Genocide and anthropology

Genocide: Conceptual Foundations

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
• Article II, 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention 

Fein defines genocide as a:
``sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.'' 

From an anthropological perspective:

the UN Convention definition is highly problematic because it: 

• privileges certain social categories ± race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality over others. While the marking of social difference is a human universal, the categories into which we parse the world are culturally constructed. 

Is genocide a product of modernity?

The Holocaust constituted a tragic coalescence of several aspects of modernity.

• With the emergence of Enlightenment ideals of equality and the uniform citizen, race became a new way of differentiating human beings. also PROGRESS
• Science was enlisted in the effort to create a new hierarchy of the human and not fully human, on top of which the Aryan race stood predominant.
• Bauman distinguishes such racism (the thoroughly modern construction of a racial social order that may be modified and ``improved'' through social engineering) from two types of prejudice: 

• ``heteropho- bia'' (general fear and anxiety about the unfamiliar) and 
• ``contestant enmity'' (more specific group hostility toward threatening ``others''). 

Several other dimensions of modernity facilitated the Nazis' racist ambitions. 

• With the rise of the nation-state, power and the means of force are increasingly centralized under state control. Science and technology make this power all the more lethal. 
• To optimize``efficiency,''work tasks are increasingly specialized and divided, culminating in impersonal bureaucracies that substitute technical proficiency for moral responsibility. 
• As the division of labor is specialized, each bureaucrat becomes another step removed from the task that is ultimately performed. 
• This distance, in turn, facilitates dehumanization, as the human beings whose lives are affected by the task lose their distinctiveness, becoming objects often referred to in euphemistic language. 
• In Nazi Germany, the result was a bureaucrat like Eichmann, who efficiently carried out his tasks, unconcerned about the dehumanized individuals he thereby helped annihilate. 
• While bureaucracy is not inherently genocidal, Bauman argues, it has the potential to facilitate lethal projects of social engineering, particularly when other moral safeguards break down. 
• This is precisely what happened in Nazi Germany, as religious leaders, politicians, and intellectuals stood by ± or even applauded or helped out ± while Hitler's government annihilated Jews and other ``contaminating''groups. 
• Bauman recognizes that many Nazis were brutal anti- Semites.Anti-Semitism alone,however,cannot account for the modern character of the Holocaust. 

ETIC versus EMIC categories to identify targeted groups

• anthropologists have a problem with the UN convention because it privileges etic explanations like ethneic group, race, religion and not internal classifications (Hutu, Tutsi) 

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
• 
  

Is "Killing" Genetically Programmed?

THE KILLING FIELDS

The judicial process of the Khmer Rouge regime, for minor or political crimes, began with a warning from the Angkar, the government of Cambodia under the regime. People receiving more than two warnings were sent for "re-education", which meant near-certain death. People were often encouraged to confess to Angkar their "pre-revolutionary lifestyles and crimes" (which usually included some kind of free-market activity; having had contact with a foreign source, such as a U.S. missionary, international relief or government agency; or contact with any foreigner or with the outside world at all), being told that Angkar would forgive them and "wipe the slate clean." They were then taken away to a place such as Tuol Sleng or Choeung Ek for torture and/or execution.

The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, the executions were often carried out using poison, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks. In some cases the children and infants of adult victims were killed by having their heads bashed against the trunks of Chankiri trees, and then were thrown into the pits alongside their parents. The rationale was "to stop them growing up and taking revenge for their parents' deaths."

Some victims were required to dig their own graves; their weakness often meant that they were unable to dig very deep. The soldiers who carried out the executions were mostly young men or women from peasant families.

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE VIOLENCE IN HUMAN SOCIETIES?

• Violence is a By-Product of Urges ?
• Daly and Wilson argued that "murderous actions are usually the by-product of urges towards some other goal." 
• The purpose of the sometimes violent competition that goes with human urges for higher status and greater reproductive success is not to kill, any more than the purpose of its stylized quintessence boxing is. But sometimes people die.

• Homicide is an Evolutionary Adaptation ? 
• David Buss, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Joshua Duntley, of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, have developed a controversial "homicide adaptation theory". 
• The theory proposes that, over evolutionary history, humans have repeatedly encountered a wide range of situations in which the benefits of killing another person outweighed the costs — particularly when the assessed costs of murder are low, success is likely and other non-lethal options have been closed off.
•  "Homicide can be such a beneficial solution to adaptive problems in certain, specific contexts that it would be surprising if selection had not fashioned mechanisms to produce lethal aggression," 
• Jose Maria Gomez, Homo sapiens are part of an especially violent lineage that goes back millions of years.
• Across the mammal spectrum, the rate of lethal violence against a member of the same species is about 0.30 percent, or a 1 in 300 chance of being killed by one of your own kind. For the ancestor of great apes (including us), it was 1.8 percent. And for humans at the origin point of our species, the rate bumps up to 2 percent, or a 1 in 50 chance of being murdered.
• Our species is, in other words, at the high point (such as it is) of a steady increase in intraspecies lethal violence that has been going on for about 100 million years.
• Evolution of "society" 
• the more social and territorial a species was, the more prevalent lethal member-against-member violence.
•  if you’re living with other members in a social group, there are simply more opportunities to get in a bloody tiff. 
• (and) if you’ve got limited resources, or you’re bent on protecting or expanding your neck of the woods, you’ve got more motive to enact violence on a competitor

The lighter the color, the less prevalent and lethal the intra-species violence

• Is Violence Inevitable  
• Humans got particularly bloody around 1,000 BC but, in the last 500 years or so, we have reduced the levels of violence
• The spike in carnage, at the start of the Iron Age, corresponds to a period when a sizable chunk of our species quit the hunter-gatherer game or left small settlements for comparatively larger urban areas.
• organizing states increased the competition for territory. 
•  the decrease in lethal violence that started around 500 years ago has accelerated. 
• In societies today with legal systems and law enforcement (“two separate yet equally important groups…”)
• a culture that rejects violence, murder rates are less than 1 in 10,000.
• Are we physically evolved for violence?
• Physical indicators, such as those studied by Carrier, can be viewed as evidence that selection for violence-enabling features has taken place. 
• Carrier sees “signs of design for aggression” everywhere on the human body: In a recent paper, co-authored with biologist Christopher Cunningham from Swansea University, he suggests that our foot posture is an adaptation for fighting performance. He has even proposed, as part of his fist-fighting hypothesis, that the more robust facial features of men (as opposed to women) evolved to withstand a punch.
• (article link)

• Gender: More MEN kill ?
• Evolutionary psychologists say that this is because men have evolved to compete more intensively than women in the race for status, material wealth and sexual partners. 
• In terms of the by-product theory, men are more likely to suffer the consequences when competition gets out of hand. This competitive kindling is at its most combustible in men of low socioeconomic status in regions of high social inequality, suffused with a sense of everything to gain and little to lose.
•  for women, the costs of such escalation have historically been higher: a woman risking death is a greater impact to the fate of children according to evolutionary biology
• men and women don't differ much in their experience of anger, the primary accelerator of aggression. 
• Anne Campbell, an evolutionary psychologist at Durham University, UK, suggests that the differences in aggressive behavior thus reflect differences in the strength of the factors controlling the behavioral expression of that anger.
• Developmental studies show that girls generally score higher on empathy measures, are more fearful and are better at controlling their behavior.(Campbell)

• Neuro-biology of Homicide?
•  Richard Davidson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that dysfunction in the brain circuits that normally inhibit emotional impulses — those associated with the prefrontal cortex — is a crucial prelude to violent outbursts
• Research:
• Among the brains of 41 murderers pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, they found lower activity (as measured by glucose metabolism) in the prefrontal cortex, and greater activity in structures in the limbic system, thought to drive aggression, than they found in non-murderous brains.
• Raine: the difference in the average volume of the orbitofrontal cortex between men and women accounts for about half of the variation in antisocial behavior between the sexes.
• Is there a link between homicidal behavior and the capacity to follow moral guidelines?
• Parts of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala that are abnormal in violent individuals and murderers are activated when making moral judgments. Raine and Yang have proposed that these systems serve as the engine that translates moral feelings into behavioral inhibition — an engine that has blown a gasket in the antisocial, violent and murderous 

• Is Violence at the Root of Social Organization?
• The roots of chimpanzee warfare lie in the social organization and behavioral ecology of their societies. 
• Although chimps live in communities of around 150, they are rarely all found together. Instead they typically travel around their territory in parties of up to 20 animals. From time to time, a roaming party from one group will cross paths with a roaming party of another. If they are of equal size, there will be a lot of screaming and charging. When there is an imbalance of power, the larger party will often try to isolate and attack an enemy chimpanzee, sometimes holding their victim down while the frantically excited attackers hail down lethal blows.(Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham)
• By dominating or eliminating neighboring communities, aggressors can expand their range, which means a better food supply, healthier adults and faster reproduction
• Raids on neighboring communities are also common in anthropologists' accounts of small-scale human societies. 
• a small band of men leaves its home ground, sneaks up on the neighbors and tries to kill one or more of them. 
• Data for inter-group human conflicts in numerous subsistence-farmer and hunter–gatherer societies assembled by anthropologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Overall, humans and chimpanzees showed comparable levels of violent death from aggression between groups.

HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

• 'War' is a broad term, "In major international wars people do what they do mainly because it is their duty in the role they occupy; combatants in institutionalized wars do not fight primarily because they are aggressive," says Hinde.
• some of the normal machinery that inhibits violence — the moral engine — might become selectively disengaged in warring armies. 
• Ideology, propaganda and denigration of the out-group can harden the barrier between 'us' and 'them', — As a result, killing comes to feel permissible. Even, sometimes, right.
• What about comparisons of aggression and killing within groups? 
• Chimps often turn on their own, particularly infants and young adults. 
• in-group killing exceeds death from between-group conflict in at least some chimp communities. 
• Humans in small societies, by contrast, die much less frequently from fights within their group than from group battles. 
• Anthropologist Victoria Burbank of the University of Western Australia in Crawley has recorded rates of non-lethal acts of physical aggression in an aboriginal Australian population; chimps display such behavior 200 times more frequently, if not more.
• Prosocial lack of violence looks like a fundamental aspect of human nature — the human ability to generate in-group amity often goes hand in hand with out-group enmity. 
• altruism and war co-evolve, promoting conflict between groups and greater harmony within them
• "Your group was more successful if you cooperated with its members but not with outsiders." (in human evolution)
• And there is evidence that this risk is reducing further in studies of death rates from both inter-group homicide and intra-group warfare, both of which seem to have plummeted over the millennia. (if violence is decreasing...what other factors would make it increase?)
• Criminologist Manuel Eisner at the University of Cambridge has documented a trend of declining homicide rates estimated from historical records left by coroners, royal courts and other official sources spanning Europe from the twelfth century to the modern day. 
• After rising from an average of 32 homicides per 100,000 people per year in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to 41 in the fifteenth, the murder rate has steadily dropped in every subsequent century, to 19, 11, 3.2, 2.6 and finally 1.4 in the twentieth century.
• Eisner rules out better policing and improved medical treatment as causes of the decline for the simple reason that it started before professional police forces appeared and techniques for dealing with wounds became more effective. 
•  A part of the answer that is consistent with an evolutionary approach is a long-term reduction in inequalities of life circumstances and prospects — 
• "In places such as Sweden where every cabbie drives a Mercedes," says Daly, "people don't bother to kill so often."
•  When contested resources are made more plentiful, he says, conflict over resources decreases and homicide rates drop.(Duntley)

MORAL REARMAMENT

• Societal specifics play a part as great as or greater than that of any evolutionary generalities.
• countries with the highest homicide rates are typically plagued by familial feuding and blood revenge
•  The death toll was frequently exacerbated by cultures laying weight on a male strength in arms and a willingness to demonstrate it. 
• violence was particularly prevalent in élites, who would often use it with impunity against their social inferiors. 
• violence as a phenomenon of lower-class youths — the sort of violence Daly and Wilson have studied in Chicago crime statistics — is a recent trend.
• Deescalating Violence: 
• Cultural/social institutions that determine who owns what, and access to civil law courts that help you resolve CONFLICTS, make resorts to violence much less likely — in a modern society, it's actually counterproductive
• Evolution has also furnished us with a moral sense. 
• A drop-off in war could also lead to reductions in other forms of violence. 
• In cultures and societies with a recent history of warfare, children tend to be socialized to tolerate pain and to react aggressively, which prepares them for the possibility of becoming a soldier (arguably something that evolution would favor) or a potentially deadly brawler (probably something it wouldn't). 
• "If we grow up without these experiences, which is the case for most people in modern democracies that could affect how aggressive we are and our moral views of our options," says Wilson.
• Falacy of De-escalating Violence and Development
• the notion that war is a vice of “backward” peoples is absurd. (John Gray)
• Destroying some of the most refined civilizations that have ever existed, the wars that ravaged south-east Asia in the second world war and the decades that followed were the work of colonial powers. 
• One of the causes of the genocide in Rwanda was the segregation of the population by German and Belgian imperialism. 
• Unending war in the Congo has been fueled by western demand for the country’s natural resources. 
• If violence has dwindled in advanced societies, one reason may be that they have exported it.
• the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable. 
• The United States is the most advanced society in the world. 
• According to many estimates the US also has the highest rate of incarceration, some way ahead of China and Russia, for example. 
• Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American jails, many for exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many prisoners are mentally ill and growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves continuous risk of assault by other prisoners. There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement, sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has been constructed) for indefinite periods – a type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture. 
• Cruel and unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation may have been abolished in many countries, but, along with unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, the practice of torture seems to be integral to the functioning of the US.
• 
  

MARGARET MEAD AND THE NON-EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

Do Scarce Resources, High Population Density and Economic Division  Make Warfare and Violence Inevitable?

•  "This has always led to competition as a means of survival, and warfare has been the inevitable consequence of our ecological-demographic propensities." Stephen LeBlanc (Why We Fight)
•  "No matter where we happen to live on Earth, we eventually outstrip the environment," (Malthus)
• The HARF show no clear correlation between scarce resources and degree of warfare and violence
• " the correlation between population pressure and warfare "is either very complex or very weak or both." (Keeley: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage)
• the Semai population is 60 times denser than the Waorani, and they have much less food, because their soil less fertile and game less plentiful. And yet the Semai, the Robarcheks pointed out, "are among the most peaceful people" known to anthropology (even though some Semai helped British colonialists fight communist insurgents in the 1950s). The Waorani, however, are one of the most violent known societies, with casualties from warfare claiming as much as 60 percent of the population. (Robarcheck (s))
• MEAD
• Mead dismissed the notion that war is the inevitable consequence of our "basic, competitive, aggressive, warring human nature." Not all societies wage war. 
• War has never been observed among a Himalayan people called the Lepchas or among the Eskimos. In fact, neither of these groups, when questioned by early ethnographers, was even aware of the concept of war.
• Mead distinguished between individual and group violence. 
• Eskimos were "not a mild and meek people," she noted. They engaged in "fights, theft of wives, murder, cannibalism," often provoked by fear of starvation. "The personality necessary for war, the circumstances necessary to goad men to desperation are present, but there is no war."
• Mead refuted the claim that war springs from "the development of the state, the struggle for land and natural resources of class societies springing, not from the nature of man, but from the nature of history." 
• the theory of "sociological inevitability" is contradicted by simple societies that do fight. Hunter–gatherers on the Andaman Islands "represent an exceedingly low level of society," but they have been observed waging wars, in which "tiny army met tiny army in open battle."
• Australian aborigines, similarly, occasionally interrupted their wanderings "from water hole to water hole over their almost desert country" to battle each other. They seemed to fight not for any of the usual reasons—the "the struggle for lands, struggle for power of one group over another, expansion of population"—but because war was part of their tradition.
• The DANI in dead birds as well! (Cosmological reasons?)
• Warfare is "an invention" 
• Once a society becomes exposed to the "idea" of war, it "will sometimes go to war" under certain circumstances. 
• the Pueblo Indians, fight reluctantly to defend themselves against aggressors; others, such as the Plains Indians, sally forth with enthusiasm, because they have elevated martial skills to the highest of manly virtues; fighting bravely is the best way for a young man to achieve prestige and "win his sweetheart's smile of approval."
• why?
• Robarcheks pointed out that war is in a sense "contagious," because when one group in a region resorts to war, "others must either take it up or be destroyed." 
• Keeley, similarly, noted that war among North American Indians often stemmed from the aggression of just a few extremely warlike tribes, "rotten apples that spoiled their regional barrels." He added, "Less aggressive societies, stimulated by more warlike groups in their vicinity, become more bellicose themselves."
• Societies in a violent region, the political scientist Azar Gat have a strong incentive to carry out preemptive attacks. 
• Societies may "attack the other side in order to eliminate or severely weaken them as a potential enemy. War can thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fear of war breeds war."
• How do we end war? (Mead)
• For an invention to become obsolete, "people must recognize the defects of the old invention, and someone must make a new one...to invent new forms of behavior which will make war obsolete, it is a first requirement to believe that such an invention is possible."
• Militarism is deeply embedded in modern culture