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
•