Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Alumni Building CB 3115, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3115, USA.
Cult Med Psychiatry. 2012 Jun;36(2):204-24. doi: 10.1007/s11013-012-9257-z.
In the south Indian state of Kerala, the nation's so-called suicide capital, suicide can often appear self-evident in meaning and motivation to casual onlookers and experts alike. Drawing on explanatory accounts, rumors, and speculative tales of suicide collected between 2004 and 2007, this article explores the ontological power of certain deaths to assert themselves as always-already known on the basis of perceived and reported demographic patterns of suicide. I demonstrate the ways suicides are commonly read, less through the distinct details of their individual case presentations than "up" to broader scales of social pathology. Shaped by the intertwined histories of public health intervention and state taxonomic knowledge in India, these "epidemic readings" of suicide enact a metonymy between individual suffering and ideas of collective decline that pushes the suicide case to fit-and thus to stand for-aggregate trends at the level of populations. Focusing on how family navigated the generic meanings and motivations ascribed to the deaths of their loved ones, I argue that the ability of kin to resist, collude with, or strategically deploy epidemic readings in their search for truth and closure hinged significantly on their classed fluency in the social, legal, and bureaucratic discourses of suicide.
在印度南部的喀拉拉邦，这个所谓的自杀之都，自杀的意义和动机对普通旁观者和专家来说往往是不言而喻的。本文利用 2004 年至 2007 年间收集的解释性说明、谣言和对自杀的推测性故事，探讨了某些死亡在多大程度上以其被感知和报告的自杀人口统计学模式为依据，将自己作为已经被预先认知的存在而断言自身的本体论力量。我展示了自杀通常是如何被解读的，它们更多地是通过社会病理学的广泛尺度来解读，而不是通过其个别案例陈述的独特细节。在印度公共卫生干预和国家分类知识交织的历史背景下，这些对自杀的“流行解读”在个体痛苦和集体衰落观念之间建立了一种转喻关系，将自杀案例强行纳入人群层面的总体趋势。本文聚焦于家庭如何应对那些与亲人死亡相关的普遍意义和动机，我认为，亲属在寻找真相和结束痛苦的过程中，抵抗、共谋或策略性地利用流行解读的能力，在很大程度上取决于他们在社会、法律和官僚自杀话语方面的阶级流畅性。
