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C O M M E N T A R Y
Explaining Suicide: An Afterword
Jean La Fontaine
Published online: 1 March 2012
� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
It is an amazing tribute to the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim (1897), that over
a 100 years after his pioneering on suicide (Le Suicide: Etude Sociologique) was published, it receives mention by two-thirds of the contributors to this volume.
While the reference is not always uncritical, in the case of Niehaus and Picone for
example, it nevertheless forms a background to much that has been written here.
Durkheim’s success in showing the social dimension of what seemed the most
inscrutable of private acts, the ending of one’s own life, was a first great step
towards social science’s understanding of suicide. Durkheim argued that no
explanation could be based on the individual’s own motivation whether derived
from the farewell notes written by suicides or from the ideas of the closest kin and
friends, pointing out the self-justificatory nature of the notes and the stereotyped
nature of the ‘reasons’ noted in records of the reasons attributed to suicide. To
Durkheim this stereotyping indicated a social dimension that he referred to as
collective representations, though once his argument was established he seemed to
regard them as of lesser importance. The main aim of the work was to show that
suicide rates displayed regular patterns that differed for different societies and,
within societies, between socially significant categories such as age and gender.
Moreover, he aimed to show that events in the economic and political fortunes of
the wider society had their effects on the suicide rate.
Durkheim argued that the structure and integration of society was responsible for
the differences in suicide rates to be observed within and between societies.
However, he was largely concerned with industrial society. He implied that the
greater integration of small-scale non-industrial societies would entail far fewer
suicides and for some time no research was done to support this. Others either
subscribed to this theory, like Cavan (1928, p. 60 cited in Bohannan 1960, p. 23 fn)
or, like Briffault, (1927, p. 143 ff cited in Bohannan 1960, p. 22 fn) claimed that
J. La Fontaine (&) Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
123
Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409-418
DOI 10.1007/s11013-012-9256-0
suicide in ‘simple societies’ was extremely common. There was no data to support
either conclusion. Indeed Westermarck (1908, p. 12), criticising an early contri-
bution by Steinmetz (1894, p. 60), pointed out that it was absurd to assume that
there was one rate for all societies described at that time as primitive. That
Westermarck was right that the range was as great as in European societies is
demonstrated here.
However, for a long time, there was no research to check either of these notions
since Durkheim’s work was widely accepted and anthropologists saw little of
suicide during their field-work with the exception of Malinowski who wrote about
the forced suicide he documented in the context of law since it was a suicide after a
serious breach of taboo. According to Bohannan (1960 Introduction), much of the
writing of the post-Durkheim period was concerned with the possibility of relating
suicide and homicide patterns as culturally determined uses of violence against the
person; this was the main aim of the volume of articles collected by Bohannan
(1960), 1
my own first published paper among them (La Fontaine 1960). In his
introduction to it, Bohannan pointed out the difficulty of testing Durkheim’s
conclusions on data for many non-industrial societies, since the absence of accurate
records in most of them made rates difficult to calculate.
The data on which the articles in Bohannan’s book were based were all collected
as the result of the establishment of colonial governments in East Africa and Nigeria
(one article) that recorded deaths and collected statistics. Many of the contributors
expressed their doubts over the reliability of the statistics available. 2
Suicide records
were even less efficiently kept but it was clear that, however, unreliable the
statistics, suicide was rare.
A different problem was that the territories concerned were (and are) composed
of many peoples of widely different traditional cultures, so that unlike the situation
in Europe, figures for the whole unit, for Uganda, Kenya or Nigeria, were not related
to a single culture (see Southall 1960, pp. 227–229). 3
While the authors, all of them 4
but one associated with the East African Institute of Social Research, were aware of
the probable defects in these crude statistics, in order to achieve some parity with
Durkheim’s study, some form of quantitative analysis was necessary. We were
concerned, like Durkheim, with comparing acts of suicide as reflections of social
structure as well as recording the social constructions put on them.
There was considerable similarity among the peoples studied, although suicide
among the Tiv could not be included for lack of cases. The one exception found was
1 The idea of the book was first floated at a conference at the East African Institute of Social Research in
Kampala which I did not attend as I was half-way up a mountain on the eastern border of Uganda.
However, I subsequently discussed the proposal with Jim Bohannan whose wife was undertaking field-
work not far from my field-work area. We also talked about it later when back in Britain, the Bohannans
in Oxford and me in Cambridge. There was an idea that I might co-edit with him but as I was nose down
writing my Ph D. thesis I wriggled out of the commitment. 2
This is still the case in many places. 3
The cultural uniformity of classes and regions in Europe may well have been assumed in Durkheim’s
work although he recognised some differences such as that of religion, but this point cannot be dealt with
here. 4
G.M. Wilson was a Government anthropologist in Kenya, whose paper was recruited for the book by
Bohannan.
410 Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418
123
that of the Joluo, the only Nilotic people studied whose view of suicide is quite
unlike that of neighbouring Bantu-speaking peoples. Moreover, they believed that
suicide released malevolent powers that could attack whatever had caused the
individual to commit suicide. They thus fitted the pattern of revenge suicides that
Jeffreys had described in Africa not long before this collection was made (Jeffreys
1952, pp. 118–122). Wilson reported that Jolou made threats of suicide in daily life
to get results or avoid unpleasant consequences (1960:193), a most unusual situation
and not only in Africa. It is not surprising perhaps that the Joluo not only had a
much higher rate of suicide than other societies described in Bohannan’s collection
but Wilson does not try to argue that the threats are linked with a propensity to carry
them out. In addition, Joluo reversed the ratio of male to female suicides (Wilson
1960, pp. 190–191) which was found in the other societies studied and has been in
most studies ever since, including those discussed in the current volume. Wilson
was an anthropologist employed by the government of Kenya and unlike his
colleagues he collected these figures himself on his tours of duty over 2 years,
which may have been the reason for the much greater number of cases. Neither he
nor anyone else offered this explanation although Wilson did note that cases
reported to the government were ‘only those that were suspected of having been
cases of murder that were made to look like suicide’ (1960, p. 193).
In this volume, written 50 years later, Niehaus has addressed similar questions
and has faced similar problems. He has had to collect his own figures for
Bushbuckridge, the area in which he is interested, although more reliable data is
now available for South Africa as a whole. Other authors refer to the process of
standardisation by which records mould events into their own, necessarily crude,
categories. In another article, we learn that the family of the deceased could not be
interviewed, in another that there are attempts to present suicides as accidents or
even murders (see Wilson 1960, p. 193). It is clear that ensuring that records of
suicide cases are accurate still poses problems to research.
Durkheim’s main categories of suicide were based on social criteria and in
particular on a concept of integration which affected both society itself and the hold
society exercised over its component individuals. Whether society itself was
suffering a form of disintegration (associated with anomic suicide) or the
individuals concerned were poorly integrated into its structure (egoistic suicide),
suicide rates were a reflection of the state of particular societies. Distinguishing
between these two categories is not easy: is unemployment to be taken as an index
of social disintegration so that any suicides attributed to it are anomic or is it the
case that unemployed men are no longer adequately integrated into society and
hence commit egoistic suicide? Such questions seem to indicate that anomic and
egoistic suicides are less distinct than Durkheim thought.
The third Durkheimian category (altruistic suicide) was quite different from the
other two; it concerned those societies in which suicide was either honourable or the
required social response in some circumstances. Japan has been traditionally
considered the best example of this type of society but the article by Picone (this
volume) shows that this was an error. As she points out, such suicide was the ideal
for male warriors, a small and specialised sector of Japanese society that was
generalised, unjustifiably, to the whole. Her analysis of this mistake and how it
Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418 411
123
came about constitutes a warning against over-hasty generalisation from a small
sample. In this case, it seems to have arisen from the idea that Durkheim’s three
categories referred to whole societies rather than types of suicide.
Japanese kamikaze pilots (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002), like their earlier warrior forbears, and the contemporary suicide bombers of the embattled Muslim countries
(see Dabbagh, this volume) may confirm that altruistic suicide is valued only by the
dedicated fighters for a cause and valid only for those specialised sectors of a
population in particular circumstances. If this is so then altruistic suicide is a rare
form of suicide. The other usual example of altruistic suicide, referred to by Niehaus
(this volume) is the suicide of widows on their husbands’ pyres [suttee] that was once common in India. Since the Indian government has now banned it, instances of
it are crimes and therefore not easily investigated. We may never know how much
suttee was voluntary suicide or a form of homicide in which women were forced into compliance by their affines. Dabbagh raises the same doubts about certain
suicides of young Palestinian women that might have been so-called ‘honour’
killings. Similar queries may be raised over the traditional ‘suicide’ of the elderly
among the Inuit, who might be considered to resemble widows in their redundancy
to society and who, according to Kral, were ‘helped’ to commit suicide to avoid
being a burden on the community (Kral, this volume). Unfortunately, Kral cannot
help us on the issue of coercion for he is concerned with the present-day Inuit. But
the issue of possible coercion in cases deemed to be altruistic cannot be ignored,
even if it is very hard to document.
The best-known contemporary acts of altruistic suicide are those of the so-called
‘suicide bombers’ among Palestinians. Dabbagh discusses the notion of martyrdom
as the polar opposite of suicide, being considered honourable and rewarded in
Heaven while suicide is condemned in Islam as an offence against God. However, it
is also the case that to be an act of true martyrdom, a suicide must conform to strict
Islamic conditions. She also warns that martyrdom may present an honourable way
out for those she terms the ‘weaker’ members of society who cannot bear the
perpetual turmoil of their lives. It seems that martyrdom may, in some instances, be
a disguise for other forms of suicide; if this is so then altruistic suicide may be even
rarer than it seems to be. It could be argued, and Niehaus does argue (this volume),
that such categories are not particularly useful to the social scientist. Indeed they
have been relatively neglected compared with other aspects of Durkheim’s theory. It
is noticeable that they have not been the focus of either articles in Bohannan’s
collection or the present one. 5
In 1952, as already noted, M.D.W. Jeffreys described a form of suicide that did
not fit into Durkheim’s three categories. 6
Vengeance suicide, he recorded, might
occur in Africa but also elsewhere in the world where it was believed that suicide
released a powerful force that could punish those who had forced the suicide to take
this step. Such an act was generally considered a possible course of action; it did not
5 With exception of the articles by Dabbagh and Picone who both consider altruistic suicide. Both articles
reduce the incidence of altruistic suicide to something exceptional. 6
As Bohannan pointed out (1960, p. 11) Westernarck had mentioned the possibility of this type of
suicide in 1912 but Jeffrey’s article was based on research in West Africa.
412 Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418
123
merely represent the expression of individual feelings but it could hardly be
accounted altruistic. Although it was accepted as a means to an end, the individual
was neither required to commit suicide nor was it considered honourable if he did
so. Bohannan (1960, p. 12) points out that vengeance is a classification not based on
the criteria of social integration used to delineate both egoistic and anomic suicide
which makes it inconsistent with the other types. But altruistic suicide is also a
category not based entirely on the integrative state of society but dependent on a
specific representation of suicide; like vengeance suicide altruistic suicide is
logically inconsistent with the other two categories. This leaves us with two
categories based on social criteria and two (anomic and vengeful) that might be
called cultural since they depend on culturally specific definitions of suicide.
Durkheim took ‘collective representations’ as providing the proof that suicide
was a socially patterned form of behaviour that could be understood as such.
Thereafter he seemed less interested in them than the suicide rates he interpreted.
Not surprisingly, until recently, social scientists have largely accepted and then
ignored Durkheim’s observations: that suicide is socially constructed. They have
examined rates and what these could reveal of a society’s structure and condition
(e.g. Bohannan 1960; and also see Niehaus this volume), although the context for
discussions of these rates might be the ideas current in the society under
examination. Bohannan attempted to recategorise suicide, claiming three types of
suicide: the jural (when a suicide follows some serious breach of social norms of
which the case described by Malinowski (1926, pp. 77–79) is perhaps the most
famous example), the domestic and the status-linked (1960, p. 262) but these seem
not to have been widely accepted, although the domestic relations of male and
female within the household have been considered by most of the contributors to the
current volume.
If rates are ignored, the structural distinctions of age and gender are not taken for
granted in the same way and indeed most of the articles in this book set out the
distinctions of age and gender that form the framework within which suicide is to be
examined. Commonly, suicide is higher among men than women and male suicides
are more frequent than female ones. The significance of gender in the determination
of suicide is a social categorisation that plays an important part in analyses of
suicide, both those of the past and in the present volume. While not all the articles
here focus directly on the difference between the incidence of male and female
suicides and its significance, most refer to this distinction which bids fair to be the
only social universal to be uncovered so far. Bohannan remarked in 1960 that
among the peoples described in his collection of articles women were disposed to
commit suicide when unable to fulfil their roles as wives and mothers, while men
were also vulnerable to loss of status in extra-domestic contexts, particularly in
competitive societies such as the Gisu (La Fontaine 1960, pp. 126–127) where rank
was achieved rather than ascribed. The authors of the articles in this volume are
more inclined to understand women’s suicides as protests against their domination
by men, as indeed are their informants (see Billaud, this volume) and may neglect
male suicide. For Niehaus, the difference between the causes of male and female
suicides arises from their different constructions of personhood. He concludes that
‘In theoretical terms we can argue that whereas men’s suicides were more likely to
Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418 413
123
pertain to problems about the ‘‘individual’’ aspects of their masculine personhood,
women’s suicides fore-grounded problematic ‘‘relational’’ (dividual) aspects of
feminine personhood’. Presented as a failure of role fulfilment, as a protest against
male domination in society, as the result of domestic troubles, as differences in
personhood, women’s suicide appears universally different in incidence and nature
from that of men. We might even, in Durkheimian terms, consider that women who
are mothers are less prone to suicide since they are integrated firmly within a
domestic group by their children; men’s attachment to this basic unit is less secure
(on this see La Fontaine 1981).
Unlike Niehaus, many of the contributors to this volume have set aside the
consideration of suicide rates, apart from brief remarks on the incidence of suicide
among men and women and the relevance of the two major social categories of age
and gender. It is interesting that the majority claim a high or increasing rate of
suicide among ‘their’ people indicating that this also may require explanation. An
unusual exception is provided by Palestinian society where actual rates of suicide
are low despite the concept of glorious martyrdom that would seem to justify it.
The problem of how collective representations are connected with the incidence of
suicide in the society that holds them remains largely unaddressed. However, an
interesting contribution to its solution is made by Chua who describes some local
stereotypes of suicide in Kerala that combine the age, gender and social status of the
suicide with the set of circumstances that precipitated the death, creating a handful of
vignettes of suicide that seem to regularise the act. These archetypes, as Chua calls
them, are used to understand actual cases of suicides and her article demonstrates how
people strive to cram the circumstances of a particular suicide into the framework of a
suitable archetype. These vignettes are reinforced by the reporting in the media and
acquire credibility from them. Chua claims that they are related to ‘demographic
patterns of suicide such as age, gender, class, method and site’, but we are not given
the statistics for these features to clinch the argument. What we do not know is how the
quantitative pattern of recorded suicides relates, either to the media reporting, or the
folk stories. Finally, one would have to know if there was any evidence that the stories
were constructed from the statistics; Owens and Lambert show how in England the
official view obscures folk views that emerge in different contexts so that statistics
may or may not reflect any collective representations current in the population.
The cultural construction of suicide does not seem to include concepts that might
account for changes in rates, with the possible exception of the ‘collective decay’
and ‘moral surrender’ attributed by folk explanations of contemporary suicide in
Kerala (Chua this volume). Imberton also notes that the Mayan-Chol in Southern
Mexico may see a sharp rise in suicide rates as a contagious epidemic and Kral
indicates that among the Inuit the effect of major changes in their way of life,
including particularly relations between the generations may be blamed. But in most
of these articles, collective representations seem most useful in providing culturally
acceptable understandings of suicide both generally and in particular cases; they do
not explain the incidence of suicide or changes in the frequency and nature of
suicide among a particular people.
Dabbagh’s contribution raises an additional question: how to consider attempted
suicides. As is widely known, Western psychologists consider failed suicides to be a
414 Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418
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‘cry for help’ from someone under unbearable emotional pressure (see Perlin 1975,
p. 151) but it is also recorded that many suicides make several attempts before they
succeed in killing themselves. In terms of social analysis, can these attempts then be
considered similar to completed suicides and thus a potential form of data? Billaud
appears to have decided affirmatively. She makes no distinction between attempted
and completed suicides and the two cases she discusses concern young women who,
she asserts, were not ‘really’ trying to kill themselves. They are, however,
representative of a rising incidence of suicide among young Afghani women,
although these girls have used drugs while the usual method of those who die is
immolation. The attempted and completed suicides are all seen as protests against
the plight in which Afghan women find themselves; the failed suicides can thus
provide data that allow one to understand women’s actual suicides in Afghanistan.
Dabbagh takes the opposite point of view. She begins from the observation that the
suicide statistics for Palestinians were very similar to those of the West but ‘with
different characteristics for attempted suicide and actual suicide’. Attempted suicide
was more common, being largely carried out by young people, mainly women, often
using ‘soft’ methods such as drugs (like the two Afghani girls p. 6). ‘Fatal suicide’,
appeared to be generally committed by older age groups, and more often by men using
more violent methods. It seems from the Palestinian data that attempted suicide is not
a good indicator or source of evidence for the analysis of suicide, itself being different
in social origins. Picone also attributes different motives to attempted suicides from
those of actual suicides. Widger too emphasizes the difference between these two
types of action, referring to self-harm as distinct from suicide. Other authors either
deliberately exclude failed suicides from their analysis (e.g. Owens and Lambert) or
do not mention the problem of attempted suicide. It remains then to be decided
whether any similarity between attempted and accomplished suicide varies according
to culture. Thus, far the weight of the data is against it although attempted suicide may
throw some light on the views of certain types of individual.
The articles in this volume demonstrate the considerable variation in collective
representations of suicide. There are few societies in which suicide is regarded
positively, with the possible exceptions discussed above in connection with
Durkheim’s category of altruistic suicide. Most peoples regard it negatively. In
Japan, suicide, together with murder and death by drowning, is considered a ‘bad
death’. Suicides are despised by the Maya-Chol who live in Southern Mexico, like the
Inuit far to the north of them and consider suicide as a disease, able to infect others
with the desire to die. In Singapore, all dead bodies are considered polluting, but a
suicide is also considered dangerous to vulnerable categories of person such as
pregnant women or children. 7
(Toulson, p. 6) If this is so, then it is surprising that the
kin of a suicide may decide to hide the mode of death from others (and the undertakers
may collude with the plan), seeming to fear the possibility of public shame more than
spreading the pollution. In other places, the negative connotation of suicide may be
expressed in a variety of different ways: as extreme shame cast on close kin, as the
manifestation of evil, as pollution, as the result of witchcraft that forces individuals to
take their own lives or, in Islamic and Roman Catholic cultures, as forbidden by God
7 We are not told what the danger consists of.
Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418 415
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and therefore a sin. There seems to be a very common, though often implicit, moral
judgement of suicide that stigmatises the action and it must not be confused with the
fear of contamination, of pollution or a notion of the infectious nature of suicide which
are also commonly associated with it.
It is not entirely clear how far morally negative views of suicide or reduced rates
of suicide can be attributed to particular religions. Picone points this out with
reference to Japanese cultural representations of suicide and discusses, briefly, the
effect of Buddhism. Durkheim had included the influence of religion in his classic
study on suicide, but largely in terms of the effect of different forms of Christianity
on social integration. In this volume, Widger reports that in Sri Lanka: ‘suicidal
behaviours are over-represented among the Buddhists, under-represented among the
Catholics, and almost completely absent among the Muslims’. Moreover, in the
West Bank Palestinian community studied by Dabbagh which is almost entirely
Muslim (97% according to figures quoted by her), the suicide rate is very low. This
suggests that Islam may have an inhibiting effect on suicide but in general the
influence of the world religions 8
on either folk views of suicide or the propensity of
its members to kill themselves is something that we need to know more about.
Among these representations of suicides are instances of ideas that suicides are not
themselves responsible for their actions. Outside agencies such as witches, spirits or
inanimate agents such as contamination or infection from other suicides can be
blamed. When a suicide occurs in Sri Lanka (Widger, this volume) the question asked
is not ‘Why’ but ‘Who’? Something similar happens in China (Toulson, this volume).
But in such cases, what is being asked is which person drove this individual to commit
suicide for it may be believed that suicide is the result of persecution or hurtful deeds
by others. The individuals in the household or kin group of the dead may be the ones
believed to be guilty. In other societies the agents are supernatural: witchcraft,
powerful ghosts or spirits, or a ‘different evil person’ inhabiting and controlling the
individual may have been the cause of suicide. In each case it is, of course, tantamount
to denying that the death was a suicide at all (Imberton, Widger, Owens & Lambert).
Even in England, as Owens and Lambert have documented, the remaining relatives
may talk of a man who commits suicide as being a different person, as ‘possessed’ by
an evil double that causes him to do things he would not otherwise do (Owens &
Lambert, this volume). The fatalistic view that it is God’s will is also to be found, for
example among the Mayan-Chol in Southern Mexico. In all these situations, the
individual suicide is perceived as acting under the direction of some outside force.
These ways of understanding suicide remove the intention to die from the suicide and
hence pass no moral judgement on him or her.
Few of the peoples depicted in this volume consider suicide a rational decision of
the individual. Among the Mexican people studied by Imberton, there are some who
attribute suicide to the individual’s choice of suicide as a solution to manifold
problems but it is not the only view. Nor is it in England where the common belief
that madness is the cause of suicide is an explicit denial of such a rationalist
interpretation, accounting also for the wide spread opposition to licensing it for the
terminally ill. Even in Kerala, where certain stereotypes of suicide seem to depict an
8 Traditional religious views are not more likely to be considered in this context.
416 Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418
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acceptance of some motives as sufficient to drive individuals to suicide (Chua) the
view that faced with certain situations suicide is a rational act is rare. The issue is
contentious and which situations merit being labelled as a rational choice of death
may be debated (see Widger, this volume). Suicide as a rational action is most often
a minority and contested view.
The idea that a society can be represented by a single view of suicide is demolished
by the work recorded in this volume. Many explanations of suicide within one society
and even of a particular suicide have been documented. Changes introduced from
elsewhere, by missionaries and government officials, in schools and on television are
affecting collective representations in the non-Western world. Ethnographic research
reveals that not only do representations of suicide vary within one society, as Imberton
and Kral among others demonstrate, the interpretation may differ according to the
person expressing it. Owens and Lambert argue that ‘Accounts of persons who are
relatives of the deceased are inevitably shaped strongly by the character of the
relationship itself. Thus, informants’ interpretations of events, especially regarding
the background to and reasons for a suicide, are directed as much towards dealing with
questions of personal accountability as with offering up a neutral description of the
deceased’s character and of factors contributing to the demise (Owens et al. 2008,
p. 241)’. This view is supported by Ajith’s careful investigation of his nephew’s death
described by Chua; it is a matter of vital importance to his kin to understand why this
individual died. Imberton and Widger both discuss how those close to the dead argue
about the appropriate interpretation of a suicide. The search for an agreed
understanding may be extended further to everyone in contact with the suicide or
with knowledge of him or her.
A close focus on one or two cases has shown that the interpretation of suicide has
individual as well as collective representations and the attribution of cause may
result in discussion and even dispute. What needs to be shown is how the attribution
of motive in particular cases involving known individuals is derived from or
contributes too a general representation of suicide that can be said to be
characteristic of a particular society. Chua comes close to it but the generalised
template for understanding suicide in Kerala is an artefact of the state. Examples
taken from the media show that some of the stereotypes are used to interpret
particular cases but are all the categories meaningful to the public at large? How do
actual cases contribute to and modify the state categorisation?
This collection must lead to the realisation that suicide can carry very many
different kinds of meaning: as collective representations of the act in the abstract, as
part of the moral evaluation of action, as an element in religious belief, as a category
in official records and in the multiple understandings of kin, neighbours and the
wider community when considering particular suicides. These meanings find their
expression in the regular interaction of individuals that constitute social life and can
best be elicited by the techniques of ethnographic research. The fundamental social
construction of gender may seem to be expressed almost universally in differences
in suicide rates, but the difference has received less scrutiny here than its role in
causing women to take their own lives. Female suicide may be attributed to male
domination, female protest, the social construction of the gendered person, or the
power structure of the household, all of which relate female suicide to domestic life.
Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418 417
123
But as Bohannan remarked ‘Men commit suicide for the same reasons as women do
– and for some others as well’ (1960, p. 262). It is these extra reasons that raise the
male suicide rate above that of women. The contributors to his collection make
clear, and Niehaus’s analysis 50 years later confirm this view, that status problems
raise the rate of male suicide. 9
Examining more closely Durkheim’s concept of collective representations has
complicated but not altered his recognition of the fundamentally social nature of
suicide. However, it has shown that this social dimension is perceptible in another
dimension from that of suicide rates. The interpretation of individual suicides and
their explanation in terms acceptable to the community is an activity that mobilises
social relationships and encourages the revaluation of accepted truths; in so doing it
affirms and re-creates the social representations of suicide.
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Wilson, G.M.
1960 Homicide and Suicide among the Joluo of Kenya. In Bohannan, P.J. (ed) African Homicide and
Suicide. Princeton University Press, pp. 179–213.
9 It does not seem that Joluo men are less plagued by status problems nor that Jolou women’s domestic
situation is very much worse than elsewhere. However, there is the indication that women suffer notably
from men’s violence and that their suicides are sometimes murders of which their husbands are guilty.
418 Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:409–418
123
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