Saris, A. Jamie (2012) Studying Suicide in Modern Ireland: New Directions and Old Conundrums. Irish Journal of Anthropology, 15 (2). pp. 6-8. ISSN 1393-8592
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Abstract
Few activities in human life attract and hold both
popular and scholarly attention as much as suicide.
Western Moral Philosophy has for centuries found it a
burden too heavy to put down. To be sure Christianity
proscribed it (often severely), especially after
Constantine institutionalized the religion, but a belief
system founded on divine self-sacrifice, which beatified
its early martyrs who almost always eagerly embraced
their doom, and which advised self-abnegation, could
never fit its ambivalence about the deliberate ending
of the physical self into a straight-jacket of simple
categorical rejection. The secular descendants of Moral
Philosophy - some parts of medicine, at least what
came to be called Psychology and Psychiatry, most
social sciences, and, indeed, pretty much any branch of
knowledge that made understanding the human subject
(in its physical or moral being) its business - found in
suicide its own conceptual limits. If the Enlightenment
thinking about the fundamental aspect of the human
person was true - unitary, rationally-calculating, drawn
towards pleasure and avoiding pain, but most of all self preserving
then everything from deliberate self-harm
to unresistingly embracing one's certain doom, could
only be set at the limits of reason. Thus, we have the
default stance of suicide analysis: that the individual
was not in possession of his or her right mind, i.e.,
was somehow sick - physically, psychologically, and/
or morally. And, of course, we have the corollary
to this stance - that if this dis-ease could have been
ameliorated, then no ending of life would have been
contemplated and/ or carried through.
Item Type: | Article |
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Keywords: | Studying Suicide; Modern Ireland; New Directions; Old Conundrums; |
Academic Unit: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology |
Item ID: | 4373 |
Depositing User: | Dr. A. Jamie Saris |
Date Deposited: | 24 May 2013 11:23 |
Journal or Publication Title: | Irish Journal of Anthropology |
Publisher: | The Anthropological Association of Ireland (AAI) |
Refereed: | Yes |
URI: | https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/4373 |
Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
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