Suicide and Agency

Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Destruction, Personhood, and Power

Ludek Broz, Daniel Münster, Ludek Broz, Daniel Münster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472457912
• eBook ISBN: 9781317048459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part I Introduction

Chapter 1 The Anthropology of Suicide: Ethnography and the Tension of Agency

Daniel Münster and Ludek Broz¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315611297-1

“Everyone dies …

Very few people kill themselves”

Emile Durkheim 1952: 267

¹ The introduction has benefitted from insightful comments, suggestions, and criticisms by many people. We are particularly grateful to Katrina Jaworski and Jocelyn Chua for their critical readings of earlier drafts. Both editors have contributed equally to the writing of the introduction as well as to the editing of the book as a whole. The decision to put Broz's name as first editor of the volume and Münster's as first author of the introduction was arbitrary.

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 non-European experiences of self-harm in order to re-examine 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 position of agency in contemporary understandings of suicide. The focus is on rationalizations of suicide events—popular, expert and scientific—and how they articulate situated ideas about human personhood, the morality of death, and the human capacity to voice dissent and act politically through self-inflicted death.

In this opening chapter we develop our argument about the centrality of agency, personhood, and power for the anthropology of suicide by dealing first with the core premises of what we like to call the “mainstream” of suicide studies and the counter-hegemonic potential of the ethnographic approach. Second, we elaborate on what we identify as the central tension of agency in suicide by focusing on both scientific epistemologies and vernacular understandings of the phenomenon as manifested in the ethnographic record. Third, we discuss the challenge that the anthropological work on personhood poses for the Western Self implicit in suicide studies. Finally, we connect agency in suicide to the question of “power” by focusing, on the one hand, on ideas about the human capacity to performatively express dissent and to act politically through self-inflicted death and, on the other hand, on the diagnostic potential of suicide ethnography for the study of structural violence.

For numerous thinkers throughout history (notably philosophers), suicide has pointed to central questions about the human condition. As the existential philosopher Albert Camus claimed famously, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” (1955: 3). Building on the centrality of suicide for Camus, anthropologists James Staples and Tom Widger argue that “[q]uestions of existence, survival, and coping …, whether one agrees with Camus or not, are surely crucial for human beings everywhere, and go straight to the centre of anthropological enquiry” (Staples and Widger 2012: 185). Yet the potential significance of suicide for ethnographic understandings of the human condition stands in stark contrast to the relative silence on the subject within social and cultural anthropology as academic disciplines. In fact, anthropology has been a latecomer to the systematic study of suicide, leaving as yet little trace in suicide studies (for a review of some recent anthropological contributions, see Macdonald 2007; Staples and Widger 2012).

We argue that the reasons for the reluctance of social and cultural anthropology to afford greater attention to suicide are to be found in the epistemological and methodological challenge of studying suicide ethnographically. 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. However, in the context of a particular locality, suicides are contingent phenomena whose occurrence cannot be foreseen as only rarely do individuals actively and successfully seek to end their own lives. The average Suicide Mortality Rate (SMR) for “Western” countries suggests that for every ten persons who commit suicide in any given year, nearly a hundred thousand do not.² And yet, despite—or because of—the exceptionality of suicide (Morrissey 2006: 1) that has largely prevented anthropology from a substantial ethnographic contribution to its study, there seems to be an impulse, among both researchers and the population at large, to make sense of suicide cases in relation to extrapersonal issues. Regardless of the statistical odds, most human societies tend to treat suicides not as idiosyncratic and exceptional ways of dying but as a kind of death indicative of larger, more significant issues, such as ruptures in social, economic, and moral life.

² See World Health Organization for national rates of suicide mortality (based on successful suicides per 100,000 persons per year) (http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide_rates/en/index.html, accessed 12).

Suicidology has addressed the problem of exceptionality in two ways. One approach involves the use of what Nicolas Rose calls “psy knowledge, techniques, explanations, and experts” (2006: 12). Psy stands for “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. From this perspective cases of suicide become integrated into a clinical picture and, in Ian Marsh's words, a “compulsory ontology of pathology” (Marsh 2010: 31). The second approach deals with the exceptionality of suicide through quantitative regimes of representation (cf. Hacking 1990). The disciplines that rely on statistical aggregation of large population numbers in the form of suicide rates (e.g. sociology, criminology, demography, and public health) also grew in the nineteenth century, this time out of the field of moral statistics which dealt with deviance and social problems. Both of these epistemic clusters offer particular solutions to the methodological problem of the rarity of suicide and provide implicit clues in the search for meaning in suicide: medicalization has rationalized suicide in terms of pathology, while quantification has demonstrated statistical correlations between suicide and other (national) indicators of health and well-being of populations.

These expert knowledge regimes on suicide entail a logical tension which we refer to as 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.

The tension of agency is not only built into medical and sociological suicidology but is also implicit in most vernacular discourses about suicide. The tension, the necessity and denial of agency, seems to us to be connected to the very widespread classification of suicides as a “bad death” (Seale and van der). 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). The abnormality of and moral outrage surrounding suicide in turn require a clear ruling as to whether a particular case of death must be regarded as a suicide as opposed to a normal or “good” death. What makes most suicides “bad” deaths seems to be the agentive decision to end one's life, that is the will to die, or the act of giving in to the “death wish” as Freudians would call it (see Menninger 1938). In other words, there is no suicide without agency, or to be more precise, there is no suicide without intentionality. Almost universally—and across the registers of vernacular and expert knowledge — agency appears to be a fundamental component of suicide as bad death.

The centrality of agency in vernacular definitions of suicide thus stands in tension with equally widespread assumptions about victimhood or “patiency” (Schnepel 2009) in suicide, which hold that the act is caused by influence of agents, forces, or structures located outside the person, such as demons, kin relations, illness, or violence. 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.³ As historian Rab Houston points out, the growing popularity of legal and medical verdicts of “lacking wrongful intent” (non compos mentis) among forensic coroners after 1750 went hand in hand with a substitution of ideas of sinful blasphemy for medicalized explanations (Houston 2009).

³ In this introduction we use the French word suicidé to refer to the person committing/attempting/contemplating suicide. This avoids the potential confusion of referring to both the (suicide) act and the (suicide) victim by the same term “suicide,” as is common in the English language. More importantly, suicidé is grammatically a peculiar passive-active construction (like employee—an agent, but not quite as active as its counterpart, the employer). We therefore prefer the term over the commonly used “suicide victim” “suicide completer” and “suicide attempter,” as each of these stresses only one aspect of the agency/patiency divide.

Counter to extra-personal explanations for suicides are issues to be explained by suicide. Suicide events are often assumed to point toward broader social problems in the wider world. The questions they pose may then assume a political character. How, for example, should one make sense of the fact that more US soldiers have died from suicide than in combat since the war in Afghanistan began (Gibbs and Thompson 2012)? Does this fact tell us something about gender (masculinity), bureaucratic indifference, or institutional pressure in the military? Similarly, what is to be made of the news that suicide rates in Europe increased following the financial crisis or that, following the suicides of several people dispossessed of their homes, Spanish banks had to temporarily suspend evictions (Dowsett 2012)? What is to be learned from the study of these news reports about alienation, fear, and the structural violence of economic orders? From an anthropological perspective, the question can be formulated thus: How can we appreciate the diagnostic potential of suicide cases—their inherently accusatory nature and their seismographic detection of social dysfunctionality and structural violence—without, however, resorting to universalizing positivism that ignores context-specific understandings of the indictment expressed through suicide? The anthropology of suicide must acknowledge that the diagnostic potential of suicide cases is equally shaped by history and power.

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. This means making sense of agency and patiency in situated discourses and in expert knowledge regimes that come to bear on particular cases of self-destruction. With such focus, anthropology may be able to contribute novel perspective to medical and sociological suicidology, to which we turn next.

Disciplining Suicide and the Challenge of Ethnography

The secularization ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II SUICIDE, PERSONHOOD AND RELATIONALITY
• PART III SELF-DESTRUCTION AND POWER: BODIES, RESISTANCE AND CRISES
• PART IV AFTERWORD
• Index