Reading Sri Lanka's suicide rate

Widger, Tom

Abstract

By the final decade of the twentieth century, rates of suicide in Sri Lanka ranked among the highest in the world. However, in 1996 the suicide rate began to fall and was soon at its lowest level in almost 30 years. This decline poses problems for classic sociological theories of suicide and forces us to question some fundamental assumptions underlying social scientific approaches to the suicide rate. Drawing from sociological, medical epidemiological, historical, and anthropological secondary sources as well as 21 months of original ethnographic research into suicide in Sri Lanka, I argue that there are four possible readings of the country's suicide rate. While the first three readings provide windows onto parts of the story, the fourth—a composite view—provides a new way of thinking about suicide, not just in Sri Lanka but also cross-culturally. In so doing the paper poses questions for how the relationship between suicide and society might be imagined.

Citation

Widger, T. (2014). Reading Sri Lanka's suicide rate. Modern Asian Studies, 48(03), 791-825. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x1200073x

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 30, 2013
• Publication Date: May 1, 2014
• Deposit Date: Oct 17, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 3, 2015
• Journal: Modern Asian Studies
• Print ISSN: 0026-749X
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-8099
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 03
• Pages: 791-825
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x1200073x
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1452171