In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India

by Jocelyn Lim Chua

Overview

Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation’s suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life.  Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world.

In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours.  In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520281165
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/08/2014
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jocelyn Lim Chua is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note

Introduction

PART ONE. The “Problem” of Striving
1 Between the Devil and the Deep Sea
2 Gazing at the Stars, Aiming for the Treetops
3 Tales the Dead Are Made to Tell

PART TWO. On Living in a Time of Suicide
4 Care-full Acts
5 Anywhere but Here
6 Fit for the Future
Afterword

Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

"A timely and important contribution to the emerging anthropological critique of ‘suicide’ as a kind of human behaviour and as an object for social and medical intervention."

Centre for Medical Humanities - Dr. Tom Widger

"A timely and important contribution to the emerging anthropological critique of 'suicide' as a kind of human behaviour and as an object for social and medical intervention."--Dr. Tom Widger "Centre for Medical Humanities" (2/2/2015 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher