Showing papers in "Contributions to Indian Sociology in 2012"

Farmers’ suicides and the state in India: Conceptual and ethnographic notes from Wayanad, Kerala

Abstract: This article reflects on the challenge of making ‘farmers’ suicides’ an object of ethnographic enquiry. This challenge is not just a matter of methods, ethics and access but also a matter of categorical choices involved in studying this over-determined and politicised category of self-killing. Drawing on fieldwork in the Wayanad district of Kerala, the article argues that ‘farmers’ suicides’ are not self-evident types of rural death, but become reified and visible through the state’s enumerative practices. This state-defined category, conveyed and scandalised by the media, rests on a connection between suicide and—–an equally reified—‘agrarian crisis’. The ethnographic endeavour of ‘chasing’ the elusive object of farmers’ suicides may destabilise this seemingly self-evident link. Despite this, farmers’ suicides have taken on a political life of their own. They have become a constructed yet real interface for the reworking of the relationship between state and rural citizens in liberalising India. The Indi...

‘I drank it to put an end to me’: Narrating girls’ suicide and self-harm in Sri Lanka

Abstract: Sri Lanka experienced a spiral of suicides in the 1980s and 1990s, with deaths rising to nearly 48 per 100,000 in 1995. Although reported rates of suicide have declined since then, the incidence of suicide and deliberate self-harm remains high, especially among young people. Data on hospital admissions showed that the number of adolescent girls admitted for deliberate self-harm more than doubled between 2001 and 2007. We conducted in-depth interviews with girls in the south of Sri Lanka who were hospitalised for deliberate self-harm. The interviews revealed several common themes in the girls’ accounts of the circumstances that prompted self-harm episodes, their motives and emotions, and others’ responses. Most episodes involved accusations and disputes regarding the girls’ sexual comportment and heterosexual relations. They often involved harsh scolding and beatings by parents. Themes in the girls’ accounts included anger, disappointment, shame, and acute distress; descriptions of their self-harm as an ex...

Suicide in a central Indian steel town

Abstract: Over the past 15 years ‘farmer suicides’ have occasioned grave public concern; and it has recently been claimed that Chhattisgarh has the highest incidence in the country. This article suggests that the representation of such cases as the major public policy problem to do with self-inflicted death is politically inflected and that there are good grounds for supposing that—at least in certain pockets—the urban suicide rate is as high, if not higher. In the industrial area around steel town of Bhilai, this has risen dramatically over the last 20 years and it is the aristocracy of public sector labour that is significantly most susceptible. This is ultimately attributable to the liberalisation of the economy and the consequent downsizing of this workforce, which has led to a crisis in the reproduction of class status. Such workers are privileged; think of themselves as different from the informal sector ‘labour class’ and fear sinking into it. Suicides are significantly under-reported and the official statistics are systematically inflected by fear of the police and the law, which encourage both concealment and the deliberate obfuscation of likely motives, and almost certainly increase the ‘lethal probabilities’ of suicide attempts.

Suicide and the morality of kinship in Sri Lanka

Abstract: Ethnographic research amongst Sinhala Buddhists in community and clinical settings in the Madampe Division, northwest Sri Lanka, suggests that local understandings and practices of suicidal behaviour reflect the kinship structure. In particular, acts of self-harm and self-inflicted death arise in response to the breaking of core kinship rights, duties and obligations, or as a challenge to inflexibility or contradictions within the system. In either case, the morality of kinship is closely associated with the causes of suicidal behaviour, as the ‘inevitability’ or ‘evitability’ of kin relationships is negotiated and lived in practice. This article analyses how local political economies give rise to particular kinship and moral conditions, with special attention paid to those between household (gē) members and brothers-in-law (massinā).

Introduction: Suicide in South Asia: Ethnographic perspectives:

Abstract: This volume has its roots in a two-day international workshop, ‘Ethnographies of Suicide’, which was held at Brunel University in West London, UK, back in July 2008. The 15 papers presented there drew on fieldwork from across the world, with contributions from Afghanistan, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Greece, Portugal and the UK. It was noteworthy, however, that a third of the papers, as well as an additional film presentation, all focused on work that had been conducted in South Asia, particularly in India and Sri Lanka. Despite having recently begun fieldwork on suicide in the region myself—in Andhra Pradesh—until I organised the conference I had been unaware of the wider interest in the topic among fellow South Asianist scholars, and began to realise that there was a strong case for bringing more of this work together in a single collection. Rather than confining insights into suicide to references in isolated monographs and papers, presenting them as a collection allows regional connections and comparisons to be made that might otherwise go unobserved. Such a volume might also provoke further studies into a subject

The suicide niche: Accounting for self-harm in a South Indian leprosy colony

Abstract: This article analyses the circumstances under which attempted suicide became an increasingly common possibility of thought and action among the young, healthy generation of people who had grown up ...

Global rights and state activism: Reflections on civil society—State partnerships in health in NW India:

Abstract: This article examines the changing dynamics of development in India, focusing on partnerships between civil society organisations (CSOs) and the state in the area of rural health. Drawing on ethnographic perspectives of CSO work, we examine the shifting meaning of these partnerships for the institutions involved and how they function given their differing institutional cultures and values. We argue that the adoption by the state of a global language of rights and its efforts to integrate civil society language, practices and representatives in the policy and implementation of health programmes point to collaborationist models which support the creation of an ‘activist’ state, as they simultaneously strengthen as well as weaken the role of CSOs as mediators in development.

Class, caste and housing in rural Pakistani Punjab: The untold story of the Five Marla Scheme

Abstract: This article examines the contemporary significance of caste as a dimension of social stratification in Pakistani Punjab, using rural housing as a vantage point. Work on the interplay of class and ...

Mobilising language, imagining region: Use of Bhoti in West Arunachal Pradesh

Abstract: For more than a decade, the Monpas, a Tibetan Buddhist borderland community in west Arunachal Pradesh, have been demanding the status of mother tongue for Tibetan or Bhoti, as it is commonly known in the Indian Himalayas. Bhoti or Tibetan has provided the religious script as well as the language of the religious canon for Tibetan Buddhists in the trans-Himalayas, although the communities living in the Indian Himalayas and in Bhutan and Nepal speak different variants of Tibetan (‘Tibetan-related languages’). Rather than seeing the language politics of the borderland Monpas as the localised assertion of ethnic identity by a marginal group, this article shows that Monpa language politics is underlain by a spatial discourse corresponding not to a Monpa homeland, but instead connecting different Tibetan Buddhists of the Indian Himalayan region. This is not to argue that there is a move for territorial reconfiguration on the basis of the Bhoti language politics, but to allow the discourse around Bhoti to open u...

‘Girl still burning inside my head’: Reflections on suicide in Sri Lanka:

Abstract: This chapter reflects on why suicide has become such a pervasive phenomenon in Sri Lankan society by engaging with the extensive scholarly literature that exists on this subject. Rather than trying...

Aqeeda, Adab and Aitraaz: Modalities of ‘being’ Barelwi:

Abstract: Through an exploration of the concepts that inform one’s conduct in everyday life, this article seeks to make manifest the performative code that lies at the heart of Barelwiyat. To ‘be’ a Barelwi,...

Endnote: Comparing South Asian and South African suicide:

Abstract: Contemporary ethnographers and anthropological researchers face a dual challenge. On the one hand, we are admonished to guard against treating our units of study as self-contained, island-like entities, immune from broader forces and from connections with global impact (Appadurai 2000; Hannerz 1996). On the other, Marshall Sahlins sounds a stern warning about ‘endangered specificities’ in the social sciences today, suggesting that the imposition of external analytical frameworks might well cloud out, or even annihilate, valid local cultural constructs, perspectives and understandings (Sahlins 1996; Smith 2002). Our challenge is to situate our units of study within broader analytical frames without losing sight of local contours and dynamics. It is to tread softly and to steer a careful balance, elucidating both the generalities and particularities of our research information. This endnote aims to meet this challenge by comparing suicide in South Africa and South Asia. Rather than to assume South Asian exceptionalism, I endeavour to explore to what extent the South Asian instances described in this volume might contribute to a more general anthropology of suicide. Sustained ethnographic comparison is possibly the most

Remembering David Pocock

Abstract: Parry and Simpson’s (2010) biographical essay on David Pocock in CIS took me down memory lane. Since the essay reports that Pocock destroyed all his papers before his death (p. 343) and ‘was never precise about the dates or the sequence of his fieldwork and these are now difficult to unscramble’ (p. 336, n. 7), I may first report that I have in my file six letters from him, four written while in the field in Gujarat in 1953 and two from Oxford in 1955. I do not have copies of my letters to him. Pocock was affiliated with the department of sociology at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda for his fieldwork. M.N. Srinivas, professor and head of the department since June 1951, helped him in affiliating with the department and in finding a village for fieldwork through his friend Nanubhai Amin. Pocock must have arrived in Baroda in early March 1953 and gone to Sundarana, the field village in Kheda (Anglicised, Kaira) district, by late March or early April. I had just completed my B.A. and was preparing to go for my fieldwork in Panchmahal district, adjoining Kheda district. Srinivas, my teacher, suggested that I visit Pocock in his field so that I would learn how an experienced anthropologist like him conducted fieldwork. Pocock welcomed the idea. Pocock wrote letters on April 12 and 15, narrating his difficulties in settling down in Sundarana, especially his dependence on his host. He commented, ‘There are advantages in living actually with the people one studies but there are also some disadvantages—and loss of independence is one of them’ (emphasis in original).

Agnatic notion, bilateral tendencies and the organisation of local groups among the Muduga:

Abstract: This article examines the agnatic notion and the organisation of local groups among the Muduga of Attappady in Kerala. Ethnographic evidence shows that the actual practices of the Muduga deviate fr...