Suicides, poisons and the materially possible: The positive ambivalence of means restriction and critical–critical global health

Abstract

Developing an object-oriented perspective on suicide, in this article the author challenges critical global health scholarship and sociological theories of ambivalence by showing how a focus on ‘materially possible’ suicide prevention can offer culturally relevant solutions to a suicide epidemic in a resource-poor setting. Taking the example of pesticide regulation in Sri Lanka, he demonstrates why, in theoretical terms, banning toxic pesticides has coherence in a local poison complex that renders suicide available to people as a cultural practice. While writers in the field of critical global health have been suspicious of ‘magic-bullet’ interventions such as means restriction because such policies reportedly overlook the social complexity of problems such as suicide, the author argues that what is materially possible is often of merit because it renders graspable an otherwise deeply contingent and variegated problem. He further argues that critical global health can view the ambivalent costs and benefits of materially possible, magic-bullet interventions as a positive rather than negative offshoot of global health.

Moral Economies of Life and Death: Agricultural Improvement, Imperialism, and Chemical Kinships with Reactive Nitrogen

“…Shiva (2004) describes how the combined industrialization, chemicalization, and capital restructuring of green-revolution agriculture led to thousands of farmer suicides in India. One of the most popular forms of suicide among farmers across the Global South is the ingestion of Paraquat, an Nr based herbicide (see Widger 2018). Miles away from India, in a small village in Yorkshire, one of my own kin uses the compensation from an industrial accident to return to the land he was dispossessed from, buying himself a farm.…”

Screening Charity Recipients: Health Philanthropy, Medical Diagnosis, and Kidney Disease Prevention in Sri Lanka

“…The prevalence of chronic kidney disease of unknown aetiology (CKDu) in Sri Lanka's agricultural heartland, which also happens to be the seat of the dominant Sinhala Buddhist culture on the island, the frontline in the civil war, and the centre of the suicide epidemic, all bestow CKDu with medical, moral, and political significations that in turn shape the creation of CKDu hotspots. Tom Widger has shown how processes of post-colonial transformation and civil war, rapid agricultural development, the widespread use of agrochemicals, and historical practices of drinking poison to counter accusations of shame in relational contexts, all coalesced to generate Sri Lanka's suicide 'epidemic'-a 'poison complex' of suicidality across registers of language, cognition, practice, and material culture (Widger , 2018. Within the post-war imaginary of the Sinhala Buddhist nationstate, agrochemical or fluoride poisoning in those areas amounts to the poisoning of the body politic through the poisoning of Sinhala Buddhist bodies (Widger forthcoming).…”

Bad Guys and Bag Ladies: On the Politics of Polemics and the Promise of Ambivalence

“…Advocating an ambivalent position, however, is not without its problems. Within the fields of psychology (Sincoff, 1990) and sociology (Merton, 1976), the “overwhelming perspective on ambivalence has been negative” (Widger, 2018, p. 406). Despite the fact that life is full of tension, overlap, divergence, difference, and hesitation, ambivalence has been framed as a pathological condition that needs to be resolved.…”