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Suicide in Sri Lanka: The Anthropology of an Epidemic
Contributor(s): Widger, Tom (Author)
ISBN: 1138820741     ISBN-13: 9781138820746
Publisher: Routledge
OUR PRICE:   $190.00  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: November 2014
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Psychology | Suicide
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies - General
- Social Science | Regional Studies
Dewey: 362.28
LCCN: 2014021043
Series: Routledge Contemporary South Asia
Physical Information: 0.7" H x 6.2" W x 9.3" (1.01 lbs) 198 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

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.