In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

224  The Anthropological Study of Suicide Anthropological Literature on Suicide In this chapter I shall review a number of anthropological approaches to suicide concerning premodern, non-industrial, or tribal societies. I do not include works dealing with urban and industrial societies, such as Japan, although obviously anthropological approaches can and have been conducted on them (see Iga 1986). However, studies on industrial and urban societies are mostly sociological in their scope and methodology.1 Suicide is a topic that has attracted a lot of attention in the fields of sociology, psychology, law, criminology, and philosophy. Anthropologists have occasionally dealt with suicide and suicidal behavior, but much less frequently than their colleagues in the other social sciences, especially sociologists and psychologists. Going back to the 1960s, the anthropological literature on suicide is not very extensive. True enough, a number of studies have been published (articles rather than books) on certain areas or groups where suicide rates have been observed to be high or higher than elsewhere, as with Micronesia and other island people in the Pacific, North American Indians, and Australian Aborigines. Among the few book-length anthropological studies devoted to the topic of suicide, some that should be mentioned are the classic work of Elwin on the Muria (1991 [1943]), the collective volume published by Bohannan on Africa (1960a), Devereux’s study on the Mohave (1961), and the more recent book by Catedra on the Vaqueiros of northern Spain (1993).2 Other than that, a number of papers or short essays have been published in specialized journals together with passing references to suicide in various ethnographic studies. We shall have a closer look at some of them in the following pages in order to assess the kind of interpretation they propose, the nature of the explanatory models they offer, and the degree to which they offer scientifically plausible accounts for the phenomenon. 9. th e an th ropologic al st u dy of su icide 225 The Study of Suicide: Preliminary Remarks A number of preliminary remarks must be made, however trite they might seem. From an epistemological point of view it is not entirely besides the point to say that the notion of suicide is familiar to everyone. Who could spend his entire life without thinking at some point, however fleetingly, of ending his life, or wishing to die—not to mention the actual occurrence of such an event among one’s relatives, friends, or acquaintances. Also, media accounts of suicide play an important role in propagating conventional notions about this phenomenon. Actually, the very familiarity of the concept of suicide is a major epistemological obstacle. Almost everyone has experienced suicidal ideation temporarily. Emotions and moods linked to it—despair, grief, depression, emotional exhaustion, and the like—seem to be the commonsensical and inescapable explanation for suicide in general.3 As will be seen, anthropologists are not immune to this commonsensical and unscientific temptation. The next remark has been so aptly formulated by Durkheim: “Everybody dies, few people kill themselves” (1997, 340). Because few people kill themselves, demographers and sociologists always express the rates as per 100,000, not in percentages. Suicide rates, even when high—for the vast majority of countries in the world they are below 50 per 100,000—never threaten the demographic balance of the general population.4 In groups where suicide rates are extremely high, the general mood and deportment of the majority of the people do not reflect the gloom and depression of a few potential suicides. It is important to keep in mind that suicides, however frequent, are nevertheless statistically a rarity.5 Rare as they are, however, their rate remains consistent and stable over long periods of time for any given group or population that has been systematically observed. It is this fact that makes suicide a desirable subject of scientific study. Indeed, Durkheim made the following observation, which explains why he and countless other social scientists were interested in this phenomenon: “[Quetelet] took for granted that consistency was to be found only in the most general aspects of human behavior; but it can be found at the same rate in sporadic manifestations that are being observed in rare and isolated sectors of the social field” (1997, 340, my trans.). The stability of suicide rates over periods extending from 10 to 50 years is an astounding fact, one that has been recorded once more among the people investigated in this volume and in previously...

Share