Between Demons and Disease

This chapter uses the Laura Ahearn's definition of agency as "the socioculturally mediated capacity to act": the suicida person who commits suicide is a victim of a demonic power over which he or she has no control. Instead, Lidia identified her symptoms as a demonic strategy to lure her into suicide, though she also recognized that treatment, combined with prayer, were an effective tactic of resistance. Present-day yucatecan attitudes and beliefs about suicide are ambivalent. Yucatan's suicide rate is more than twice that of the Mexican national average. This colonial text is strong evidence of a prevalence of suicide in the colonial period. A patient's journey into PIAS usually follows inpatient admission to HPY. Typically, a patient is admitted due to a suicide attempt at the psychiatric hospital when the attempt is particularly lethal or is the latest in a series of multiple attempts

Disease · Geography · Pathology · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · History · Medicine · Psychedelics and Drug Studies

• Language and Agency

  Laura M Ahearn•Annual Review of Anthropology•2001

  Add to list