Culture and Suicide

This chapter reviews suicide from an anthropological point of view. A cultural approach to suicide has been absent in the mainstream suicidology literature, and anthropological studies of suicide are rare. Providing an anthropological view of suicide in S. Perlin’s Handbook for the Study of Suicide, Jean La Fontaine noted the importance of examining cultural values, indicating that anthropology’s focus has been on social values and structure related to the incidence of suicide. M. L. Honkasalo and M. Tuominen have edited a book on culture and suicide, where they also avoid pathologizing the suicidal. They see agency in suicide, yet it is also very much influenced by culture. The literature on suicide and culture has mainly been cross-cultural or comparative, primarily using quantitative data. Classical Marxist theory has the social system serving the interests of the ruling class, while most people are in the “exploited” classes who are not interested in the social system but their internalization is a “false consciousness.”