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

Staples, James; Widger, Tom

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Authors

James Staples



Abstract

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.

Citation

Staples, J., & Widger, T. (2012). Situating suicide as an anthropological problem: ethnographic approaches to understanding self-harm and self-inflicted death. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 36(2), 183-203. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9255-1

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Jun 1, 2012
Deposit Date Oct 17, 2014
Publicly Available Date Mar 11, 2015
Journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
Print ISSN 0165-005X
Electronic ISSN 1573-076X
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 36
Issue 2
Pages 183-203
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9255-1

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