Rates of suicide and self-harm are rising across the globe, and Sri Lanka has been among the highest in the world for several decades. Through a close ethnographic analysis of suicidal behaviour in western Sri Lanka, this book seeks to understand this problem. In particular, it uses ethnographic methods and theories to show how the relational contexts of suicidal behaviour deeply shape the ways in which self-harm and self-inflicted death obtain meaning and become associated with particular motives, methods, and consequences. Drawing from the results of 21 months of original fieldwork, the book provides a history of suicide in Sri Lanka, and discusses a number of social and medical epidemiological theories that have attempted to account for the patterns of suicide in the country. By conducting an anthropological analysis of suicide in Sri Lanka, the book shows how practices of self-harm and self-inflicted death are both produced by and produce wider social, cultural, and emotional processes. It highlights the motives of both children and adults becoming suicidal, and in particular, how certain kinds of relationships are apparently more prone to give rise to suicidal responses than others. The book goes on to examine how suicides are resolved both at the village and national level, and by reviewing how successive governments have sought to deal with the suicide epidemic at various points in time, it demonstrates how different notions of culpability have come and gone in response to different political periods. It argues that suicide is never a single event in time and space, but is rather deeply embedded in, and constitutive of, on-going relationships across time and space.

This book is an important new contribution to South Asian Studies and Anthropology, as well as to sociologists and psychologists working in the field of suicide prevention.