Death and suicide in ethnographic field: The case of Buell H. Quain

Abstract

The immediate reason for writing this article is the novel Nine Nights by the Brazilian writer Bernardo Carvalho, and the subject is the thematization of anthropological thanatography and suicidology on the example of writing about the death of the forgotten anthropologist Buell Quain among the Brazilian Indians. The story of his anthropological work and suicide, once a taboo topic in the discipline, forms an integral part of a significant, but lesser-known episode in the history of American and Brazilian anthropology in the first half of the 20th century. The literary work in question is treated as one of the heuristic sources for the reconstruction of Quaine?s biography and ethnography and the anthropological-historical analysis of the case, and not as an analytical subject in itself. The anthropological understanding and interpretation of the ethnographer?s suicide in the field includes a number of interrelated subjective and objective factors: the idiosyncratic life history, the very nature and conditions of ethnographic research, the actual condition of the studied Indian communities, and the political climate in Brazil on the eve of World War II.