The Anthropology of Suicide: Ethnography and the Tension of Agency

Abstract

"everyone dies … Very few people kill themselves" emile durkheim 1952: 267 Suicide is a challenging object of study. as ian Hacking has recently claimed, "[t]he meanings of suicide itself are so protean across time and space that it is not so clear that there is one thing, suicide" (2008: 1). For anthropology, the particular challenge lies in thinking beyond some of the assumptions implicit in the powerful and widespread clinical conceptualization of suicide, which presents it as a pathological and individual act, committed with willful intent, full consciousness and unambiguous authorship, whose default subject is arguably a "Western," male, white, middle-class human. These implicit assumptions serve as a "gold standard" of real suicide, to which all acts of self-harm are compared or ultimately attributed. in this volume, however, we aim at abandoning such assumptions in favor of noneuropean experiences of self-harm in order to reexamine critically the Western tradition of thinking about suicide. The ethnographies assembled in this volume engage with cultural practices of making sense of suicide, and in particular with the multitude of questions and answers about agency, personhood, and death that circulate within specific vernacular and expert regimes of knowledge around the issue of suicide. When families, neighbors, religious specialists, doctors, public health experts, activists, and newsmakers speculate about possible motives and reasons behind suicides, they operate with 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). By recording and analyzing ethnographic instances of such sense-making, this volume seeks to highlight the ambivalent

Author(iz)ing Death: Medical Aid-in-Dying and the Morality of Suicide

“…Despite the variation in practices of self‐inflicted death, the editors of a recent volume on suicide and agency identify a striking tension in vernacular and expert understandings of suicide: “the requirement for agency and a simultaneous denial or diffusion of the agency of the suicidé” (Münster and Broz 2015, 11). On the one hand, in order to be thought of as such, the act of suicide requires what they call “singular intention” (Münster and Broz 2015, 11) and relies on ideas about sole authorship; on the other hand, responsibility for the act is almost never fully attributed to the agent. As evident in both psychological and sociological approaches to suicide, there always exists an “external other” (Münster and Broz 2015, 14)— mental illness or society, respectively—that diminishes or deflects the agency of the individual .…”

“…On the one hand, in order to be thought of as such, the act of suicide requires what they call “singular intention” (Münster and Broz 2015, 11) and relies on ideas about sole authorship; on the other hand, responsibility for the act is almost never fully attributed to the agent. As evident in both psychological and sociological approaches to suicide, there always exists an “external other” (Münster and Broz 2015, 14)— mental illness or society, respectively—that diminishes or deflects the agency of the individual . This agentive tension, the editors point out, relates directly to the moral evaluation of suicide in a given context, as “convictions about the im/morality of suicide determine the un/ease with which agentive involvement” is perceived (Münster and Broz 2015, 19) and whether a given act is classified as suicide .…”

“…As evident in both psychological and sociological approaches to suicide, there always exists an “external other” (Münster and Broz 2015, 14)— mental illness or society, respectively—that diminishes or deflects the agency of the individual . This agentive tension, the editors point out, relates directly to the moral evaluation of suicide in a given context, as “convictions about the im/morality of suicide determine the un/ease with which agentive involvement” is perceived (Münster and Broz 2015, 19) and whether a given act is classified as suicide . Instead of resolving this tension, they suggest studying it ethnographically.…”

Unintentional injury fatalities in the context of rising U.S. suicide rates: A five-year review of the web-based injury statistics query and reporting system

“…However, there are clear issues with this broad definition due to suicide attempts (SAs) during which the individual's life does not end, which may be due to nonlethal means or rapid medical intervention. Intentionality is a key philosophical and psychological component but cannot always be determined by outside investigators or even consciously by the suicidal individual (Münster and Broz, 2016). Impulsivity is also a heterogeneous concept that harbors inaccurate implications as it relates to suicide (Cole et al 2019).…”

Ongame molwashoka otse

“…The term 'suicidé' refers to both persons with suicidal thoughts and persons who die by suicide (Münster and Broz 2016).…”