Abstract
This chapter discusses the theoretical and methodological challenges the study of suicide poses for ethnographic research. It argues that anthropology has the potential to move beyond the implicit notions of agency, personhood and self of many mainstream (clinical) approaches to suicide.
The chapter also argues for a parallel treatment of scientific and vernacular ways of making sense of suicide cases. Serving as a theoretical backbone for the book, the chapter identifies the tension of agency in suicide as the product of individual intentionality wrestling with the (structural) forces beyond individual choices and decisions.
This unresolvable tension frames suicide as expressions of individual choice and indicators of pathologies of power and larger structural constellations.