Suicide is one of the fastest-growing and least-understood causes of death. The scientific literature on suicide has long been dominated by the fields of psychology and sociology. While such insights are important, they are often rooted in socioeconomically and culturally narrow biomedical frameworks, and recent research has revealed that the risk profiles for suicide do not hold true across different social and cultural groups. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, explores how cultural understandings of suicide shape the processes designed to record and study these deaths. The data generated by this research will be of value to scientists who advise medical and law enforcement officials about how to resolve disparities between suicide propensities and risk profiles.
Ashley Hagaman, under the supervision of Dr. Amber Wutich of Arizona State University, explores how suicide is perceived, categorized and documented. This research will take place in Nepal, where community reports speculate suicide to be the leading cause of death for women of reproductive age. However, national-level data do not corroborate with these findings. Therefore, suicide may be a much greater problem than nationally aggregated data suggest. National mortality data are filtered through reporting systems shaped by social, cultural, legal, and medical institutions. Data collected in Nepal would be representationally significant in helping understand suicide; more than 60% of the world's suicides occur in Asia. This study seeks to understand how suicide is perceived, contested, categorized, and documented in institutions ranging from the local (i.e., family, community) to the professional (i.e., medical, law enforcement) in Nepal. To untangle these processes, this research will investigate the following questions: (1) What are the material, social, and cultural factors that shape the understanding of suicidal acts in Nepal? (2) How do actors representing familial, community, legal, and medical institutions perceive, contest, and negotiate suicide documentation? (3) What accounts for the convergence or divergence of suicide data in local-level community reports and higher-level official suicide reports? The research will include a discourse tracing of suicide definitions, reporting, and documentation in law enforcement, health, and community institutions. The findings will advance anthropological and other social scientific theories related to suicide, knowledge production, and the institutional shaping of local lived experiences.
