Chol Understandings of Suicide and Human Agency

According to ethnographic material collected since 2003, the Chol Mayan indigenous people in southern Mexico have different causal explanations for suicide. It can be attributed to witchcraft that forces victims to take their lives against their own will, to excessive drinking, or to fate determined by God. However, it can also be conceived of as a conscious decision made by a person overwhelmed by daily problems. Drawing from the theoretical framework developed by Laura M. Ahearn, inspired by practice theory, the paper contends that these different explanations operate within two different logics or understandings of human agency. The first logic attributes responsibility to supernatural causes such as witchcraft or divine destiny, and reflects Chol notions of personhood. The second logic accepts personal responsibility for suicide, and is related to processes of social change such as the introduction of wage labor, education and a market economy. The contemporary Chol resort to both logics to make sense of the human drama of suicide.     

Informal Mentors and Role Models in the Lives of Urban Mexican-Origin Adolescents

This article draws on a larger study investigating the social networks and help-seeking practices of Mexican-origin youth in San Diego, California. The authors present the subset of findings concerning adult, nonfamily informal mentors and role models. Using survey data, interviews, and a critical ethnographic perspective grounded in sociological theory, the article examines participating adolescents' critical understandings of these significant figures their lives, the rare and fortuitous nature of these relationships, and their empowering influence in the lives of urban, low-income, immigrant Latino youth. Linkages to social capital and developmental theories are offered.     

Two Kinds of Suicide

In suicidology, the common view is that ‘rational’ suicides occur only rarely, because the competence of people who want to end their lives is compromised by mental illness. In the Netherlands and Flanders, however, patients’ requests for euthanasia or assistance in suicide are granted in 5300 and 1400 cases a year respectively, and in all these cases at least two doctors have confirmed the patient's competence. The combination of these two findings is puzzling. In other countries one would expect at least some of these people to end their own lives. The article argues that we can distinguish between two types of suicide with clustering characteristics. In cases of the first type, the agent doesn't carefully plan his action, doesn't communicate his plans to relatives or others, and uses violent means. In such cases it is reasonable to presume lack of competence. The other type has the opposite characteristics. The most plausible explanation of our problem is that suicides of the second kind are invisible to suicidology, because they tend not to be registered as suicides at all.     

Kinship Between Judith Butler and Anthropology? A Review Essay

This essay critically evaluates Judith Butler's recent writings on kinship. In this work, Butler challenges the universalist assumptions of psychoanalysis, hoping to lay the analytical groundwork for imagining new forms of familial relationship. Butler examines the way that anthropology and psychoanalysis have constructed the incest taboo as necessitating heteronormative forms of kinship. Butler's critique of kinship, which draws on her theories of subjection, belies her own attachment to a vision of social life occupied primarily by normative institutions, in particular the state. I suggest that new forms of kinship must be understood on their own terms, whether or not they are accorded legitimacy in law or accepted by psychoanalysis. Anthropology's ethnographic practice can emendate an account of subjection and recognition that obsessively looks to institutions and norms even as it criticizes them.     

Constructions of race: symbolic ethnic capital and the performance of youth identity in multicultural Australia

The relationship between ethnicity and cultural and social capital has been taken up by several scholars in terms of questions of disadvantage. This paper considers the performance of race and ethnicity as positive capital among a group of Sudanese young people with refugee backgrounds in Brisbane, Australia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate young people's adaptation of cultural associations in their hybridized and essentialized self-representations. In particular, I explore my informants’ use of hip hop music and style as resources in performance. Much of young people's engagement with capital in performance enables their relatively overt and self-conscious process of clarifying who they are in relationship to one another, often with particular reference to race and ethnicity. Their engagement with globally relevant mediums is indicative of young people's agency in defining their own lives in the context of the political and moral framework of Australian multiculturalism.     

Gendered Endings: Narratives of Male and Female Suicides in the South African Lowveld

Durkheim's classical theory of suicide rates being a negative index of social solidarity downplays the salience of gendered concerns in suicide. But gendered inequalities have had a negative impact: worldwide significantly more men than women perpetrate fatal suicides. Drawing on narratives of 52 fatal suicides in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, this article suggests that Bourdieu's concepts of 'symbolic violence' and 'masculine domination' provide a more appropriate framework for understanding this paradox. I show that the thwarting of investments in dominant masculine positions have been the major precursor to suicides by men. Men tended to take their own lives as a means of escape. By contrast, women perpetrated suicide to protest against the miserable consequences of being dominated by men. However, contra the assumption of Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus', the narrators of suicide stories did reflect critically upon gender constructs.     

Ethnic background,social class or status? Developments in school attainment of the children of immigrants in The Netherlands

In the field of education and children of immigrants we are confronted with a peculiar clash of opinions. Some believe that the differences in school attainment between indigenous children and children of immigrant families can be explained in terms of social class. Others seek the differences in terms of status groups. Empirical research was carried out in one of the bigger cities of The Netherlands, which attempted to further this theoretical debate. The results indicate that the influence of an immigrant background on school attainment is largely mediated by both social class and status. Ethnicity, however, also has a specific effect on education, independent of social class and status. It is argued that the characteristic of ethnicity is a sociological kind of motivation. The educational motivation of immigrant families can have a ‘positive’ effect in the sense that ‘black’ schools perform reasonably well, and a ‘negative’ effect in the sense that immigrant children at schools with a high level of aspiration perform less well than their indigenous Dutch schoolmates.     

Mad, Bad or Heroic? Gender, Identity and Accountability in Lay Portrayals of Suicide in Late Twentieth-Century England

Suicide research has relied heavily on the psychological autopsy method, which uses interviews with the bereaved to ascertain the mental health status of the deceased prior to death. The resulting data are typically interpreted within a clinical diagnostic framework, which reinforces psychiatric assumptions concerning the ubiquity of mental illness amongst those who take their own lives. The ways in which informants reconstruct the past and the meanings they attach to events preceding the suicide are rarely examined. This paper uses qualitative methods to analyse the narratives given by bereaved people in an English psychological autopsy study, in order to understand how they made sense of a family member's suicide. Some clear differences between the portrayal of male and female suicides emerged. The paper discusses the gendering of agency and accountability in relation to the differential medicalisation of male and female distress in the UK, and suggests that a preoccupation with mental illness in suicide research may have obscured other culturally normative understandings of self-accomplished death.     

"Who is healthy among the Korwa?" Liminality in the experiential health of the displaced Korwa of Central India

The Korwa, an indigenous community of Central India, were displaced from their forest abode four decades ago because of the state's forest policy. The resettled Korwa do not consider the new space their home and summarize their journey of displacement from hill forest to lowland villages in terms of deprivation of healthy life. The Korwa complain of fever, diffuse aches, fatigue, and frail bodies forming a part of their everyday lives thereby signaling the loss of experiential health attributed to alienation from the forest. During an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Chhatisgarh, the Korwa informants were found to be drawing a sharp contrast between the "health-generating" attributes of forest life and the "health-threatening" miseries of current wage labor economy. Using liminality framework, this article attempts to understand health experiences of the displaced Korwa as embodiment of their social and material conditions of existence.     

Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry

The toy industry has touted ethnically correct dolls as a progressive solution to representation and inclusion in the toy box, and in children's lives. Ethnographic work with ten-year-old, poor and working-class black children in New Haven, Connecticut complicates these assertions. These children had very few ethnically correct dolls. Instead, girls had white dolls that they brought into their worlds through styling their hair in ways racially marked as black. Contrasting a case study of Mattel's Shani dolls with an ethnographic look at race and commodities among New Haven kids, this paper locates children's consumption within the context of social inequality, a context examined in few studies of toys or consumption. Taking kids as primary ethnographic subjects suggests ways in which this largely silenced group can speak to larger social and theoretical issues, among them race, class, gender, and age. [children, U.S. anthropology, social inequality, consumption]     

Ways of Asking,Ways of Telling

The interpretive understanding that can be derived from interviews is highly influenced by methods of data collection, be they structured or semistructured, ethnographic, clinical, life-history or survey interviews. This article responds to calls for research into the interview process by analyzing data produced by two distinctly different types of interview, a semistructured ethnographic interview and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM, conducted with participants in the Navajo Healing Project. We examine how the two interview genres shape the context of researcher-respondent interaction and, in turn, influence how patients articulate their lives and their experience in terms of illness, causality, social environment, temporality and self/identity. We discuss the manner in which the two interviews impose narrative constraints on interviewers and respondents, with significant implications for understanding the jointly constructed nature of the interview process. The argument demonstrates both divergence and complementarity in the construction of knowledge by means of these interviewing methods.     

Toward a Marxian anthropology? Bare,abstract, mobile,global

Anthropology has conventionally taken as some of its most cherished foundational categories the precise opposites of the key concepts that animate this inquiry: rather than “bare life,” anthropology has tended always to emphasize the fullness and complexity of social and political life; instead of labor in the abstract, which we recognize in its commodified form as “labor-power,” anthropology has produced exquisite inventories of concrete laboring activities and the “cultural” content of productive work; against the impermanence and mutability of lives characterized by their mobility, the ethnographic enterprise has been deeply attached to the sedentarist presuppositions of lasting settlement, dwelling, and “community”; and contrary to the task of apprehending space on a global scale, ethnographic study has been overwhelmingly localized and place-bound. Rethinking these elementary premises of the ethnographic endeavor and situating these critical concepts at the center of our epistemological frameworks are crucial theoretical and practical tasks for any meaningful social inquiry today. In this regard, the Marxian theoretical arsenal is simply indispensable. But, in the derisive words of so many disciplinary forebears and overseers, is this properly “anthropological”? The prospective convergence of genuinely critical sociopolitical inquiry with the techniques and insights of anthropology must remain for us the locus of an urgent problem—an open question on an open horizon.     

Highlighting the contrasts,downplaying the divergences: insertion and visibility tactics of Brazilians in Portugal

Although many scholars point to the importance of gender in structuring the immigrant experience, many immigrant women themselves do not attribute much importance to the role that gender plays in their lives. To explore this issue further, we investigate how thirty-two foreign-born Latinas define their experiences in Utah, a new immigrant destination that has received little empirical attention. The women in our sample indicated five major challenges they faced in their everyday lives: social isolation, language difficulty, racial-ethnic prejudice, poverty and lack of documentation. Most of the women described these challenges in terms of social class, race-ethnicity and immigrant status, rather than gender. We argue that migration research needs to be more attuned to axes of oppression other than gender and more attentive to how immigrant women, themselves, interpret their everyday lives.     

On the ethics and practice of contemporary social theory: from crisis talk to multiattentional method

Using an approach derived from the anthropology and sociology of knowledge, this article explores the historical emergence of European social theory and its contemporary place in the human sciences. I direct ethnographic attention to a sense of crisis or impasse in social theory’s capacity to frame and to analyze the complexity of contemporary relations in the world. By reanalyzing this crisis talk as a phenomenological reaction to the growing (sub)specialization of social theory, I offer a new way of thinking about social theory in terms of specialized analytical attentions. I also suggest how we can move from crisis talk to a new ethics of theoretical complementarity, inspired by Dilthey, which I term “multiattentional method.”     

Two kinds of physician‐assisted death

I argue that the concept ‘physician‐assisted suicide’ covers two procedures that should be distinguished: giving someone access to humane means to end his own life, and taking co‐responsibility for the safe and effective execution of that plan. In the first section I explain the distinction, in the following sections I show why it is important. To begin with I argue that we should expect the laws that permit these two kinds of ‘assistance’ to be different in their justificatory structure. Laws that permit giving access only presuppose that the right to self‐determination implies a right to suicide, but laws that permit doctors to take co‐responsibility may have to appeal to a principle of mercy or beneficence. Actually this difference in justificatory structure can to some extent be found in existing regulatory systems, though far from consistently. Finally I argue that if one recognizes a right to suicide, as Oregon and other American states implicitly do, and as the European Court of Human Rights has recently done explicitly, one is committed to permit the first kind of ‘assistance’ under some conditions.     

Accusations of Genital Theft: A Case from Northern Ghana

Occurrences of panic attacks associated with belief in genital retraction have been described in the anthropological and psychological literature in terms of culture bound reactive syndromes. Similar phenomena occur widely in West Africa, where they are reported as cases of penis snatching. Explanations for these phenomena range from the biomedical emphasis on pathology to the social psychological emphasis on altered perceptual sets. This paper provides a narrative of an accusation of genital theft in a rural West African settlement. Drawing from ethnographic information, it will be argued that the case is best explained in light of social relations, definitions for in-groups and out-groups, and local knowledge concerning witchcraft and divination. Local explanations for the case conform to both biomedical and social psychological models.     

The Marketization of Education: Public Schools for Private Ends

This article argues that the neoliberal renaissance of the 1980s marketized education, with distinctly negative social consequences. We examine the emergence and promotion of a national-level discourse that positioned schools in the service of the economy. Based on ethnographic research conducted in North Carolina, we then show how local growth elite utilized this discourse to further their own race and class interests to the exclusion and detriment of poorer, African American parents and students. We suggest that ethnographic studies of policy formation help to socially and historically contextualize contemporary debates and denaturalize unwarranted assumptions about the public good.     

Herding,social influence and economic decision-making: socio-psychological and neuroscientific analyses

Typically, modern economics has steered away from the analysis of sociological and psychological factors and has focused on narrow behavioural assumptions in which expectations are formed on the basis of mathematical algorithms. Blending together ideas from the social and behavioural sciences, this paper argues that the behavioural approach adopted in most economic analysis, in its neglect of sociological and psychological forces and its simplistically dichotomous categorization of behaviour as either rational or not rational, is too narrow and stark. Behaviour may reflect an interaction of cognitive and emotional factors and this can be captured more effectively using an approach that focuses on the interplay of different decision-making systems. In understanding the mechanisms affecting economic and financial decision-making, an interdisciplinary approach is needed which incorporates ideas from a range of disciplines including sociology, economic psychology, evolutionary biology and neuroeconomics.