Through a Glass Darkly

The study of suicide is an emerging and important interdisciplinary field in central and east European Studies. The importance of the topic is self-evident. Suicide is literally a matter of life and death, important in its own right; but the study of suicide is also a means of addressing larger questions in the history, culture, and politics of the region. Suicide is almost always an object of grave concern whenever and wherever it occurs, thus prompting a wealth of statistical and discursive documentation and information. It is a supremely individual act-arguably the supreme individual act-but also one that implicates and involves the community or society in which it occurs. This is especially true during times of seeming or actual spikes in the occurrence of self-killing, so-called "suicide epidemics" that demand immediate attention and explanation. But the reasons for suicide are also often highly elusive, creating what Irina Paperno has termed a "black hole" into which is drawn the explanations, rationalizations, and justifications of all those proximate to the act. In this way, to study suicide in its social context is also to study the attitudes and the anxieties of the society in question. It is to look through a glass darkly: to see a reflection of contemporary concerns and attitudes that might otherwise have gone unseen

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Criminology · Documentation · Object (grammar · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · History · Law · Suicide and Self-Harm Studies · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research