As a tool of instant information dissemination and social networking, the Internet has made possible the formation and affirmation of public identities based on personality traits that are usually characterized by clinicians as pathological. The wide variety of online communities of affirmation reveals new conditions for permissiveness and inclusiveness in expressions of these socially marginal and clinically pathologized identities. Much the same kind of discourse common to these online communities is evident in some suicide forums. Web sites with suicide as their central raison d'être, taken together, encompass a wide range of ideas and commitments, including many that provide collective affirmation outside of (and often with hostility toward) professional intervention. The paradox of a potentially life-affirming effect of such forums runs counter to a stark dualism between online therapy versus "prochoice" forums and, by extension, to simple models of the influence of ideas on the lethality of suicide. Different forums either intensify or mitigate self-destructive tendencies in ways that are significant for understanding the place of communication in the occurrence of suicide and for therapeutic practice.
It is rare that circumstances in world history are favorable to the creation of a new kind of global political entity. Nationalism and the nation-state were novelties in the nineteenth century, as E. J. Hobsbawm (1990) convincingly demonstrates, but their connection with modernity was concealed by nationalist identifications with natural ties, permanent homelands, archaic cultures, and timeless bonds of common history. A similar global movement, which I refer to here as "indigenism," has gained momentum over the last few decades largely out of the notice of observers, pundits, and theorists of international events. This movement, it is true, is smaller in scale, more fragile, less turbulent than the nationalist upheavals of the past two centuries, but it nevertheless has the potential to influence the way states manage their affairs, and even to reconfigure the usual alignments of nationalism and state sovereignty.The use of the term 'indigenous' 1 in reference to original inhabitants of a giv- 119
Cet article est une première réponse à un appel visant à attirer l'attention sur les conséquences sociales pour les Cris de la Baie James de l'aménagement de complexes hydroélectriques sur le territoire qu'ils habitent. L'article donne une brève description des deux principaux modes de vie qui caractérisent la société crie, soit le mode de vie des chasseurs-pêcheurs-trappeurs, qui repose sur la coopération entre familles vivant en étroite relation avec le milieu naturel, et le mode de vie des villageois, dans lequel les personnes comptent davantage sur les institutions formelles pour la satisfaction de leurs besoins sociaux et matériels. Les deux modes de vie se chevauchent et dépendent l'un de l'autre. Des données provenant des dossiers des services sociaux indiquent qu'en raison de la centralisation rapide des Cris de la Baie James dans des villages structurés qui a accompagné les projets d'aménagement de grande envergure, la proportion des Cris qui se livrent aux activités économiques traditionnelles a diminué, créant une situation d'instabilité sociale dont témoignent les taux élevés de suicide, de négligence à l'égard des enfants, de vandalisme, de toxicomanie et d'alcoolisme. Tout porte à croire que d'autres projets d'envergure tels que la phase II du projet de la Baie James aggraveraient ces problèmes, même s'ils devaient créer des emplois pour un grand nombre des résidents des villages cris.This article is a preliminary response to an appeal for attention to be given to the social consequences of hydro-electric development for the Cree of James Bay. A brief description is given of two main styles of life in Cree society: the hunting, fishing and trapping lifestyle in which families co-operate with one another and live in a close relationship with the natural environment, and the village lifestyle in which people depend more upon formal institutions to meet their social and material needs. These styles of life overlap and are interdependent. Data from social service files indicate that the rapid centralization of the James Bay Cree into structured communities that accompanied large-scale development decreased the proportion of people in the traditional economy -a situation which has led to social instability in the villages that is reflected in high frequencies of such problems as suicide, neglect of children, vandalism, and drug and alcohol abuse.
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