ABSTRACT
Most discussions of suicide correctly begin with Emile Durkheim's Le Suicide. His four-fold sociological typology—egoistic/altruistic/ anomic/fatalistic—has precipitated a rich conversation for more than a century, albeit with considerable criticism and emendation. This chapter argues that many types of suicides might be better understood in the framework of ritual drama. This performative approach implies "agency" and a spectrum of control, interpreting suicide as a distinctly human act in a social and cultural context. Suicide as dramatic performance addresses the more reductive causal explanations of suicide by sociology and biology. Suicidal dramas, ancient or modern, sacred or secular, require "scripts". The suicidal drama, whether collectively enacted or individually performed, always has, as Moore and Myerhoff enumerate in the formal properties of ritual, a "social message". Any aspect of behavior, they write, can be ritualized. Suicide requires ritual form to accomplish its meanings. Suicide as ritual drama is constructed of several formal properties.
