[Update: Various broken links repaired.]
Recently an American man burned himself to death to protest the war in Gaza. The case got lot of attention on social media. This led to more people noticing my work on suicide and conflict.
I may write something about the recent self-immolation. But for now I want to address the general phenomenon of people killing themselves to express grievances.
My first paper on this, “Suicide as Social Control,” is available for free on sites like Academia.edu and Researchgate. It’s been getting a lot of views lately! But since not everyone has the time or patience for academic articles, now might be a good time to post a shortened and more accessible version.
Moralistic Suicide
Sociologist Donald Black argues that much violence is a way of expressing and handling grievances. He refers to this as moralistic violence. This concept includes much violent crime in modern society. The typical criminal assault or homicide actually has an underlying similarity with law — both are ways of handling conflict and punishing perceived offenders.
Suicide too can be moralistic violence. Moralistic suicide is any suicide that expresses or handles a grievance, whether the act is one of protest, punishment, appeal, atonement, or avoidance.[1]
How do we tell if a suicide was moralistic? One source of evidence are statements made by the suicidal person.
Perhaps most explicitly moralistic are those who kill themselves in acts of political protest, stating their grievances in speeches, letters, and manifestos. One of the most famous cases of protest suicide in recent history occurred in Vietnam on June 11, 1963, when Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death to protest the Vietnamese government’s anti-Buddhist policies. Before his death, Quang Duc wrote “I have the honour to present my words to President Diem, asking him to be kind and tolerant towards his people and enforce a policy of religious equality.”2
Some who kill themselves over more private, interpersonal conflicts also leave notes indicating their death was a moralistic act — perhaps a hostile one.
We also see moralism where self-killers try to maximize the impact that their deaths will have on others. Those using suicide as a tactic of protest or appeal often structure their acts so as to attract maximum attention and sympathy, such as by committing suicide in public places and choosing dramatic and painful methods like burning.
Others take action to ensure their death will harm an opponent. For example, one man left letters that explicitly and repeatedly blamed his wife and brother, who were having an affair, for his death:
The letters he left showed plainly the suicide’s desire to bring unpleasant notoriety upon his brother and his wife, and to attract attention to himself. In them he described his shattered romance and advised reporters to see a friend to whom he had forwarded diaries for further details. The first sentence in a special message to his wife read: “I used to love you; but I die hating you and my brother, too.”3
Suicide can impose a wide variety of sanctions on those left behind. The aggrieved may, as in the case described above, inflict guilt and shame. Likewise, among the Tikopia of Polynesia, suicide frequently occurs when “the person feels himself or herself offended and frustrated, and flounces off in a rage, often hurling back some pointed ‘last words’ to make the survivors regretful.”4 And many survivors of suicide attempts in modern Europe cite wanting another to feel guilty as a “major influence” on their act.5
In some societies people believe suicide will allow them to inflict supernatural harm on an enemy, perhaps by transforming the self-killer into a vengeful ghost or placing some other sort of curse upon an adversary.6
In other societies, self-killers can count on their family, community, or government to punish an enemy for their suicide. In parts of New Guinea, for instance, the suicide of a married woman will provoke her family to demand blood money from her husband, who is considered to have killed her with abuse or slander. Sometimes suicide even results in blood vengeance against the person held responsible.
Self-Execution
While some suicides handle outward grievances, against other people, there are also suicides that handle grievances against the self-killer. That is, some suicide is a kind of self-execution for the self-killer’s own supposed wrongdoing.
Consider a case from Victorian England, in which a woman killed herself for being unfaithful to her husband:
Mary Renton, aged 25, the wife of a fisherman who was at sea, was found drowned in March 1894. The letter to her husband declared: “I have deceived you ever since Friday night and I cannot bear to think of it again . . . tell Mother and brothers that I cannot disgrace them any longer.”7
See also this case among the Netsilik Eskimo:
Oaniuk was killed accidentally during a hunt. Okoktok, a poor hunter, shot him during a caribou chase. Our informant is specific about the unintentional character of this tragedy: ‘It is certain that Okoktok didn’t want to kill Oaniuk, because the latter was a very excellent hunter.’ As he died, Oaniuk shouted for his gun in order to shoot back at Okoktok, but did not get the chance. Okoktok felt terribly guilty and later, visiting his neighbors, he declared himself ready to be killed. He was told: ‘You are not good game; if you want to kill yourself, go out and do it yourself.’ That is precisely what Okoktok did.8
An offended party may even suggest or demand that the offender commit suicide. An extreme example was found in Tokugawa Japan, where offenders could be ordered by superiors to commit suicide by disembowelment, known as seppuku.
The Social Structure Moralistic Suicide
Most studies of suicide seek to explain why some individuals are more likely to kill themselves, or why some societies have higher suicide rates. My unit of analysis is neither the person nor the society, but the conflict. Given that a grievance exists, what makes it more likely to result in suicide rather than some other reaction? My central question is why some conflicts are handled with suicide while others are not.
To answer this question I use the paradigm, or strategy of explanation, known as pure sociology or Blackian sociology. This was first introduced by Donald Black in his theory of law. In Blackian sociology, one explains variation in social life with its location and direction in social space (also known as its social structure or social geometry).
Social space includes vertical dimensions defined by the distribution of different kinds of social status, including wealth, respectability, and authority. Behaviors can be directed either upward, toward status superiors, or downward, toward status inferiors.
Social space also has dimensions defined by the distribution of intimacy (relational distance) similarity (cultural distance) and cooperation (functional interdependence). Behaviors therefore span greater or lesser social distances, based on the characteristics and relationships of the actors involved.
Using Black’s paradigm, we explain different ways of handling conflict with the social distances between the parties in the conflict, by their social elevation, and by who has a grievance against whom.
Moralistic suicide is most likely to be committed by those in conflict with adversaries who are 1) socially close, 2) socially superior, and 3) with whom they are functionally interdependent. Additionally, 4) suicide is more likely to the degree that the inferior in such a situation lacks third party support. Consider each of these relationships in detail.
Social Closeness
Moralistic suicide varies directly with social closeness. It is more likely in conflicts between intimate and culturally homogenous parties than in conflicts between those more distant.
We thus see moralistic suicide most often in conflicts between spouses and kin. For example, the majority of suicide and attempted suicide among the Trobriand islanders occurred in the context of “lovers’ quarrels, matrimonial differences, and similar cases.”9 Among the Cheyenne of the North American plains, suicides to “appeal to the public for a redress of a wrong” almost always involve “a grievance within the closest family.”10 And although Micronesian youth frequently commit suicide following conflicts with parents,
It is virtually unknown for a Micronesian adolescent to commit suicide after being scolded by a teacher, a neighbor, a priest, a policeman, a friend, or a collateral relative. If a young man seeks to marry a young woman of his choosing, but is thwarted by his sweetheart’s parents, suicide is quite improbable. However, if his own parents reject his plea for approval of the match, his suicide would be an accustomed response.11
In modern America too, conflicts with intimates provoke more moralistic suicide than conflict with acquaintances or strangers. And even among conflicts between non-intimates, those that are relatively closer are more likely to generate moralistic suicide. Protest suicides are more often aimed at the protestor’s own government than at foreign governments.
Vertical Direction
Moralistic suicide is greater in an upward direction than in a downward direction. Suicide is more likely to express grievances against social superiors than against social inferiors.
Thus, in highly patriarchical societies, wives are more likely than husbands to handle marital grievances with suicide. In Papua New Guinea, where women are typically subordinated to husbands and male kin, suicide is used as a means of retaliation most often by women. Downward grievances—by men against their wives—are commonly handled with beatings, but the reverse is not true: Women rarely use violence or direct attack, even in self-defense. By committing suicide, however, they ensure that their kin will demand compensation from or perhaps take vengeance against the husband.12
Things are similar among the Aguaruna Jívaro of Peru, where threatened, attempted, or completed suicide is explicitly recognized as an action against abusive husbands.13 The combination of subordination and family conflict also helps explain the high suicide rates of young married women in places like rural China, India and Iran.14
In conflicts between parents and dependent youth, the youth are more likely than the parents to handle their grievances with suicide. In Western Samoa enraged young men commit suicide in response to slights and offenses by parents and other older relatives, all of whom respond in “severe and punitive” ways to direct challenges to their authority. There’s a similar pattern in Micronesia, where suicide among young men has reached epidemic proportions.15
Protest suicides—like public self-burning—also have an upward direction, expressing grievances toward states and other large organizations on behalf of less organized collectivities. For instance, since the 1970s, several South Korean workers and labor activists have killed themselves to protest the actions of powerful, government-backed business corporations.16
High levels of intimacy can overshadow the effects of inequality, and vice versa. Some moralistic suicides occur toward those who are socially close but similar in status (as in many cases involving intimate partners in modern America), while some occur toward those who are socially distant but vastly (as in many cases involving political protest).17 But moralistic suicide is most likely in relationships that combine intimacy and inequality, such as marriages in patriarchal settings.
Functional Interdependence
Black defines functional interdependence as the extent to which two people or groups cooperate with one another.
Moralistic suicide varies directly with functional interdependence. Family relationships are sometimes interdependent as well as close, and to the extent that this is so family conflicts are more likely to be handled with suicide.
For instance, increasing economic dependence has corresponded to rising rates of moralistic suicide among Samoan youth, who are increasingly unable to escape or directly challenge the authority of the family members upon whom they depend. Increasing dependency is also associated with rising rates of youth suicide in Micronesia.18
Similarly, a researcher studying suicide in Japan in the 1980s observed that Japanese women do not usually seek divorce “because legal protection and job opportunities are lacking,” leading them to either tolerate marital problems or commit suicide. At least one study of Japan during this period found that prefectures with higher divorce rates had lower rates of female suicide, suggesting that divorce was indeed an alternative to self-destruction.19 And divorce is an alternative that becomes more likely with independence: Women with employment or other sources of support outside the nuclear household find it easier to leave abusive or unsatisfactory relationships.
Third Party Support
To explain how conflicts are handled, one must take account of the behavior of third parties. Third parties may intervene as partisans, offering various degrees of support for one side against the other, or they may intervene as settlement agents, such as judges or peacemakers. In any event, they play a crucial role in the handling of conflict.20
Moralistic suicide varies inversely with third-party support. Those who receive support in a conflict are less likely to kill themselves than those faced with similar conflicts but lacking support. Thus suicide by aggrieved wives is common among the Aguaruna Jívaro, where women “often find their relatives reluctant to defend them from abusive husbands.”21 In fact, suicidal behavior itself may be an effective means of mobilizing third parties. Among the Aguaruna, “the very kinsmen who may be unwilling to intervene on a woman’s behalf when she is alive are galvanized into action when she kills herself.”22
Overt appeals to reluctant third parties are common in suicides of political protest. For example, an analysis of suicide notes left by protestors in Korea between 1970 and 2004 revealed that protestors “committed suicide . . . in order to inspire movement activism among half-hearted activists and apathetic bystanders.”23 As one college student wrote before burning himself: “I beg the activists of all persuasions . . . Do not let my death and all the deaths of my predecessors be in vain.”24
Third-party behavior itself varies with the social location of the third party relative to each of the adversaries. Black’s theory of third parties uses the social location of third parties to predict partisan support: “partisanship is a joint function of the social closeness and superiority of one side and the social remoteness and inferiority of the other.”25
Black also predicts that the overall quantity of third party intervention, whether partisan or neutral, depends on the distance between the adversaries: third-party intervention varies directly with social distance.26 And, finally, he proposes that the quantity and nature of intervention varies with the distance of the third party from both disputants: those close to both sides will intervene as friendly peacemakers (“warm nonpartisans”) while those distant from both sides (“cold nonpartisans”) will not get involved at all.27
Those with grievances against an intimate superior face a disadvantage in attracting partisans or peacemakers. Still, the absence of third-party support is not inevitable. But supportive behavior is only likely if third parties are socially close to the aggrieved. Therefore disputants who lack close ties to third parties will be less able to get help with their conflicts and more likely to resort to suicide.
The effect of physical and social isolation on third-party support partly explains the association between domestic violence and suicide by wives: both abuse and suicide have similar third-party structures.
As M.P. Baumgartner argues, wife abuse is more common and more severe where wives have less support while husbands have more. Such an imbalance often occurs when wives reside with their husband’s kin but at a distance from their own.28 Societies in which patrilineal kin form solidary residential groups tend to have more violence against wives, more suicide by wives, and less suicide by husbands—a pattern found among tribal New Guineans and in the farming villages of rural China and Taiwan.
Notably, men in such settings who find themselves bereft of partisans may also resort to self-destruction. For example, among the Aguaruna, older men mobilize networks of kin and other allies for collective action against enemies. But young men who lack such support networks sometimes commit suicide when they have conflicts with their elders. And among the Maenge of New Guinea, only “rubbish men”—orphans without any kin to support them in conflicts—commit suicide.29
The Structure of Self-Execution
Self-execution is encouraged by the same variables that promote moralistic suicide against others: inequality, social closeness, functional dependence, and a lack of third- party support. Only in these cases the position of offender and aggrieved are flipped: Self-execution is more likely tin response to downward grievances, and when the target of the grievance lacks third party support. Thus in settings that include feudal Japan, imperial Rome, and the Polynesian island of Tikopia, aggrieved superiors sometimes order their inferiors to kill themselves—and the inferiors comply.30
Social closeness and interdependence matter as well. Where rulers can order subordinates to kill themselves self-execution is commonly restricted to members of the governing class and military officials—individuals who are close to the central authority as well as interdependent with it. In Tokugawa Japan, for instance, self-execution was a practice of the samurai, a class of warrior nobility. In imperial Rome, the emperor might demand suicide from members of the senatorial class, while others received standard executions.31
Even in less hierarchical relationships, closeness encourages suicides that express guilt, remorse, or expiation: “The young Trukese can live with the fact that he is the subject of public opprobrium in the community, but he cannot at all live easily with the feeling that he is the cause of disgrace for his family.”32
And in all cases self-execution is less likely to the extent there is third-party support for the alleged offender. For example, among the Tikopia, a man who offended the chief might volunteer to go on a suicide voyage. His departure could be prevented, however, if “a man of rank” intervened and ordered him to stop, at which point the offender “could then acquiesce in obedience to the command, yet with the dignity of having been prepared to expiate his offence with his life.”33
Conclusion
In sum, moralistic suicide is more likely in conflicts marked by social closeness, inequality, interdependence, and a lack of third-party support for at least one side.
Each variable increases the likelihood of moralistic suicide, and its probability is even greater when all are present in combination. Thus moralistic suicide is most frequent and pronounced in settings where these factors converge: in tribal and traditional societies where relationships are close, enduring, and highly interdependent, where families are rigidly stratified, and where patterns of kinship and residence promote extremes of third-party support.
But in modern societies these conditions decline: relationships are more often unstable, independent, and egalitarian. Moralistic suicide thus declines, becoming a less pronounced feature of social life. But it does not disappear. It can still be found in conflicts between husbands and wives, parents and children, citizens and rulers, and even between people and themselves.
Thanks for reading! Again, this is the cliff-notes version of an academic paper and I’ve cut out most of the background, comparison of different theories, and several examples and citations. If you’re interested in that stuff then check out the original.
Also, this is only one aspect of my work on suicide. If you’re interested in more, consider reading my book Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction. See also this post on “Social Causes and Consequences of Suicide.”
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The concept of moralistic suicide overlaps with existing concepts in the suicide literature. Several scholars have recognized as distinctive types suicides involving vengeance, aggression, or appeal. Within Blackian sociology, M.P. Baumgartner first discussed suicide and self-injury as acts of social control, noting their similarity to conflict tactics such as running away, appealing for help from third parties, and withholding labor. Black himself has also briefly discussed the classification of suicide as social control. See Baumgartner, M.P. 1984. “Social Control from Below.” Pp.303-345 in Toward a General Theory of Social Control, volume 1: Fundamentals, edited by Donald Black. Orlando: Academic Press.
P.172 in Biggs, Michael. 2005. “Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963-2002.” Pp.173-208 in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, edited by Diego Gambetta. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Quoted on p.311-312 of Douglas, Jack D. 1967. The Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
P.128 in Firth, Raymond. 1967. “Suicide and Risk-taking.” Pp.116-140 in Tikopia Ritual and Belief. Boston: Beacon Press.
P.385 in Hjelmeland, Heidi; Keith Hawton, Hilmar Nordvik, Unni Bille-Brahe, Diego de Leo, Sandor Fekete, Onja Grad, Christian Haring, Ad J.F.M. Kerkhof, Jouko Lönnqvist, Konrad Michel, Ellinor Salander Renberg, Armin Schmidtke, Kees van Heeringen, and Danuta Wasserman. 2002. “Why People Engage in Parasuicide: A Cross-Cultural Study of Intentions.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 32 (4): 380-393.
Jeffreys, M.D.W. 1952. “Samsonic Suicide or Suicide of Revenge among Africans.” African Studies 11 (3): 118-122. See for example, p.163 in Wolf, Margery. 1972. Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
P.261 in Bailey, Victor. 1998. “This Rash Act”: Suicide across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
P.165 in Balikci, Asen. 1970. The Netsilik Eskimos. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press.
P.94 in Malinowski, Bronislaw. [1926] 1976. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. Totowa: Littlefield, Adams & Co.
P.159 in Llewellyn, K.N. and E. Adamson Hoebel. 1941. The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
P.33 in Rubinstein, Donald H. 1995. “Love and Suffering: Adolescent Socialization and Suicide in Micronesia.” The Contemporary Pacific 7 (1): 21-53.
Counts, Dorothy Ayers.1980.“Fighting Back is Not the Way: Suicide and the Women of Kaliai.” American Ethnologist 7 (2): 332-351; 1987. “Female Suicide and Wife Abuse in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 17(3):194-204. Johnson, Patricia Lyons. 1981. “When Dying is Better than Living: Female Suicide among the Gainj of Papua New Guinea.” Ethnology 20 (4): 325-334.
Brown, Michael F. 1986. “Power, Gender, and the Social Meaning of Aguaruna Suicide.” Man 21 (2): 311-328.
Zhang, Jie; Y. Conwell; L. Zhou; and C. Jiang. 2004. “Culture, Risk Factors and Suicide in Rural China: A Psychological Autopsy Case Control Study.” Acta Psychatrica Scandinavica 110: 430-437. Wolf 1972 (cited in n.6). Wolf, Margery. 1975. “Women and Suicide in China.” Pp.111-142 in Women in Chinese Society, edited by Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hadlaczky, Gergo and Danuta Wasserman. 2009. “Suicidality in women.” Pp.117-138 in Contemporary Topics in Women’s Mental Health: Global Perspectives in a Changing Society, ed. by Prabha S. Chandra, Helen Herrman, Jane Fisher, Marianne Kastrup, Unaiza Niaz, Marta B. Rondon, and Ahmed Okasha. NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Aliverdinia, Akbar and William Alex Pridemore. 2009. “Women’s fatalistic suicide in Iran: A partial test of Durkheim in an Islamic republic.” Violence Against Women 15 (3): 307-320.
Macpherson, Cluny and La’Avasa Macpherson.1987. “Towards an Explanation of Recent Trends in Suicide in Western Samoa.” Man 22 (2): 305-330. Hezel, Francis X. 1984. “Cultural Patterns of Trukese Suicide.” Ethnology 23(3):193-206. Rubinstein, Donald H. 1983. “Epidemic Suicide among Micronesian Adolescents.” Social Science Medicine 17 (10): 657-665. Rubinstein, Donald H. 2002. “Youth Suicide and Social Change in Micronesia.” Occasional Paper No.36, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan: Kagoshima University Research Center for the Pacific Islands. Rubinstein 1995 (cited in n.11).
See Biggs, 2005 (cited in n.2). Jang, Sang-Hwan. 2004. “Continuing Suicide among Laborers in Korea.” Labor History 45 (3): 271-297.
Political grievances may also result in terrorism—covert mass violence against civilians (Black, Donald. 2004. “The Geometry of Terrorism.” Sociological Theory 22(1):14-25.) Terrorism often involves suicidal attacks, although in such cases self-destruction is generally a secondary consequence of inflicting violence directly on others. Black (idem) predicts that terrorism occurs upwardly and across very long distances in social space. Terrorism is thus more likely against alien nations, as when Arab Muslims attacked targets in America on September 11, 2001. While protest suicide also occurs in an upward direction, it crosses smaller distances. Protest suicide is thus mostly a domestic phenomenon, usually expressing grievances by citizens against their own government, as when public burnings led to popular uprisings within several Arab Muslim nations—including Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia—in early 2011.
P.111 in O’Meara, J. Tim. 2002. Samoan Planters: Tradition and Economic Development in Polynesia. Belmont: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. P.39 in Rubinstein, 1995 (n.11).
P.58 in Iga, Mamoru. 1986. The Thorn in the Chrysanthemum: Suicide and Economic Success in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chandler, Charles R. and Yung-Mei Tsai. 1993. “Suicide in Japan and in the West.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 34 (3/4): 244-259.
Black, Donald and M.P. Baumgartner. 1983. “Toward a Theory of the Thirty Party.” Pp.84-114 in Empirical Theories About Courts, edited by Keith O. Boyum and Lynn Mather. New York: Longman. Cooney, Mark. 1998. Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence. New York: New York University Press. Phillips, Scott and Mark Cooney. 2005. “Aiding Peace, Abetting Violence: Third Parties and the Management of Conflict.” American Sociological Review 70 (2): 334-354.
P.320 in Brown, 1986 (n.13)
Idem.
Kim, Hyojoung. 2008. “Micromobilization and Suicide Protest in South Korea, 1970-2004.” Social Research 75 (2): 543-578.
Idem, p.567.
P.127 in Black, Donald. 1998. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. (Revised Edition, first edition 1993). San Diego: Academic Press.
P.835 in Black, Donald. 1995. “The Epistemology of Pure Sociology.” Law and Social Inquiry 20 (3): 829-870. (Black 1995:835).
PP.134-35 in Black, Donald. 1998 (n.XXV).
Baumgartner, M.P. 1992. “Violent Networks: The Origins and Management of Domestic Conflict.” Pp.203-231 in Violence and Aggression: The Social Interactionist Perspective, edited by Richard B. Felson and James Tedeschi. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Brown, 1986 (n.13). Panoff, Michel. 1977. “Suicide and Social Control in New Britain.” Bijdragen: Tot de Taal-land-en Volkenkunded 133 (1): 44-62.
P.138 in Firth, 1967 (cited in note 4). Pp.129-135 in Pinguet, Maurice. 1993. Voluntary Death in Japan. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Cambridge: Polity Press. Seward, Jack. 1968. Hara-Kiri: Japanese Ritual Suicide. Rutland: Charles E.Tuttle Co. van Hooff, Anton J.L. 1990. From Authothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity. New York: Routledge.
Pinguet, 1993 (n.30). Pp.95-96 in van Hoof, 1990 (n.30). Otterbein, Keith F. 1986. The Ultimate Coercive Sanction: A Cross-Cultural Study of Capital Punishment. New Haven: HRAF Press.
P. 203 in Hezel, 1984 (n.15).
Firth 1967 (n.4).