortion shall be performed by any person except under and in conformance with law permitting an abortion to be performed only in an emergency when a reasonable medical certainty exists that the continuation of pregnancy will cause the death of the mother and requiring that person to make every reasonable effort, in keeping with good medical practice, to preserve the life of her unborn offspring.

Section 3. The Congress and the several States shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation within their respective jurisdictions.

The Paramount Amendment

The paramount right to life is vested in each human being from the moment of fertilization without regard to age, health, or condition of dependency.

• You "kill" a human, but you "murder" a person

Is the product of a birth ALWAYS a HUMAN?

• Arunta of Australia: a premature child is not considered human, because it is nothing like them, instead they consider it the young of another animal (kangaroo) improperly inside a woman.
• Thailand: women are said to have given birth to: a gold, a monkey stomach, a fish, jewels, a mouse-like golden child.
• Truk Islands: abnormal or deformed births were labeled as ghosts and burned or thrown into the sea
• not infanticide: a ghost is not a person and can not be killed anyway
• Tallensi of East Africa: TWINS are suspected of being malicious bush spirits, and not trusted as human.
• Twins are treated as humans after a few months, BUT are not given a guardian ancestor and seen as people until after about 4 years, when their personhood can be assessed
• Southern Africa: Twins (if they were allowed to live after birth) were regarded with suspicion. No one would ever marry a twin, lest they try to kill them in their sleep.

PERSONHOOD IS CONTINGENT ON SOCIAL RECOGNITION

• historically this has been denied to a variety of groups of people:
• women
• children
• slaves
• prisoners of war
• lepers
• the deaf
• ethnic groups
• insane
• other "defectives"
• there can be no definition of personhood separate from its social and cultural context

Evidence from Burial Practices:

• Chippewa consider any birth to be a human, so they give early term miscarriages and still birth burials like any other "person" would get.
• USA: under 500 grams, fetus is not "buried"
• birth certificate over 500 grams, but is mitigated by social class, where poor mothers are less likely to see their dead births classified as "human"
• Ashanti: before adolescence, not given a ritual burial (adulthood designated person status)

Social Birth:

• Before the abortion debate, no one would have considered the fetus a "person" partly because an essential component of personhood, "SEX" was unknown.
• Birth itself marked both humanness and personhood.
• Based on the belief that BIOLOGICAL events have significance
• CHANGE (1973) Now instead of BIRTH being the darker of biological and social existence in the US, "VIABILITY" became a measure of biological and social significance.
• In Many cultures, SOCIAL "birth" is recognized much later on and is marked by various rituals
• ear piercing
• hair cutting
• naming
• depilation (body hair removal)
• removal of incisor teeth
• circumcision
• This may also be a long PROCESS, where various benchmarks must be met before one moves to the next stage of personhood. "rights" are always dependent on the continual completion of these stages.
• LIFE-CYCLE periods are also variant among cultures.It is common for stages like "infant" and "adolescent" to be absent in non-western cultures, where these categories are not recognized.

PERSONHOOD ACROSS CULTURES

• Javanese: To be a person is to be "Javanese" and flagrantly immoral, small children, insane, and insolent are said to be ndurung kjawa 'not yet Javanese'
• Nuer: people do not mourn for a small child. A small child is not yet ran, 'a person' at a bout 6 years of age when they can begin to contribute to the daily life of a kin group, they are considered a person.
• 1950's Korea: Death of an infant is not recognized. Personhood is a process.

biological birth acknowledges "potential", but is not a recognition of "personhood" in many cultures. Personhood is a socially and culturally recognized fact.

BIRTH AS A RITE OF PASSAGE

• Birth itself is a SEPARATION
• Everything that follows ritually, is part of the transition to personhood (circumcision, bathing, rubbing, hurrying the placenta, cutting the umbilical cord, food and behavioral taboos by mother , father and infant,physical separation from the mother)
• the rites are indicative of the LIMINALITY of the stage between BIRTH and PERSONHHOOD.
• taboos must be followed
• rituals must be observed
• all intended to help with the transition from human to person.
• often treated as a period of seclusion like being in the womb (children are not yet FULLY born)
• Philipines: strict seclusion in a room with a raised well-sealed floor and closed windows for two weeks
• Yavapai (Amazon):mother and infant remained in seclusion for 6 days on a bed of warm coals covered with grass.
• EXPLANATIONS:
• Ghana: child may be reclaimed by spirits, if it is a "spirit child". If it is, it will "die" before the 7 day seclusion is up and the body will be mutilated and buried in spot, so that this does not happen again. Parents are not permitted to mourn. It takes 7 days to know if the child is human.
• Ashanti: in this traditional matrilineal culture, the child is given its "spirit" nioro by the father.If the child survives 8 days with no special care while in seclusion, it is given a Nteatea ceremony by the father's lineage, and it is given its spirit. Until then it is potentially a "spirit child" and not yet born.
• Todo (India): keep child indoors for three months, until it is brought out to "meet the sun" (and all the other players in the social world). Until then the child's face can not see the sun, and they are not a person.
• Hopi: have a "meet the sun" ceremony where the mother was purified and the baby was named as it "met the sun".
• Bariba (Benin): babies could be born witches, and therefore must be identified shortly after birth so that they do not endanger the health of the mother or the community.
• Mohave: once a child has "suckled' on its mother's breast, it is a person and can not be killed with out sanction.
• Ancient Athens: A child could be killed before the naming ceremony Amphidromia
• 17th and 18th century England: infanticide was practiced and it was frowned upon, but since personhood was incremental, it was seen as less heinous than killing an adult, 
• Brazil: Death Without Weeping article. We see that Poor Catholic women allow see their babies as "unwilling to thrive" "not wanting to live"
• practice indifference to them/dont care for them if they seem weak
• dont bury them or have a funeral
• DISCUSS THIS ARTICLE IN DETAIL AFTER THE BREAK!!!!!
• WATCH CITIZEN RUTH (for discussion)

During these "trial periods", the infant must prove that they are worthy of personhood. first by managing to survive, and then by displaying the vigor and affect of someone who is destined to be a member of the community. If it does not pass these tests, it may be neglected, or killed without repercussion..

• INFANTICIDE is condemned, but only after the child is noted to be a person. In societies where they lack the means to kill a child BEFORE birth, these liminal periods are times in which killing is permissible.
• WEANING: Children are often considered appendages of their mothers until WEANED. 
• Yanomami: if a woman died in childbirth her (live) infant would be buried with her. If both survived, the child would be named after it was weaned.
• NAMING: as the quintessentia...in many cultures, there is no penalty for the killing of a child that is not yet named.
• Naming may have prevented infanticide
• Among the Inuit of the Arctic, a child was named after a deceased relative and so "reincarnating" their spirit. The child then became a known part of the social intercourse of the community
• In cultures that suffer from extreme poverty, the naming of children is often delayed as a way to stave off the disappointment of death (high rates of infant mortality)-emotional deprivation is part of economic scarcity (Brazil)
• Himalayas: Children's names are not spoken becasue they do not want to identify them to spirits that may endanger them (emotional attachment to name avoidance)
• Hindu: named by a Brahmin priest after the 10th day, but not called by their names for fear of the evil eye. (emotional attachment---but see vulnerability). Babies are often depicted in pictures with large birth marks so as not to make them too beautiful.

Why is it "Murder"?

• Factors
• the "status" of the mother (wet nurse, indigent mother, upper class woman)
• Female status and FETAL status are linked (sometimes this affords a woman higher status, sometimes lowers status)

QUESTIONS:
In the United States, the abortion debate has been constrained, by a culture-bound discourse on  "personhood". Because biological birth is seen as the event which designates both humaness and personhood, the only space to "negotiate" is the period before birth. the conversation is about "where on the spectrum" do we determine a child is "viable"/alive/human/a person? We disregard any definitions of the personhood of the mother, or any other aspects of this debate. 

• How have our TECHNOLOGIES (ultrasound, amniocentesis, etc) contributed to our changing ideas of "personhood"
• "gender reveal parties"???? What does this say? How does this impact the debate?
• Ultrasound "birth" announcements/baby pictures on facebook, etc. What up?

mizuko kuyd ---literally refers to a kayo 供養or memorial service conducted in most cases by Buddhist priests for the spirits of mizuko 水子，meaning “water child or children” and referring normally to an aborted fetus (induced or spontaneous) but also to stillborn infants and those who die soon after birth.

• This service is in part intended as consolation to the mother, as the one most directly affected, but often with other members of the family in mind as well. 
• Westernization and Urbanization: with the gradual devolution of the traditional family system in modern urban areas the responsibility for abortion, which used to be shared by the local community in Edo Japan, must now often “be borne in secret completely by the individual”

The Paradox of Abortion: 

• "The quality of life pitted against life.Whichever we choose, we lose. And that, too, is part of being human. That too is the dilemma of abortions” 
• Legality of Abortion
• abortion has been legal in the United States only since 1973
• Japan passed the Eugenic Protection Law in 1948 (with revisions in 1949 and 1952), making abortion legally possible for the first time. 

Living Will

Free Living Will Templates by State

Advice for Creating a Living Will

Suicide

How do we talk about and understand such a CULTURALLY LADEN act like SUICIDE (which has such taboo and negative implications in American Culture)?

• How do we understand how cultural practices of making sense of suicide?
• How do we understand the multitude of questions and answers about agency, personhood, and death within specific  knowledge around the issue of suicide?
• What are our assumptions about free will, suffering, authorship, power and personhood and about “the very quality of life experienced by someone who chooses to die” (Marks 2003: 308). 
• Is there an ambivalent position of agency in contemporary understandings of suicide
• rationalizations of suicide events—popular, expert and scientific—
• ideas about human personhood, the morality of death, and the human capacity to voice dissent and act politically through self-inflicted death. 

According to Emile Durkheim’s (A Study in Sociology, New York, The Free Press, 1951) theory on suicide, he concluded that there are four different types of suicide.

• various sociologically factors and influences were at work such as work pressure, financial, religious, marital to name just a few.
• four types of suicide:
• Egoistic suicide.
• Altruistic suicide.
• Anomic suicide.
• Fatalistic suicide.

(1). Egoistic:

According to Durkheim, this type of suicide was a consequence of the deterioration of social and familial bonds. It occurred when an individual was detached from others in his/her community

• Individuals not sufficiently tied to social groups (i.e., those with well-defined, stable values, traditions, norms, and goals) had little social support and/or guidance, and therefore tended to commit suicide. The bonds that normally integrated individuals into the group had weakened, leading to a breakdown in social integration.
• During his research, Durkheim discovered that unmarried individuals committed suicide at higher rates than married, especially single males, who had less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals. Loosely-bound liberal Protestant groups had higher suicide rates than Catholics and Jews, because in the latter regular religious participation was mandated.

(2). Altruistic:

With altruistic suicide, Durkheim argued that certain suicide types occurred among tightly knit groups when they came under severe threat; in such situations, members were prepared to die in the group’s defense. Here individuals were integrated into the social group to such a degree that they lost sight of their own individuality; they were willing to sacrifice themselves to the group’s interests, even if that sacrifice was their own life.

• According to Durkheim, the most common cases of altruistic suicide occurred among members of the military.--soldiers who knowingly gave up their lives for their country were in effect committing suicide. (This assertion was controversial because it seemingly diminished the valor of those actions).

(3). Anomic:

Durkheim linked the third type of suicide, anomic, to disillusionment and disappointment. (Anomie was a concept Durkheim developed to describe a state where social and/or moral norms were confused, unclear, or simply not present. In short, normlessness).

• when a society completely broke down, the lack of norms and restrictions on behavior would engender suicidal behavior. If these external guidelines were absent, there would be nothing in place to restrain people’s aspirations and/or appetites.
• This type of suicide can occur when societies change drastically due to industrialization, economic expansion, massive layoffs, and so forth.
• In cultural contact, the traditional values of Indigenous peoples are undermined. Some members, unable to identify with the cultural values imposed upon them, can lose their sense of belonging.
• Durkheim subdivided this type into four sub-categories: acute and chronic economic anomie, and acute and chronic domestic anomie.

4). Fatalistic:

According to Durkheim, fatalistic suicide occurred within tightly knit groups whose members sought, but could not attain escape. Examples cited included individuals with over-regulated, unrewarding lives such as slaves, childless married women, and young husbands. Slaves might commit suicide in order to demonstrate control over their lives.

• if a society espoused suicide as an act beneficial in some situations for social welfare, then social ties and integration in such a society could foster suicide. One such example occurred in various aboriginal communities when elders voluntarily went off to die so as not to be a burden.

In studying suicide, Durkheim’s aim was to explain why some groups endure higher suicide rates and why rates varied over time. Two limitations to Durkheim’s system for classifying these types:

• does not clarify as to why one individual commits suicide while other members of the same group do not; it has difficulty elucidating why some individuals succumb to societal pressures and others do not
• The four types of suicide overlap and may, in some cases, be difficult to differentiate.

CULTURAL ATTITUDES TOWARD SUICIDE

• The Catholic Church treated suicide as a sin. 
• Islam features a specific verse in the Quran, stating “do not destroy yourselves.”
• Latin American Catholocism: “The tradition that suicides are more likely to come back as ghosts, that belief doesn’t so much discourage suicide as it stigmatizes it" (Magliocco).
• The Japanese act of seppuku, a ritualistic disembowelment from the samurai tradition, makes suicide into an honorable act.

• “If you were to continue that spiritual meaning from the Buddhist tradition, especially from the Samurai ethic, it is actually a brave and courageous act which maintains honor for the situation at hand,” (Lee) 
• religious deprivation of the body, and how people can die and be released to find salvation.
• starving oneself to death to attain enlightenment (Nath Yogis)
• Sutti among Brahmin wives
• Jihad among "Allah's warriors"
• Massada (Biblical Jews)

Suicide asks central questions about the human condition. 

• anthropologists James Staples and Tom Widger argue that “[q]uestions of existence, survival, and coping …, are surely crucial for human beings everywhere, and go straight to the centre of anthropological enquiry” (Staples and Widger 2012: 185)
• anthropology has been a latecomer to the systematic study of suicide. Anthropology has historically aimed at generalizing cultural forms (e.g. norms, types, structures, patterns) uncovered through long-term ethnographic engagements with everyday life contexts, thus focusing on regular and quotidian rather than the exceptional and contingent. 
• Most human societies tend to treat suicides not as idiosyncratic and exceptional ways of dying 
• the "psychosciences" and disciplines psychology, psychiatry, and their cognates” (Rose 1998: 3), fields that have contributed to the medicalization and pathologization of suicide since the nineteenth century. 
• medicalization has rationalized suicide in terms of pathology
• quantification has demonstrated statistical correlations between suicide and other (national) indicators of health and well-being of populations. 
• Illustrate the tension of agency: the dialectic of agency and patiency. 
• "On the one hand, they build on a specific Western notion of agency and subjectivity by defining the object of study—suicide—as intentional, agentive action. This intentionality distinguishes suicide sharply from “normal ways of dying.” 
• On the other hand, these knowledge regimes partly deny agency (as free will) to the suicidal person by invoking allegedly universal causes that are beyond the individual’s (conscious) control and possibly outside of their personhood altogether, such as depression, serotonin levels, gender, genetics, sexual orientation, or financial crises. This tension of agency, the simultaneous reliance on and denial of agency, sometimes comes with a dismissal of situated political and cultural meanings of self-destructive acts in suicidology"
• widespread classification of suicides as a “bad death” (Seale and van der Geest 2004).
• Suicide, Parry and Bloch argue, is the “supreme example of bad death”: the self-destruction of a person “is regarded with such incomparable horror” in many cultures because their “soul may forever be excluded from the society of the dead and must wander the earth as a lonely and malignant ghost, while the corpse may not be accorded the normal rites of disposal …” (Bloch and Parry 1982: 16). 
• What makes most suicides “bad” deaths seems to be the agentive decision to end one’s life 
• Attempts at locating agency outside of the suicidal person have historically been important in deflecting moral or legal sanction away from the suicidal person or, as we prefer to call them, the suicidé. 
• Suicide events are often assumed to point toward broader social problems in the wider world. 
• The central challenge for an anthropology of suicide is to uncover and describe the peculiar tension of agency prevalent in specific ethnographic settings, including in their inhabitants’ explanatory repertoire and in the explanatory repertoire of anthropology itself.

DISCIPLINING SUICIDE

• transformed suicide from sin to mental disease and thereby relocated it into the realm of medical sciences -PATHOLOGIZED, and MEDICALIZED (eurocentric)
• the sociological thesis detached suicide from moral consideration at the individual level by treating suicide rates as quantitative indicators of social constraints on the individual.

SUICIDE AND PERSONHOOD: Who and What Dies

• Melanesia and elsewhere are, “not the repository of a unitary or bounded identity but rather composed of social relations, and in this sense [thinkable] as ‘dividual’ or ‘partible’ entities” (Carsten 2003: 94) .(“inherently social.”) 
• the Mayan conception of personhood, in which “every person can extend into every other person that occupies the same place.” 
• in Altai (Siberia) domestic animals are a part of the personhood of their master and that they execute his or her agency. 
• In India  several notions of a person may be applied simultaneously: Those engaged in suicide in India constitute themselves—and are constituted by others—both as individual agents who undertake unilateral acts intended, at the moment they occur, to result in particular outcomes; and as dispersed, fluid dividuals, where intent and consequences of a suicidal act are situated across a number of social agents—including parents and family members, spirits, and the evil eye.

SUICIDE AND POWER: Suicide Against Power/The Body as Protest

• Seen through the lens of power relations, acts of suicide are not only about death and dying but also about life and the living. 
• In Sri Lanka, “are rarely concerned with dying but seeking new ways of living.” 
• Andriolo describes protest suicides as “embodied minding,” the quite literal inscription of a political message onto the body of the protester: 
• “Protest suicide is dying with a message, for a message, and of a message. The body becomes the site on which self-destructive mimesis denounces the wrongs that humans have wrought” (Andriolo 2006: 102). 
• the role of body parts in the tactical employment of suicide bombing by Palestinian combatants: one could argue that there is no message inscribed into these bodies, but that the blood, organs, and other body parts of the suicide attacker are themselves a necro-political pollutant with the potency to re-classify space as Palestinian instead of Israeli. 
• hunger strikers in Northern Ireland, 
• South Asian self-immolations,
• South Korean farmer-activist who stabbed himself at the World Trade Organization’s Cancún summit
• less spectacular suicides (compared to public protest suicides) by young people (Staples this volume), indebted farmers (Münster this volume), or older women (Chua this volume) may function as political acts, indictments against structures of constraint, or performances of “J’accuse” in the face of power, or how even quotidian suicide can create, as Widger (this volume) puts it, “opportunities for social and moral action and commentary.” 
• copycat suicides in high school, etc.
• A focus on the role of structural violence (Farmer 2004) and resistance may render the suicide just another “reflection” of political economic changes beyond the control of the individual. (The agency of the suicidé is reduced to victimhood; their death ultimately becomes an effect of power.)

Suicide and Righteousness

• Hari-Kari
• Sutti
•