More than a century after Durkheim's sociological classic placed the subject of suicide as a concern at the heart of social science, ethnographic, crosscultural analyses of what lie behind people's attempts to take their own lives remain few in number. But by highlighting how the ethnographic method privileges a certain view of suicidal behaviour, we can go beyond the limited sociological and psychological approaches that define the field of 'suicidology' in terms of social and psychological 'pathology' to engage with suicide from our informants' own points of view-and in so doing cast the problem in a new light and new terms. In particular, suicide can be understood as a kind of sociality, as a special kind of social relationship, through which people create meaning in their own lives. In this introductory essay we offer an overview of the papers that make up this special issue and map out the theoretical opportunities and challenges they present. A Problem of Enduring Human InterestSuicide is a problem of enduring human interest, forcing us to ask questions about ourselves and our world that other human behaviours do not. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 1 every year almost one million people across the globe die from suicide, equating to one such death every 40 s. Over the past half J. Staples

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This volume has its roots in a two-day international workshop, 'Ethnographies of Suicide', which was held at Brunel University in West London, UK, back in July 2008. 1 The 15 papers presented there drew on fieldwork from across the world, with contributions from Afghanistan

This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India conceptualize, experience, and use their bodies in distinctive ways. I consider how such an enquiry might be informed by existing approaches to South Asian personhood, such as those emerging from phenomenology and ethnosociology. Conversely, I ask whether ethnographic analysis of those with different bodies might open up new avenues of exploration and complement our existing methodological tool-box. A focus on individuated body parts is one such approach that emerged from the latter enquiry. In looking at how leprosy-affected people perceived, talked about, and made use of their bodies in radically different contexts -at home in rural Andhra Pradesh and out begging in urban Maharashtra -I demonstrate how they might order and/or disassociate themselves from different bodily parts in different social spaces. I also show how the lived experience of leprosy might create a community of the afflicted within which awareness of individuated parts dissolves.

Despite a conventional view that bodily impairments are necessarily interpreted as emasculating and negative, this article -drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with men affected by leprosy and by cerebral palsy (CP) in India -offers a more nuanced account of how disabled men negotiate their gendered identities. Different kinds of impairments have very specific, context-defined, meanings that, in turn, have different implications for how gender and disability might intersect. Rather than diminishing masculinity in all instances -some bodily differences, as the article demonstrates, might even be enacted as hyper-masculine -impairments are shown rather to reshape understandings of the masculine in sometimes unexpected ways. And while my informants were constrained both by ableist norms and by the biological limitations of their own bodies, ambivalence towards certain forms of masculinity also afforded them space to perform their identities more creatively, sometimes to potentially positive effect. At the intersection of disability and masculinity 2At the intersection of disability and masculinity: exploring gender and bodily difference in India James Staples, Brunel University

This article analyses the circumstances under which attempted suicide became an increasingly common possibility of thought and action among the young, healthy generation of people who had grown up in the South Indian leprosy community where I conducted long-term fieldwork, despite suicide remaining relatively uncommon amongst their leprosy-affected, and often physically disabled, parents and grandparents. Alert to the pitfalls of analytical approaches that either privilege over-arching structural explanations—like those favoured by Durkheim—or, conversely, give too much credence to individual agency and psychology, my analysis here attempts to chart a course through these polarities. It does so by drawing both on Ian Hacking’s ‘ecological niche’ metaphor—to explore how particular configurations of events and circumstances, at different times, might render suicide related behaviour more or less likely among different groups; and on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’—to consider how particular sets of bodily dispositions might generate certain styles of attempted suicide and self-harm.

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