A01=Jocelyn Lim Chua
anthropologists
asia scholars
asian studies
Author_Jocelyn Lim Chua
Category=JHMC
critical theory
cultural anthropology
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographers
ethnography
everyday life
fieldwork
global change
globalization
high suicide rates
historical struggles
human condition
kerala
life and death
modern history
modern india
modernization
nonfiction
postcolonial world
psychology
retrospective
social anxiety
social aspirations
social change
social development
social historians
social history
south india
suicide
tragic
Product details
- ISBN 9780520281165
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Mar 2014
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation's suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this 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. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.
Jocelyn Lim Chua is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
