Abstract:Female suicide in Afghanistan has generally been given economic and psychological explanations. More rarely has its social dimension been analysed. In this paper, I underline the communicative potential of Afghan women's suicide in the 'post-war/reconstruction' context. I highlight its ambiguous symbolic power and its anchorage in the subversive imaginary universe of women's poetic expression. I argue that while reproducing certain cultural ideas about women's inherent emotional fragility, women's suicide also… Show more
“…In the event of a completed suicide occurring within the home, either the suicide attempt would be observed, or the corpse would be discovered, by family members who thereby become the audience for the 'performance'. Suicide/homicide Billaud (2012) identifies that women in Afghanistan are constrained by ideas about 'honour' (namûs: an Indo-Iranian term used in Kurdish, Dari, Turkish and Pashtu), which 'serves to reproduce the rigid control exercised over women and their sexuality' (Ertürk, 2007: 2) -an important ideological aspect of the hyper-regulation identified by Aliverdinia and Pridemore. Xo sûtandn has long been linked with so-called 'honour' killings by Kurdish women's rights activists, particularly since the age distribution coincides with the typical age profile of a victim of an 'honour' crime (Begikhani, 1998), which are common occurrences in the KRI and the Kurdish diaspora (Begikhani et al, 2010).…”
Self‐burning and self‐immolation are forms of self‐harm found across the Eastern Mediterranean region and South and Central Asia. The majority of those choosing these methods of self‐harm are young women. Using data from 100 young female survivors of suicidal attempts in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, this article analyses the phenomenon in the context of a life‐course progression arguing that the period around first marriage is a time of particular trauma to women. We suggest that self‐burning should be understood as a communicative act with an indigenous semiology which functions as an expression of subordinated agency within a male‐dominated society, in which marriage is a major source of conflict between generations and genders.
“…In the event of a completed suicide occurring within the home, either the suicide attempt would be observed, or the corpse would be discovered, by family members who thereby become the audience for the 'performance'. Suicide/homicide Billaud (2012) identifies that women in Afghanistan are constrained by ideas about 'honour' (namûs: an Indo-Iranian term used in Kurdish, Dari, Turkish and Pashtu), which 'serves to reproduce the rigid control exercised over women and their sexuality' (Ertürk, 2007: 2) -an important ideological aspect of the hyper-regulation identified by Aliverdinia and Pridemore. Xo sûtandn has long been linked with so-called 'honour' killings by Kurdish women's rights activists, particularly since the age distribution coincides with the typical age profile of a victim of an 'honour' crime (Begikhani, 1998), which are common occurrences in the KRI and the Kurdish diaspora (Begikhani et al, 2010).…”
Self‐burning and self‐immolation are forms of self‐harm found across the Eastern Mediterranean region and South and Central Asia. The majority of those choosing these methods of self‐harm are young women. Using data from 100 young female survivors of suicidal attempts in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, this article analyses the phenomenon in the context of a life‐course progression arguing that the period around first marriage is a time of particular trauma to women. We suggest that self‐burning should be understood as a communicative act with an indigenous semiology which functions as an expression of subordinated agency within a male‐dominated society, in which marriage is a major source of conflict between generations and genders.
“…As Price and Evans (, p. 45; 2009) argue, mental health approaches ‘tend to focus on the dramatic outcome of processes of stress in the form of suicide rather than the dynamics of social processes themselves which form the underlying causes of stress’. To better understand the complexity of suicide therefore requires ethnographic research approaches combined with ethical methodologies (see for instance Billaud ; Münster ; Staples and Widger ). As Staples and Widger (, p. 185) suggest, such approaches would ‘cast the problem in a new light and new terms’ and would enable scholars to:learn about how suicidal behaviours are imagined, talked about and practiced; how they relate to other kinds of behaviours and institutions; when and under what possibilities different people in the communities we study think suicide might arise and when it might not, when it might be ‘acceptable’ and when it might not; and how suicidal behavior does not begin with the ‘precipitating factor’ and end with the ‘suicidal act’, but extends deep into individual and collective pasts and futures.…”
Section: Problematising Discourses Of Suicidementioning
The literature on suicide reveals an academic praxis that largely overlooks the group potentially at highest risk of suicide, namely older male farmers. Within the broader literature on suicide, a small and constrained body of articles has provided empirical evidence and review of the individual risk factors for older male suicides. The rural studies literature on suicide has predominantly focused on the risk factors of suicide for farmers and rural youth and the ways in which masculinities are implicated in suicide. This article engages with these literatures for what they might reveal about the suicides of older male farmers but also critiques their limitations and makes suggestions about potentially revealing avenues for empirical investigation. It argues that the suicides of older male farmers, both real and within discourse, raise complex questions concerning reasons for suicide, embedded within subjective, social and cultural contexts. Examination of cultures of farming masculinity, rural cultures of ageing and the ways in which old age and suicide are problematised may therefore provide critical insights into the suicides of older farming men.
“…Anthropologists and other South Asian suicide experts have argued that suicide is inherently a social act, one that is inextricable from the local sociocultural and political milieu (Colucci and Lester 2012; Kleinman 2008; Eckersley and Dear 2002). Studies from low-income settings reveal how interpersonal conflict (Bourke 2003; Widger 2012b), female disempowerment (Canetto and Sakinofsky 1998; Canetto 2008; Widger 2012a; Marecek 1998), family and cultural histories of suicidal behavior (Widger 2015; Vijayakumar and Rajkumar 1999; Colucci and Lester 2012), and political injustices (Billaud 2012; Parry 2012; Chua 2009; Munster 2015) can deeply influence suicidality in the context of rapid global development (Chua 2014; Halliburton 1998). These works have emphasized the social meaning of suicide, where such acts are performative and respond to abuse, shame, revenge, or abandonment (Broz and Münster 2015).…”
South Asia accounts for the majority of the world's suicide deaths, but typical psychiatric or surveillance-based research approaches are limited due to incomplete vital surveillance. Despite rich anthropological scholarship in the region, such work has not been used to address public health gaps in surveillance and nor inform prevention programs designed based on surveillance data. Our goal was to leverage useful strategies from both public health and anthropological approaches to provide rich narrative reconstructions of suicide events, told by family members or loved ones of the deceased, to further contextualize the circumstances of suicide. Specifically, we sought to untangle socio-cultural and structural patterns in suicide cases to better inform systems-level surveillance strategies and salient community-level suicide prevention opportunities. Using a mixed-methods psychological autopsy approach for cross-cultural research (MPAC) in both urban and rural Nepal, 39 suicide deaths were examined. MPAC was used to document antecedent events, characteristics of persons completing suicide, and perceived drivers of each suicide. Patterns across suicide cases include (1) lack of education (72% of cases); (2) life stressors such as poverty (54%), violence (61.1%), migrant labor (33% of men), and family disputes often resulting in isolation or shame (56.4%); (3) family histories of suicidal behavior (62%), with the majority involving an immediate family member; (4) gender differences: female suicides were attributed to hopeless situations, such as spousal abuse, with high degrees of social stigma. In contrast, male suicides were most commonly associated with drinking and resulted from internalized stigma, such as financial failure or an inability to provide for their family; (5) justifications for suicide were attributions to 'fate' and personality characteristics such as 'stubbornness' and 'egoism'; (5) power dynamics and available agency precluded some families from disputing the death as a suicide and also had implications for the condemnation or justification of particular suicides. Importantly, only 1 out of 3 men and 1 out of 6 women had any communication to family members about suicidal ideation prior to completion. Findings illustrate the importance of MPAC methods for capturing cultural narratives evoked after completed suicides, recognizing culturally salient warning signs, and identifying potential barriers to disclosure and justice seeking by families. These findings elucidate how suicide narratives are structured by family members and reveal public health opportunities for creating or supplementing mortality surveillance, intervening in higher risk populations such as survivors of suicide, and encouraging disclosure.
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