Suicide and Agency
Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Destruction, Personhood, and Power
Ludek Broz editor Daniel Münster editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:28th Nov '15
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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- Paperback£39.99(9780367597580)
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.
This volume makes an important contribution to scholarship on agency in suicide. It offers ethnographic perspectives that complicate mainstream understandings around the transculturally persistent practice of self-killing. However, as it describes living through and with suicide, it adds more. As Strathern notes in her afterword, this volume not only contributes to understanding suicide and agency through local ontologies, but also shows how suicide tells us about aspects of social life.C.M. Cassady Wayne State University, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), 2018
"This volume is an excellent and much-needed addition to the literature on suicide. Notions of personhood, agency and suicide are interrogated throughout in rigorous and illuminating ways, and the book clearly demonstrates the valuable contribution anthropology can make to the study of suicide."—Ian Marsh, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
"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
ISBN: 9781472457912
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 566g
240 pages