Suicide and Agency offers an original and timely challenge to existing ways of understanding suicide. Through the use of rich and detailed case studies, the authors assembled in this volume explore how interplay of self-harm, suicide, personhood and agency varies markedly across site (Greenland, Siberia, India, Palestine and Mexico) and setting (self-run leprosy colony, suicide bomb attack, cash-crop farming, middle-class mothering).

Part I Introduction: The anthropology of suicide: ethnography and the tension of agency, Daniel Münster and Ludek Broz. Part II Suicide, Personhood and Relationality: Personhood, agency and suicide in a neo-liberalizing South India, James Staples; The lonely un-dead and returning suicide in northwest Greenland, Janne Flora; Between demons and disease: suicide and agency in Yucatan, Mexico, Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster; Four funerals and a wedding: suicide, sacrifice, and (non-)human agency in a Siberian village, Ludek Broz. Part III Self-Destruction and Power: Bodies, Resistance and Crises: Farmers' suicide and the moral economy of agriculture: victimhood, voice, and agro-environmental responsibility in South India, Daniel Münster; Dying to live in Palestine: steadfastness, pollution and embodied space, Deen Sharp and Natalia Linos; Accumulating death: women's moral agency and domestic economies of care in South India, Jocelyn Chua; Learning suicide and the limits of agency: children's 'suicide play' in Sri Lanka, Tom Widger; Suicide, agency and the limits of power, Katrina Jaworski. Part IV Afterword: Afterword: taking relationality to extremes, Marilyn Strathern