Situating Suicide as an Anthropological Problem: Ethnographic Approaches to Understanding Self-Harm and Self-Inflicted Death

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 183-203

  Staples, James ^a   Widger, Tom ^b  

^a BRUNEL UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; AGED; AUTOMUTILATION; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; EDITORIAL; ETHNOLOGY; FEMALE; HUMAN; MALE; MIDDLE AGED; SUICIDE;

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; AGED; ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; FEMALE; HUMANS; MALE; MIDDLE AGED; SELF-INJURIOUS BEHAVIOR; SUICIDE; YOUNG ADULT;

EID: 84861227031     PISSN: 0165005X     EISSN: 1573076X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11013-012-9255-1     Document Type: Editorial

References (56)

1. ASAD, TALAL. 2007. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press.
2. BECK, A. 1991. Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. London: Penguin.
3. Benedict, R. 2006 (1946). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture. New York: Mariner Books.
4. BERKOWITZ, L. 1969. The frustration-aggression hypothesis revisited, in: Berkowitz, L. (ed.), Roots of aggression, New York: Atherton Press.
5. BERNDT, R. M. 1962. Excess and restraint: Social control among a New Guinea mountain people. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
6. BLOCH, M. 1998. How We Think They Think. Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Oxford: Westview Press.
7. Bloch, M. 2005. Essays on Cultural Transmission. Oxford: Berg.
8. Bohannan, P. 1960. (ed). African Homicide and Suicide (ed) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
9. BROWN, M. F. 1986. Power, Gender, and the Social Meaning of Aguaruna Suicide. Man (N. S.) 21/2, 311-328.
10. Camus, A. 1955 The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. J. O'Brien, trans. New York: Vintage.
11. CARSTEN, J 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12. CHUA, J. 2011. Making Time for the Children: Self-Temporalization and the Cultivation of the Antisuicidal Subject in South India. Cultural Anthropology 26(1): 112-137.
13. COUNTS, D. 1980. Fighting back is not the way: Suicide and the women of Kaliai, American Ethnologist, 7: 332-351.
14. COUNTS, D. 1991. Suicide in Different Ages from a Cross-Cultural Perspective. In Leenars, A. A. (ed.). Life Span Perspectives of Suicide. Time-Lines in the Suicidal Process. London: Plenum Press, 215-228.
15. DABBAGH, N. T. 2005. Suicide in Palestine. Narratives of Despair. London: Hurst & Company.
16. DE CERTEAU, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
17. DOLLARD, J., DOOB, L. W., MILLER, N. E., MOWRER, O. H., & R. R. SEARS. 1939. Frustration and aggression. New Haven: Yale University Press.
18. Durkheim, E. 1933 [1893] The Division of Labour in Society. G. Simpson, trans. London: Collier Macmillan Publishers.
19. Durkheim, E. 1951 [1897] Suicide. A Study in Sociology. J. A. Spauding, G. Simpson, trans. London: Routledge.
20. FARBEROW, N. L. 1975. Suicide in Different Cultures. Baltimore: University Park Press.
21. Firth, R. 2000 (1961) Suicide and Risk-Taking in Tikopia Society. In Cultural Psychiatry & Medical Anthropology. An Introduction & Reader. R. Littlewood, and S. Dein, eds., pp. 314-338. London: Continuum International Publishing Group-Athlone.
22. Freud, S. 2005 (1917). On Murder, Mourning, and Melancholia. S. Whiteside, trans. London: Penguin Classics.
23. GIDDENS, A. 1964. Suicide, Attempted Suicide, and the Suicidal Threat. Man64, 115-116.
24. Goethe, J. W. V. 1989 [1774] The Sorrows of Young Werther. M. Hulse, trans. London: Penguin.
25. HAGE, G. 2003. 'Comes a Time We are All Enthusiasm': Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia. Public Culture 15(1): 65-89.
26. Handelman, D. 2008 Self-Exploders, Self-Sacrifice, and the Rhizomic Organization of Terrorism. Unpublished paper presented at the Ethnographies of Suicide conference, 2-3 July 2008, Brunel University.
27. HEALEY, C. 1979. Women and suicide in New Guinea. Social Analysis, 2: 89-106.
28. Hezel, F. X. 1985 Trukese Suicide. In Culture, Youth and Suicide in the Pacific. F. X. Hezel, D. H. Rubinstein, and G. M. White, eds., pp. 112-124. Papers from an East-West Centre Conference, September 1984, Honolulu, Hawaii.
29. JOHNSON, P. L. 1981. When dying is better than living: Female suicide among the Gainj of Papua New Guinea. Ethnology, 20: 325-334.
30. KLEINMAN, A. 1995. Writing at the Margin. Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine. London: University of California Press.
31. KRAL, M. J. 1998. Suicide and the Internalization of Culture: Three Questions. Transcultural Psychiatry, 35/2: 221-233.
32. LEE, S. & A. KLEINMAN, 2000 Suicide as Resistance in Chinese Society. In Perry, E. J. and M. Selden (eds) Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance. pp 221-240. London: Routledge.
33. LITTLEWOOD, R. 2002. Pathologies of the West. An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Europe and America. New York: Cornell University Press.
34. LIVINGSTON, J. 2009. Suicide, risk and investment in the heart of the African miracle. Cultural Anthropology, 24, 4: 652-680.
35. Malinowski, B. 1949 [1926] Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Routledge & Keagan Paul.
36. Marecek, J. & C. Senadheera. 2012 'I Drank It to Put an End to Me': Narrating Girls' Suicide and Self-Harm in Sri Lanka. In Suicide in South Asia: ethnographic perspectives. Special Issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS) (Vol. 46, Issue 1 & 2). J. Staples, ed., pp. 53-82.
37. MARSHALL, M. 1979. Weekend warriors: Alcohol in a Melanesian culture. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield.
38. Menninger, K. 1972 (1939) Man Against Himself. New York: Harcourt Brace International.
39. Minois, G. 1999 History of Suicide. Voluntary Death in Western Culture. L. G. Cochrane, trans. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
40. Parry, J. 2012 Suicide in a Central Indian Steel Town. In Suicide in South Asia: ethnographic perspectives. Special Issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS) (Vol. 46, Issue 1 & 2). J. Staples, ed., pp. 145-180.
41. SAHLINS, M. 2011a. What Kinship Is (Part One). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17(1): 2-19.
42. Sahlins, M. 2011b What Kinship Is (Part Two). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute17(2): 227-242.
43. SHNEIDMAN, E. S. 1996. The Suicidal Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
44. SPENCER, J. 1990a. Collective Violence and Everyday Practice in Sri Lanka. Modern Asian Studies24/3: 603-623.
45. SPIRO, M. 1993. Is the Western Conception of the Self "Peculiar" within the context of the World Cultures. Ethos, 21/2: 107-153.
46. STAPLES, J. 2003. Disguise, Revelation and Copyright: Disassembling the South Indian Leper. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N. S.), 9: 295-315.
47. Staples, J. 2012a The Suicide Niche: Accounting for Self-harm in a South Indian Leprosy Colony. In Suicide in South Asia: Ethnographic Perspectives. Special Issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS) (Vol. 46, Issue 1 & 2). J. Staples, ed., pp. 117-144.
48. Staples, J. 2012b Ethnographies of Suicide in South Asia. In Suicide in South Asia: ethnographic perspectives. Special Issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS) (Vol. 46, Issue 1 & 2). J. Staples, ed., pp. 1-28.
49. STEINMETZ, S. R. 1894. Suicide among Primitive Peoples. American Anthropologist7/1, 53-60.
50. VERRIER, E. 1943. Maria Murder and Suicide. Bombay: Oxford University Press.
51. Widger, T. 2009 Self-harm and self-inflicted Death Amongst Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka. An Ethnographic Study. Doctoral thesis: London School of Economics.
52. Widger, T. 2012 Suicide and Sinhalese Kinship. In Suicide in South Asia: Ethnographic Perspectives. Special Issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS) (Vol. 46, Issue 1 & 2). J. Staples, ed., pp. 83-116.
53. WILLERSLEV, R. 2009. The optimal sacrifice: a study of voulntary death among the Siberian Chukchi. American Ethnologist 36, 4: 693-704.
54. WILLIAMS, J. M. G. 1997. Suicide and Attempted Suicide. Understanding the Cry of Pain. London: Penguin.
55. WOLCOTT, H. F. (1999). Ethnography: A Way of Seeing. London: SAGE.
56. WOLF, M. 1975. Women and Suicide in China. In Wolf, M. & R. Witke (eds) Women in Chinese Society. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 111-141.