In Pursuit of the Good Life

Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India

Bibliographic Data

ID19984611
AuthorsJocelyn Lim Chua (0000-0002-8576-2703, corresponding author), Jocelyn Lim
Year2014
Pages240
Publication date2014-03-08
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueIn Pursuit Of The Good Life Aspiration And Suicide In Globalizing South India (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/california/9780520281158.001.0001
OpenAlexW4241962976
Open LibraryOL26179425M
ISBN9780520281158
LanguageEN
Citations received64

Once celebrated as a model of development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction: it is the nation's suicide capital. Since the 1990s, reported suicide rates have been double to triple the national average. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand the suicide crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide therefore offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world. In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, In Pursuit of the Good Life broadens the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life to consider how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times

Aesthetics · Art · Capital (architecture) · Ethnography · Everyday life · Experiential learning · Field (mathematics) · Meaning (existential) · Modernity · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Shadow (psychology) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Psychology · Social and Economic Development in India · Cultural · East Indians · Economic conditions · India · Quality of life · Social change · Social conditions · Social Science · South India · Suicide

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