Discovering Suicide

Atkinson, Joel

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-03371-3

Cited by 19 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…As he put it, "At each moment of its history … each society has a definite aptitude for suicide … the suicide-rate is therefore a factual order, unified and definite, as is shown by both its permanence and its variability" (Durkheim 1897a(Durkheim /1951. (Durkheim 1897a(Durkheim /1951 It should be noted that, unlike in Durkheim's time, the contemporary sociologist would be expected to consider the role of the coroner in the determination of suicide rates, and, in particular, the complex and socially ordered processes by which coroners "decide" if a given death is to be counted as a suicide or not (see Douglas 1967;Atkinson 1978). Elaborating upon the significance of the social suicide rates and their indexing of the implications of social institutional arrangements and states, Durkheim writes: [W]hen it appears that the variations through which it passes at different times of the day, month, year merely reflect the rhythm of social life; and that marriage, divorce, the family, religious society, the army, etc.…”

Section: Social Suicide Ratesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Émile Durkheim

Milbrandt

Pearce

2011

The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists

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Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) played a central role in the development of a theoretically robust empirical sociology in France. Engaged by some of the major social, political and intellectual concerns of his times, Durkheim explored topics as diverse as industrialization, socialism, crime, suicide, religion, morality, the family, education, professional ethics, and sociological method. Building on the work of his theoretical predecessors (e.g., Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer), a significant challenge Durkheim took up was the development of appropriate methodological protocols for the systematic study of society. His erudite writings were animated by his enduring passion to uncover and explore the deeply social foundations of our human existence.Durkheim's tireless intellectual labors were pivotal to sociology's establishment as an institutionally legitimized and productive academic discipline. This was evident by the central role he played in the successful establishment of the discipline's first major academic journal in France, L'Année Sociologique in 1898, and by his earning of the first post in France to bear the name "sociology." As Edward Tiryakian aptly remarks, "before Durkheim sociology was a provocative idea; by his professional endeavors it became an established social fact" (Tiryakian 2009: 11).Durkheim was adamant that there was a responsibility to develop sociology in ways that could illuminate the complex nature of social reality on its own terms. He dissented from the reigning position that sociology be corralled into a domain of study limited by the psychologistic assumption, shared by many European thinkers since the seventeenth century, that society is merely the sum total of individuals. Durkheim hints that sociology was, in fact, the master discipline within the social sciences: 9Émile Durkheim TARA MILBRANDT AND FRANK PEARCE 1 tara milbrandt and frank pearce of teachers who came to have a formative influence on his intellectual development. These included the historian Fustel de Coulanges and the neo-Kantian philosopher Émile Boutroux. He became strongly influenced by the writings of Charles Renouvier, another neo-Kantian philosopher, whose writings he was introduced to during his university studies in Paris.It is an understatement to say that Durkheim belonged to an extremely influential generation of students. Many of his classmates at L'École Normale, including Henri Bergson and Jean Jaurès (who became a close friend), would go on to become influential and leading intellectual figures. Within this exceptional context, it is notable that Durkheim was considered almost excessive in his studiousness and seriousness, even earning the nickname "the metaphysician" (Coser 1977) amongst his peers. Though at the end of his third year he scored abysmally (second from the bottom) on a national test, Durkheim came to be well respected by those professors with whom he became well acquainted. In a letter of reference dated October 14, 1882, Fustel de Coulanges described Durkheim ...

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Section: Social Suicide Ratesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Émile Durkheim

Milbrandt

Pearce

2011

The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists

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“…8 This is to take the Oregon 'Death with Dignity Act' as an example, but the point is a more generally valid one also. 9 Criticisms of Durkheim have also been made from within sociology, of course, with those of Douglas (1967) and Atkinson (1978) of most relevance here. As for the arguments of Hill about the Roman world, his anti-Durkheimian thesis also includes particular attention to the specificities of the Roman relationship between ethics and the self which I do not have time to discuss here.…”

Section: Concluding Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suicide, euthanasia and medicine: reflections ancient and modern

Flemming¹

2005

Economy and Society

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In this paper I explore just a few of the issues that are raised by what seem to be some rather serious shifts presently occurring in the modern order of death. My main focus is on the particular disturbances caused by the recently renewed demand for the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in much of the West; disturbances which I attempt to put into some kind of historical perspective. I argue that aspects of a new order of death are emerging around, and through, these debates: aspects that look back to the distant past as much as they look forward.

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“…Although the recording of the brute fact of death is presumably as reliable as any social statistic could ever be, a degree of uncertainty often surrounds the detail of the cause. Atkinson (1978), for example, in his work on suicide points to elements of ambiguity and uncertainty that often accompany a coroner's verdict. Prior & Bloor (1993, p. 360) go further, speaking of the shifting historical classification of death and concluding that 'the conceptual structure of the reporting sets the limits within which relevant causes of death can be discovered and selected'.…”

Section: Quantitative Data In Hiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Qualitative and quantitative approaches to health impact assessment: An analysis of the political and philosophical milieu of the multi-method approach

Love

Pritchard

Maguire

et al. 2005

Critical Public Health

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Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a relatively new, but increasingly important, contributor to both local and national decision-making processes. Adopting a multi-method approach, it incorporates qualitative and quantitative analyses to determine the various health impacts of policies and projects. HIA thus reflects recent developments in sociological theory, which have promoted qualitative techniques and challenged the dominance of quantitative methods. HIA embodies a particular renegotiation of the qualitative/quantitative opposition; each individual HIA represents an empirical instance of this renegotiation. As such, HIA can be conceptualized as a kind of 'political space', in which the opposition in question is structured by various social forces and plays out in concrete ways. Moreover, and notwithstanding the supposed methodological rapprochement, an analysis of a number of HIAs claims to expose a continuing, but perhaps unsurprising, privilege in favour of quantitative methods. In the first place, the paper contends that closer examination reveals this privileging to be unjustified, both empirically and theoretically, and alternative methodological and epistemological configurations are suggested accordingly. Specific gestures are made in this respect toward the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. In particular, the paper argues for a broad hermeneutic approach that both encompasses and situates the methodological tensions HIA stages. Second, attention is drawn to the fact that various and particular sociopolitical conditions maintain the characteristic architecture of the opposition. The political importance of HIA across a series of key issues is underscored in support of a more radical interpretation. For once situated within its wider cultural context, HIA ceases to resemble some straightforwardly neutral technology for health protection and delivery. If, instead, one reads it as an indicative micropolitical phenomenon, then one can begin to interrogate this simple policy tool in more complex ways. HIA both reveals, and is implicated in, a more fundamental and diffuse process that is presently resisting, undermining and regenerating traditional power distributions within the administration of health and beyond. The paper implicitly argues that HIA can only be properly understood within this context and, equally, allows one a certain analytical access to this context.

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Discovering Suicide

Cited by 19 publications

References 0 publications

Émile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim

Suicide, euthanasia and medicine: reflections ancient and modern

Qualitative and quantitative approaches to health impact assessment: An analysis of the political and philosophical milieu of the multi-method approach

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