Suicide in Sri Lanka

The Anthropology of an Epidemic

Tom Widger (University of Sussex, UK)

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English

Routledge
22 January 2018

Personal & public health; Medical anthropology

Series: Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series

Why people kill themselves remains an enduring and unanswered question. With a focus on Sri Lanka, a country that for several decades has reported ‘epidemic’ levels of suicidal behaviour, this book develops a unique perspective linking the causes and meanings of suicidal practices to social processes across moments, lifetimes and history.

Extending anthropological approaches to practice, learning and agency, anthropologist Tom Widger draws from long-term fieldwork in a Sinhala Buddhist community to develop an ethnographic theory of suicide that foregrounds local knowledge and sets out a charter for prevention. The book highlights the motives of children and adults becoming suicidal and how certain gender, age, class relationships and violence are prone to give rise to suicidal responses. By linking these experiences to emotional states, it develops an ethnopsychiatric model of suicide rooted in social practice. Widger then goes on to examine how suicides are resolved at village and national levels, tracing the roots of interventions to the politics of colonial and post-colonial social welfare and health regimes. Exploring local accounts of suicide as both ‘evidence’ for the suicide epidemic and as an ‘ethos’ of suicidality shaping subjective worlds, Suicide in Sri Lanka shows how anthropological analysis can offer theoretical as well as policy insights.

With the inclusion of straightforward summaries and implications for prevention at the end of each chapter, this book has relevance for specialists and non-specialists alike. It represents an important new contribution to South Asian Studies, Social Anthropology and Medical Anthropology, as well as to cross-cultural Suicidology.

By: Tom Widger (University of Sussex UK)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781138491618
ISBN 10: 1138491616
Series: Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series
Pages: 222
Publication Date: 22 January 2018
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

1. The Anthropology of Suicide 2. Of Villages, Courts, and Clinics 3. Suicide There, Suicide Here 4. Relational Flows 5. Suffering, Frustration, Anger 6. One Life, One Love 7. The Black Demon 8. The Search for Compassion 9. The Suicide Process

Tom Widger has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on suicide in Sri Lanka for more than ten years. He received a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics, UK in 2009. He has since held positions at Brunel University, UK, the University of Sussex, UK, the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Durham University, UK.