Summary SANT104 Lectures and Literature until Lecture 6
LECTURE, 1 SUICIDE AND THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIENCE
Durkheim moves away from racial or biological explanations of suicide. Seeks to separate the
science of sociology from the science of psychology. For Durkheim certain statistics reflected the fact
that Protestantism emphasised religious individualism and self-knowledge, whilst the Catholic
Church emphasised and produced a greater sense of community through symbols and rituals.
Therefore, more Protestants would commit suicide. Durkheim's is a holistic approach to the social.
He believes that you have to start from the totality and explain the parts by relating them back to
the wider totality. This means that you begin with society and you relate individuals and their actions
back to the society they live in.
What do all suicides have in common: society, that’s what he wants to look at. Not just social
relations but also if alienated or not, integrated or not. Social relations determine the rate,
shared values or beliefs as well. -> The collective consciousness of society
Society; individuals come and go but society continues to exist. What’s continuing? The
relations between individuals, that has a stability for Durkheim: the way people are
integrated, alienated or related. Society continues across time, normal regular path of
society. Every country is destined to have a certain amount of suicides, all societies are
destined to produce it. Even different occupations across time, again a stability. Even
gender. Even within gender. Even in religion.
Move away from suicide as abnormal event. Suicide is created by the way society is
organised. Suicide rates do change, but that is because society changes. Study of the suicide
rate, to study the way society changes.
o If suicide is an individualistic phenomenon, the numbers would differ or fluctuate a
lot: however, it is quite stable, just like the social relations. One or two cases of
suicide might by insane or have a mental illness but not all.
The alternative approach is to start from the individual and to explain society in terms of the
characteristics of individuals - this is called methodological individualism or epistemological
individualism. Durkheim rejects this approach; he rejects starting from individual motives so as to
explain the suicide rate. He also rejects classifying suicide in terms of motives like family trouble,
physical pain, remorse, drunkenness. He suggests 3 common types of suicide: egoistic, altruistic and
anomic plus a less common form fatalistic suicide.
Altruistic suicide because you are killing yourself for the sake of affirming social values
Egoistic suicide because you are killing yourself because you are alienated and not enough
integrated in society
Anomic suicide results from people lacking moral regulation or integration. Durkheim tends
to see society as regulating the individual, as bringing the individual into balance.
Fatalistic suicide occurs in social situation characterized by pervasive oppression. It is bound
up with excessive regulation, with strict oppressive discipline. Society is so controlled that
the individual can see no possible way to improve his or her life. Examples might be slavery
or life in a prison where the individual is condemned to a life of monotony and pain, and
suicide offers an escape.
Durkheim found that those social classes with active modern intellectual lives had higher suicide
rates. For Durkheim this tendency of the more educated classes to have higher suicide rates is proof
, of the fact that where people no longer share a common tradition and where the emphasis is on
individual knowledge then the more you fail to integrate people.
LITERATURE LECTURE 1
Shared Death: Self, Sociality and Internet Group Suicide in Japan – Chikako Ozawa-de Silva
Ozawa-de Silva studied suicide in contemporary Japan. The modern forms that suicide takes.
She is interested in internet group suicide, and how these suicides express a need for social
connectedness. She sees this as part of Japanese culture where the identity is closely bound
up with public persona, with how the self is perceived and experienced by others. For
Ozawa-de Silva this kind of suicide tells us something about the nature of the self in modern
Japan and it also tells us something about the nature of Japanese society. She uses suicide to
explore what it means to be a person in Japanese society, how people experience the self.
Most Internet group suicides have taken happened in Japan, but they have also been
reported elsewhere, Korea, Guam and the Netherlands. For Japanese under 30, suicide has
become leading cause of death. The majority of suicide in Japan has been men between the
ages of 40 and 54. However, focusing on totals can ignore rapid changes occurring
elsewhere. In 1998, there was a rapid increase in the suicide rate for those under the age of
19. There was an almost 70% increase for women and a 50% increase for men. In response
to one question in the survey, “What are the reasons or occasions for you to think about
dying?” a number of respondents replied with statements such as: “Just sort of (nan to naku)
feeling bored,” “I am tired of living,” and “When I feel unsure about who I am.” These sorts
of statement reveal a critique of life and what it offers. The discipline of life, the lack of
control over oneself, the problem of having your own identity are important issues of power
for youth in the modern world. In suicide notes, it might also be a question of what people
cannot say, in Japan there is the problem of criticizing superiors or one’s parents, not
wanting them to feel guilty or responsible for one’s death, so the suicide note cannot be
taken as accurate, it has to be interpreted. Though a modern phenomenon, internet suicides
also tap into a Japanese cultural tradition about death. There is an aesthetics of death, a
romanticization of death, of a tragic life in Japanese culture, and the youth tap into it.
Ozawa-de Silva explores the sense of loneliness that the youth voice, one might even call it
an aesthetics of loneliness, a sense of alienation, of being removed from others and society.
The official explanation of rising suicide in Japan is about economic stagnation and this
causing depression. Ozawa-de Silva wants to move away from this model of mental illness.
She discusses Japanese films that portray suicide victims as “ordinary people,” rather than as
mentally sick, stressed, or disturbed. It is the normality of everyday life that is becoming
unbearable, that is killing people. Ozawa-de Silva notices how on the internet sites, visitors
emphasize that there is nothing wrong with them, they are not undergoing poverty. What is
distinctive is that people do not want to die alone. People speak of this type of suicide as
them seeking rest and sleep. Many internet posts speak of the author’s wish to “vanish” as if
they had never existed, or they speak of a desire to take break, a pause from their everyday
suffering. There is the social nature of dying as a gift between people who share this
intimate moment together. In Japan, there is a certain way to die which is idealised and
culturally valued, namely to die with a “peaceful face.” It is traditional views about dying
which resurface in this modern way of dying. The traditional aspects of a good death are:
ordinariness, the wish to die with others, and the wish to die in comfort. In the suicide
forums on the internet, there is no negative condemnation of suicide but mostly attempts to
help individuals achieve this aesthetic ideal death which is also found in films. The emphasis
