Broz, Ludek & Munster, Daniel, 2015, Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Suicide, Personhood and Power, Routledge
Suicide and Agency offers an original and timely challenge to existing ways of understanding suicide. Through the use of rich and detailed case studies, the authors assembled in this volume explore how interplay of self-harm, suicide, personhood and agency varies markedly across site (Greenland, Siberia, India, Palestine and Mexico) and setting (self-run leprosy colony, suicide bomb attack, cash-crop farming, middle-class mothering). Rather than starting from a set definition of suicide, they empirically engage suicide fields-the wider domains of practices and of sense making, out of which realized, imaginary, or disputed suicides emerge. By drawing on ethnographic methods and approaches, a new comparative angle to understanding suicide beyond mainstream Western bio-medical and classical sociological conceptions of the act as an individual or social pathology is opened up. The book explores a number of ontological assumptions about the role of free will, power, good and evil, personhood, and intentionality in both popular and expert explanations of suicide. Suicide and Agency offers a substantial and ground-breaking contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of suicide. It will appeal to a range of scholars and students, including those in anthropology, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies, suicidology, and social studies of death and dying.
Table of Contents
Part I
Introduction: The anthropology of suicide: ethnography and the tension of agency, Daniel Münster and Ludek Broz.
Part II
Suicide, Personhood and Relationality: Personhood, agency and suicide in a neo-liberalizing South India, James Staples
The lonely un-dead and returning suicide in northwest Greenland, Janne Flora
Between demons and disease: suicide and agency in Yucatan, Mexico, Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster
Four funerals and a wedding: suicide, sacrifice, and (non-)human agency in a Siberian village, Ludek Broz
Part III
Self-Destruction and Power: Bodies, Resistance and Crises: Farmers’ suicide and the moral economy of agriculture: victimhood, voice, and agro-environmental responsibility in South India, Daniel Münster
Dying to live in Palestine: steadfastness, pollution and embodied space,Deen Sharp and Natalia Linos
Accumulating death: women’s moral agency and domestic economies of care in South India, Jocelyn Chua
Learning suicide and the limits of agency: children’s ‘suicide play’ in Sri Lanka, Tom Widger
Suicide, agency and the limits of power, Katrina Jaworski
Part IV
Afterword: Afterword: taking relationality to extremes, Marilyn Strathern
“We frequently imagine suicide as both an extreme expression of control and an act of the out-of-control. The pieces gathered in this important and timely volume make a virtue of that tension, describing the complex realities in which self-inflicted death and knowledge about such death take shape. They show how suicide is not only about exceptional deaths, but about routine ways of life.”— Kenneth MacLeish, Vanderbilt University, USA
“In the best anthropological tradition, this book heads to what many would consider the margins of social life (in this case suicide), and uses what it learns there to illuminate absolutely central issues of social theory (in this case notions of agency). Those who study suicide, death and dying cannot miss this book, but anyone interested in fresh social theoretical thinking should also want to read it.”— Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge, UK
