Abstract
A recent national survey by the Ministry for Health and Social Services revealed that Namibia’s suicide rate was vastly higher than previously thought. Mirroring global conceptions of mental health and depression, these numbers tend to be ‘explained away’ using pre-determined ‘risk factors’ – alcohol consumption, violence, and unemployment. Yet, current theories of suicide do not account for all of its intricacies; indeed, most are rooted in notions of individualism countered by many ethnographies situated in African contexts. This Think Piece problematises the study of suicide in southern African contexts, showing that notions of ‘unhappiness’, ‘depression’, and most importantly ‘self’ are locally specific and, in southern Africa, relational rather than individualistic.
Highlights
In June and July 2016, I was finishing up the largest part of my fieldwork in Swakopmund, a city on the western coast of Namibia
The Ministry for Health and Social Services (MHSS) study was by no means a perfect snapshot, relying heavily on research conducted in Euro-American locales in order to contextualise its results
The definition of ‘suicide’ used in the study read as follows: An act is suicide if a person intentionally brings about his or her own death in circumstances where others do not coerce him or her to the action, except for those cases where death is caused by conditions arranged by the agent for the purpose of bringing about his or her own death. (Afunde 2008, 3–4, quoted in MHSS 2018, 2)
Summary
Current thinking concerning suicide has called for a different tangent; the conference ‘Suicidology’s Cultural Turn, and Beyond’, reported within these very pages (Cassady 2016), has already attempted to move focus away from ‘standard’ frames of reference towards a more holistic, culturally specific understanding of this phenomenon. This Think Piece problematises suicide in southern African contexts, discussing the ways in which the study’s findings can be informed by emerging themes in anthropology. To explore why current approaches to suicidology – despite offering much – might not be entirely suited to the study of this phenomenon in southern African contexts
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