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Situating suicide as an anthropological problem: ethnographic approaches to understanding self-harm and self-inflicted death

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 16:40 authored by James Staples, Tom Widger
More than a century after Durkheim’s sociological classic placed the subject of suicide as a concern at the heart of social science, ethnographic, cross-cultural analyses of what lie behind people’s attempts to take their own lives remain few in number. But by highlighting how the ethnographic method privileges a certain view of suicidal behaviour, we can go beyond the limited sociological and psychological approaches that define the field of ‘suicidology’ in terms of social and psychological ‘pathology’ to engage with suicide from our informants’ own points of view—and in so doing cast the problem in a new light and new terms. In particular, suicide can be understood as a kind of sociality, as a special kind of social relationship, through which people create meaning in their own lives. In this introductory essay we offer an overview of the papers that make up this special issue and map out the theoretical opportunities and challenges they present

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry

ISSN

0165-005X

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Issue

2

Volume

36

Page range

183-203

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2013-01-25

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