Abstract
Durkheim’s classical theory of suicide rates being a negative index of social solidarity downplays the salience of gendered concerns in suicide. But gendered inequalities have had a negative impact: worldwide significantly more men than women perpetrate fatal suicides. Drawing on narratives of 52 fatal suicides in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, this article suggests that Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘masculine domination’ provide a more appropriate framework for understanding this paradox. I show that the thwarting of investments in dominant masculine positions have been the major precursor to suicides by men. Men tended to take their own lives as a means of escape. By contrast, women perpetrated suicide to protest against the miserable consequences of being dominated by men. However, contra the assumption of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, the narrators of suicide stories did reflect critically upon gender constructs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Only amongst the Luo of Kenya did women suicide victims outnumber men: 59% of the Luo suicide victims were women (Bohannan 1960, p. 261).
See, for example, the tables on suicide by marital status in different European countries (Durkheim 1951, pp. 176–178, 183).
A final form fatalistic suicide, stemming from excessive regulation is relegated to a brief footnote. This form involves ‘persons with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline’. In this regard, he briefly alludes to the suicide of slaves, and of married women who are childless (Durkheim 1951, p. 276).
Marx (1999/1864) refers to only one suicide by a man: a member of the Royal guard who lost his job and killed himself rather than to be a burden to his family.
Strathern (1986) and Counts (1980) draw on psychoanalytic theory that a desire to kill another person is entwined in the act of killing oneself. Such suicides have been described as Samsonic—so named after the Bibical hero who pulled down the pillars of the house on his own head to kill his enemies (Jeffreys 1952).
It is important to distinguish between narratives of suicide and actual suicidal behaviour. The information that I present relates only to the former. However, it is important to bear in mind that these two domains of social reality are not discrete. The act of killing oneself is not a solo venture. Suicide is rich with meanings and intentions, deeply rooted in culturally patterned forms of thought and emotion (Douglas 1967). Hence, narratives of suicide provide a ‘script’ for individual acts of suicide (Kral 1996).
James (1988) observes a similar temporal displacement of discourses about gender amongst the Uduk of Sudan. Though the Uduk were agriculturalists at the time of her fieldwork, they used a lexicon from an earlier era of hunting to discuss constructs of masculinity.
Stølen (1996) applies the concept ‘hegemony’ to masculine dominance in rural Argentina, and shows how gender inequalities have been effectively ‘naturalised’. As in rural Argentina women of the lowveld seem to have idealised love, marriage and motherhood.
References
Baumeister, Roy F. 1990 Suicide as Escape From Self. Psychological Review 97 (1), 90-113.
Bohannan, Paul. ed. 1960 African Homicide and Suicide. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 2001 Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Burke, Kenneth 1955 A Grammar of Motives. New York: George Braziller.
Carstens, Peter 2000 An Essay on Suicide and Disease in Canadian Indian Reserves: Bringing Durkheim back in. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies XX (2): 309-345.
Chaplin, James H. 1961 Suicide in Northern Rhodesia. African Studies 20 (3): 145-174.
Cooper, Arnold. 1986 What Men Fear: The Façade of Castration Anxiety. In The Psychology of Men: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives (eds) G. Fogel, F. Lane & R. Liebert, 145-162. New York: Basic Books.
Counts, Dorothy Ayers 1980 Fighting Back is Not the Way: Suicide and the Women of Kaliai. American Ethnologist 6 (2): 332-351.
De Wet, Chris. 1995 Moving Together, Drifting Apart: Betterment Planning and Villagisation in a South African Homeland. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
Douglas, Jack. 1967 The Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Durkheim, Emile 1951/1897 Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Farnell, Brenda. 2000 Getting out of the habitus: An alternative model of dynamically embodied social action. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (2): 397- 418.
Firth, Raymond. 1961 Suicide and risk taking in Tikopia Society. Psychiatry (2): 1-17.
Gilmore, David. 1990 Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gilmore. Margaret and David Gilmore 1979 Machismo: A Psychodynamic Approach (Spain). Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology 2 (3): 281-299.
Hammond-Tooke, W.D. 1981 Boundaries and Belief: The Structure of a Sotho Worldview. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
Hezel, Francis 1987 Truk Suicide Epidemic and Social Change. Human Organisation 46 (4): 283-291.
Hollan, Douglas 1990 Indignant Suicide in the Pacific: An Example from the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14: 365-379.
James, Wendy 1988 The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among the Uduk of Sudan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jeffreys, M. D. W. 1952 Samsonic Suicide or Suicide of Revenge among Africans. African Studies 11 (1): 118 -122.
Kral, Michael. 1996 Suicide and the Internalisation of Culture: Three Questions. Transcultural Psychiatry 35 (2): 221-233.
Kral, Michael, E. Johnson 1996 Suicide, Self-Deception and the Cognitive Unconscious. In: Leenaars A., Lester D. (eds) Suicide and the Unconscious 85-110. Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson.
Kuper, Adam. 1975 The Social Structure of the Sotho-speaking peoples of southern Africa. Africa 45, 67-81, 139-149.
Lipuma, Edward 1998 Modernity and Forms of Personhood in Melanesia. In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. (eds.) Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern. 53 -80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Littlewood, Ronald and Michael Lipsedge 1987 The Butterfly and the Serpent: Culture, Psychopathology and Biomedicine. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 11: 289-335.
MacPherson, Cluny. and La’avasa Macpherson 1987 Towards an Explanation of Recent Trends in Suicide in Western Samoa. Man (n.s.) 22 (2): 305-330.
Malkki, Liisa. 1997 News and Culture: Transitory Phenomena and the Fieldwork Tradition. In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (eds) Akeil Gupta and James Ferguson. 86-101. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Marx, Emanual 1976 The Social Context of Violent Behaviour. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Marx, Karl 1999/1864 Peuchet on Suicide. In Marx on Suicide. E. Plant and K. Anderson, eds., Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Matzopoulos, R. 2004 A Profile of Fatal Injuries in South Africa: Fifth Annual Report of the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System. Tygerberg: Medical Research Council.
McNeill, Fraser and Isak Niehaus 2009 Magic: AIDS Review 2009. Pretoria: Centre for the Study of AIDS, University of Pretoria.
Meer, Fatima. 1976 Race and Suicide in South Africa. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Moore, Henrietta. 1994 A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Niehaus, Isak with Eliazaar Mohlala and Kally Shokane 2001 Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld. London: Pluto.
Pienaar, J. 2003 Coping, Stress and Suicide Ideation in the South African Police Service. PhD Thesis. Potchefstroom: Potchefstroom University.
Rebhun, Linda-Anne 2001 Women, Men (and Dogs) in Northeast Brazil. Unpublished Seminar Paper. Agrarian Studies Institute, Yale University.
Riches, David 1986 Phenomenon of Violence. In The Anthropology of Violence. (ed.) D. Riches. 1-28. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Shneidman, Edwin 1993 Suicide as Psycharche: A Clinical Approach to Self Destructive Behaviour. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) 2001 South Africa Survey, 2000. Braamfontein, Johannesburg: South African Institute for Race Relations.
Staples, James 2012 The Suicide Niche: Accounting for self-harm in a South Indian Leprosy Colony. Contributions to Indian Sociology 46 (1–2) (in press).
Stølen, Kristi 1996 The Gentle Exercise of Male Power in Rural Argentina. Identities 2 (4): 385- 406.
Strathern, Marylin 1986 Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World, Mount Hagen, New Guinea. London: Seminar Press.
Van Binsbergen, Wim 2001 Witchcraft in Modern Africa as Virtualised Boundary Conditions of the Kinship Order. In Witchcraft Dialogues: Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges (eds) George Bond & Diane Ciekawy. 221-264. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Van Winkle, J. Nancy Westlake and Philip May 1993 An Update on American Indian Suicide in New Mexico, 1980-1987. Human Organisation 52 (3): 304-315.
Wassenaar, D., A. Pillay, S. Descoins, M. Goltman and P. Naidoo. 2000 Patterns of Suicide in Pietermaritzburg 1982-1992: Race, Gender and Seasonality. In Suicidal Behaviour 4: Proceedings of the Fourth Southern African Conference on Suicidology. (eds) L. Schlebusch and B. Bosch. 97-111. Durban: University of Natal.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks his field assistants Eliazaar Mohlala, the late Kally Shokane, and Eric Thobela for the latters' help during fieldwork, and also Rob Gordon, Michael Kral, Jean La Fontaine, Hal Scheffler, James Staples and Tom Widger for their critical comments and support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Due to the extremely sensitive nature of the information I present, I have used pseudonyms to disguise the name of the village and also the personal names in the article. Unless stated otherwise, all local terms are in Northern Sotho.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Niehaus, I. Gendered Endings: Narratives of Male and Female Suicides in the South African Lowveld. Cult Med Psychiatry 36, 327–347 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9258-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9258-y