Tom Widger

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

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.

Suicide and the morality of kinship in Sri Lanka

Ethnographic research amongst Sinhala Buddhists in community and clinical settings in the Madampe Division, northwest Sri Lanka, suggests that local understandings and practices of suicidal behaviour reflect the kinship structure. In particular, acts of self-harm and self-inflicted death arise in response to the breaking of core kinship rights, duties and obligations, or as a challenge to inflexibility or contradictions within the system. In either case, the morality of kinship is closely associated with the causes of suicidal behaviour, as the ‘inevitability’ or ‘evitability’ of kin relationships is negotiated and lived in practice. This article analyses how local political economies give rise to particular kinship and moral conditions, with special attention paid to those between household (gē) members and brothers-in-law (massinā).

Suicide and the ‘Poison Complex’: Toxic Relationalities, Child Development, and the Sri Lankan Self-Harm Epidemic

Suicide prevention efforts in Asia have increasingly turned to ‘quick win’ means restriction, while more complicated cognitive restriction and psychosocial programs are limited. This article argues the development of cognitive restriction programs requires greater consideration of suicide methods as social practices, and of how suicide cognitive schemata form. To illustrate this, the article contributes an ethnographically grounded study of how self-poisoning becomes cognitively available in Sri Lanka. I argue the overwhelming preference for poison as a method of self-harm in the country is not simply reflective of its widespread availability, but rather how cognitive schemata of poison—a ‘poison complex’—develops from early childhood and is a precondition for suicide schemata. Limiting cognitive availability thus requires an entirely novel approach to suicide prevention that draws back from its immediate object (methods and causes of self-harm) to engage the wider poison complex of which suicide is just one aspect.

Reading Sri Lanka's suicide rate.

By the final decade of the twentieth century, rates of suicide in Sri Lanka ranked among the highest in the world. However, in 1996 the suicide rate began to fall and was soon at its lowest level in almost 30 years. This decline poses problems for classic sociological theories of suicide and forces us to question some fundamental assumptions underlying social scientific approaches to the suicide rate. Drawing from sociological, medical epidemiological, historical, and anthropological secondary sources as well as 21 months of original ethnographic research into suicide in Sri Lanka, I argue that there are four possible readings of the countrys suicide rate. While the first three readings provide windows onto parts of the story, the fourth—a composite view—provides a new way of thinking about suicide, not just in Sri Lanka but also cross-culturally. In so doing the paper poses questions for how the relationship between suicide and society might be imagined.

Ambivalent Objects in Global Health: Editors’ Introduction

Objects can do many things: attract and repel, kill and cure, help and hinder, benefit and disadvantage, problematize and solve. Sometimes they can do these things simultaneously, sometimes sequentially, often to differential degrees. Sometimes they do nothing at all. Such is the ambivalence of objects, their presence and potential, in human and non-human life, health and well-being. This special issue of the Journal of Material Culture has its origins in a panel convened at the EASA/RAI Anthropology of Global Health conference held at Brighton, Sussex, UK, in September 2015. Of the 11 papers presented, 6 have been included in this collection. Collectively, they consider the history and contemporary configurations of different aspects of the non-human, material world that have implications, real and imaginary, for global health, illness and disease. The term ‘global health’ has risen in prominence in recent years and refers to ‘an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving health equity for all people worldwide’ (Koplan et al., 2009). Although when presented as such, global health is hardly objectionable, critics suggest that in practice global health – and especially when practised in the developing world – also involves new configurations of public and private health actors and top-down, often geographically remote, policy-making that can undermine health systems at national level, the delivery of free universal healthcare and the participation of local people in decision-making processes, among others (Biehl and Petryna, 2013b; Janes and Corbett, 2009; Pfeiffer and Chapman,

Suicides, poisons and the materially possible: The positive ambivalence of means restriction and critical–critical global health

Developing an object-oriented perspective on suicide, in this article the author challenges critical global health scholarship and sociological theories of ambivalence by showing how a focus on ‘materially possible’ suicide prevention can offer culturally relevant solutions to a suicide epidemic in a resource-poor setting. Taking the example of pesticide regulation in Sri Lanka, he demonstrates why, in theoretical terms, banning toxic pesticides has coherence in a local poison complex that renders suicide available to people as a cultural practice. While writers in the field of critical global health have been suspicious of ‘magic-bullet’ interventions such as means restriction because such policies reportedly overlook the social complexity of problems such as suicide, the author argues that what is materially possible is often of merit because it renders graspable an otherwise deeply contingent and variegated problem. He further argues that critical global health can view the ambivalent costs and benefits of materially possible, magic-bullet interventions as a positive rather than negative offshoot of global health.

Visions of philanthronationalism: the (in)equities of corporate good governance in Sri Lanka

Philanthronationalism – the pursuance of corporate ‘good governance’ and equality initiatives for ethno-religious political ends – shapes at a fundamental level business practice in Sri Lanka. In this article, Sri Lankan firms’ approaches to the management of ‘diversity and inclusion’ in human resourcing, brand development, and market expansion and outsourcing are explored. While many in the private sector appear to wish to promote the creation of a more harmonious and peaceful society through ethical governance processes, a continued concern to play to the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist constituency often makes this difficult.