ABSTRACT
The ethnographic fieldwork on which this chapter is based was funded by a travel grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and was affiliated in India with the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) in Tiruvananthapuram, Kerala. It focuses on the input of the participants at the suicide and agency workshop and in particular from critical readings by Ludek Broz, Ursula Munster, Julia Poerting, and James Staples. The term "moral panic" refers to "outbreaks of public concern or alarm", usually greatly exaggerated and boosted by the mass media, about nascent threats to the fabric of society, such as terrorism, youth criminality, diseases, or suicide epidemics. Anthropological research on suicide has been undertaken by medical anthropologists, who have introduced a valuable conceptual focus on the politics of the body, social suffering, and medicalization by attending to the influence of work and labor on the formation of suicidal subjectivities.
