Transcultural Psychiatry 2015, Vol. 52(1) 96–114 ! The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1363461514557560 tps.sagepub.com

Article

The Durkheim-Tarde debate and the social study of aboriginal youth suicide Ronald Niezen McGill University

Abstract A debate that took place in France in the early 20th century still has much to tell us about the interpretation and strategies of intervention of suicide, particularly the “cohort effect” of aboriginal youth suicide. The act of suicide, for Durkheim, was inseparable from the problem of social cohesion, with extremes in solidarity and regulation predictably reflected in high rates of suicide. For Gabriel Tarde, by contrast, suicide was seen as an outcome of changeable ideas found in processes of innovation and imitation among creatively receptive individuals. This latter approach remains overlooked in favor of a growing reliance on conceptions of historical trauma and conditions of social disintegration. Recognizing the idea of suicide itself as a potential locus of solidarity opens up other possibilities for responding to and intervening in suicide crises or “clusters.” Keywords aboriginal, epidemiology, historical trauma, indigenous, suicide, youth

A fundamental divide in the sociological study of suicide has endured for well over a century, starting with a controversy surrounding the foundational text of empirical suicide studies, E´mile Durkheim’s Suicide, first published in 1897. This (often implicit) controversy follows ultimately from divergent views about the essential nature of society, from different answers to the questions concerning how collective behavior comes into being, how it acts upon the individual and, ultimately, how it influences the decision to take one’s own life. The act of suicide, for Durkheim, was inseparable from the problem of social cohesion; it revealed the regularities and laws through which societies are formed by indicating the consequences of extremes in cohesion and regulation, predictably reflected, he argued, in high rates of suicide.

Corresponding author: Ronald Niezen, Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Leacock Building, 7th Floor, 855 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal, QC H3A 2T7, Canada. Email: [email protected]

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Durkheim’s greatest innovation in his sociological study of suicide, and ultimately (as I want to show) the greatest limitation of his work, was to connect the act of suicide in industrial society with a weakening of the coherence and cohesiveness of society. His perspective follows from the basic values on which his work is premised: the need for social coherence in a complex industrial society that tends toward fragmentation and insecurity, this in a clear, far-reaching analysis of social pathology and, by implication, the way towards reform. It is a vision of society that has dominated the sociological study of suicide ever since. An alternative starting point for sociological inquiry was developed by Gabriel Tarde, one of Durkheim’s colleagues at the Sorbonne. Tarde’s sociology (Tarde, 1890, 1893, 1895, 1897, 1898) should not be seen as directly in contradiction with Durkheim’s vision, but as addressing a problem that follows from it: given that individuals in complex industrial society are often separated from one another by the very nature of urban life and institutional specialization, how do they cohere? How do observable trends in belief and opinion take shape among individuals who do not personally know or interact with one another? Approached from this direction, social solidarity in complex societies cannot be dismissed as inconsequential, or as arising simply from the nature of society, but becomes the central question in the agenda of sociological inquiry (see Toews, 2010). Social solidarity is seen by Tarde as an outcome of changeable ideas, found in processes of innovation, imitation, and currents of opinion among creatively receptive individuals rather than in more immutable institutions or basic forms of social existence acting independently from human agents. The driving forces of society are to be found among active individuals exchanging information and opinion through historically ever-widening networks of communication. Applied to the study of suicide, this means that patterns or regularities that seem to follow from ideas, such as social acceptability, taboos, or the method of suicide, are not epiphenomena, but should be central to our understanding of the social causes of suicide. The basic elements of the discussion that began to take place within Durkheim’s intellectual circle have endured through the 20th century and have not changed significantly since. If anything, they have resolved themselves into more distinct, adamantine camps. This can be seen in any review of the vast literature that explores the connection between suicide with social structure. A classically Durkheimian approach, for example, is taken by Stockard and O’Brien (2002, p. 855), who find that “higher rates of disrupted family structures and greater family strain are associated with high suicide rates,” and offer the explanation that those with “nontraditional family structures experience less social integration and regulation and thus will be more likely to have higher suicide rates.” In social capital theories of suicide, emphasis on community networks, civic engagement, civic identity, and reciprocity can be seen to fit closely with the Durkheimian emphasis on social cohesion (Kushner & Sterk, 2005). Javier Mignone and John O’Neil (2005) follow such a Durkheimian model, with the substitution of the term “social capital” for Durkheim’s “integration,” while sharing with him the basic

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premise that communities function well or poorly in relation to the effectiveness of social connections and the ways in which people interact. And in an article that combines a literature review with statistical analysis, Heikkinen, Aro, and Lo¨nnqvist (1993, p. 356) find a preponderance of published material connecting high rates of suicide with weak social support systems, as measured by such things as living alone, number of close friends, residence changes, and interaction between family members, a finding that gains support in the enduring legacy of the idea of “social integration” in suicide studies. Durkheim’s recent detractors are perhaps less numerous, but no less adamant. Suicide has been referred to as “a ‘sealed’ classic, safely dead and turned over to the intellectual historians” (Collins, cited in Gane, 2005, p. 226). Mike Gane (2005) more substantively points to the far-reaching methodological implications for Durkheim’s analysis of a disconnection between suicide rates and the form of death chosen, in which the method of suicide appears to be even more stable than suicide rates, yet is dismissed in Durkheim’s analysis, with the conclusion that “the form of death chosen [is] something entirely foreign to the very nature of suicide” (1897/1966, p. 293). This is consistent with the work of those who emphasize the significance of ideas in the social dynamics of suicide. The place of “inter-mentality” or in a contemporary phraseology, the “routes of exposure,” the channels by which ideas associated with suicide become normalized and more readily acted upon, should be seen as a significant part of suicidal behavior (Gould, Wallenstein, & Davidson, 1989; Kral, 1994, 1998). It follows that “the general acceptability of suicide, rather than a series of precipitating crises for the individual, is where we should begin in the study of lethality and the perception of choice” (Kral & Dyck, 1995, p. 210). This starting point is supported by Abrutyn and Muller’s study of suicide suggestion among US adolescents, which finds that “suicidality can spread through the very ties that Durkheim theorized as protective” (2014, p. 211). An alternative approach to the study of suicide thus finds that, “we will better understand how suicide becomes an acceptable option for an individual or group, cohort, or culture by examining and studying the phenomenon of the idea” (Kral, 1994, p. 245). This opens the possibility for an approach more consistent with Tarde’s sociology, one that begins with acts and processes of communication and social interaction. I want to show that considering the communication of ideas gives us an opportunity to explore a dimension of suicidal behavior that has not been given sufficient attention and that has important implications for both interpretation and intervention in suicide crises. In particular, if we take the social dynamics considered by Durkheim’s critics as a starting point, it becomes possible to acknowledge the potential for ideas associated with suicide to find their way into the repertoires of identity and group belonging. Gabriel Tarde’s sociology, developed in part through direct debate with Durkheim, suggests a collective dimension to selfdestruction that does not have a place in Durkheim’s paradigm, one that recognizes the formation of social life itself around ideas and acts of suicide as a positive value.

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The two distinct approaches to suicide as a social or collective phenomenon that I am discussing here are clearly illustrated with reference to the literatures on aboriginal and Inuit youth suicide in Canada, which can be comparatively situated in more global concerns with self-destruction in indigenous populations. Consistent with Durkheim’s emphasis on social disturbance and discontinuity, aboriginal communities with high rates of suicide readily lend themselves to the kind of post-crisis appraisal or “historical etiology” that situates suicide in the context of political marginalization, internal colonialism, and historical trauma, along with more immediately identifiable sources of collective distress such as loss of subsistence, high unemployment, and culturally destructive residential school experience. At the same time, the tendency for aboriginal youth suicide to occur in “clusters” has led to inquiry into the influence of ideas and imitation on suicidal behavior, in ways that are consistent with Tarde’s starting point in communication, persuasion, and personal influence as sources of collective life. My approach to understanding “cluster suicides” in aboriginal communities supports the argument that basic categories of human belonging can be significantly altered or invented through the production of ideas. The implications of this observation for assumptions about the permanence and influence of social institutions have not sufficiently found their way into the study of suicide. As I will discuss further below, within crises of concentrated self-destruction of the kind that have taken place in aboriginal and Inuit communities we can sometimes find, by looking closely, a normalization of self-inflicted death in adaptive avenues toward identity formation and social inclusion. Durkheim’s sociology is generally considered to have prevailed over that of Tarde; and this can certainly be confirmed to the extent that his influence on the study of society over the past century has been more far-reaching and durable, as evidenced in part by the Durkheimian orientation of many recent studies of aboriginal youth suicide. But we are now in a position to better appreciate the merits of Tarde’s understanding of social dynamics because the rapid changes that have taken place in the technology of travel and communication, not to mention the displacements of large-scale development and rural/urban migration, have made it much easier to see the mutability inherent in social life, the historical arbitrariness of social categories, and the creative processes and contestations that lie behind identity formation. Following from this starting point in the Durkheim–Tarde debate, which I will elaborate at some length in the first part of this paper, I want to draw upon the literature on aboriginal youth suicide to explore the possibility that suicide is discussed and sometimes acted upon by people who, through their suicidal behavior, are seeking the acceptance and security of a community. Recognizing the idea of suicide as a potential locus of solidarity takes us away from a perspective that focuses narrowly on conditions of social disintegration and historical discontinuity, in which societies are seen to have an inherent tendency to produce high rates of suicide when they are in some way out of balance.

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Durkheim’s sociology of suicide Durkheim sought not only to scientifically investigate, but also, through science, to tame and control the subject matter of his investigation. Suicide is notoriously complex, intemperate, clouded by emotion, dampened by prohibitions, and hidden by compassionate deceit; and for these very qualities it was an ideal subject matter for Durkheim to attempt to categorize, regularize, and use to explain the workings of society. His was a basic strategy similar to that of Freud: the essence of human life can be most clearly seen through the various forms of its pathologies. The collective reality that Durkheim sought to reveal in his study of suicide consisted of those “real, living, active forces which, because of the way they determine the individual, prove their independence of him” (1897/1966, p. 39), and produce a moral reality greater than him. He expressed this point most forcefully in his study of religion, in which he famously concluded that, “a society is to its members what a god is to its faithful” (1912/2001, p. 208). In Durkheim’s sociology, suicide becomes prevalent when social forces are in some way out of balance. In those societies that integrate individuals with powerful moral force, individuals most often choose to end their lives out of a sense of duty. This “altruistic” suicide is described by Durkheim from examples, such as feudal Japan, that suggested to him the influence of pre-modern forms of organization— “mechanical solidarity”—in which corporate life is cohesive, regular, and integrative, and in which the individual is strictly subordinated to the group. Durkheim surmised that in industrial societies, the most common causes of suicide are quite different. The definitive feature of industrial (or, in his terms, “organic”) society is its tendency to fragment, to separate individuals from one another by their distinct functions in a complex division of labor and by political, economic and, ultimately, moral and spiritual uncertainty and instability. Under these circumstances, suicide occurs with great frequency when the institutions of society fail to integrate individuals, when the individual’s possibilities and feelings are not hedged in by traditions, aggregations, or a secure sense of belonging (resulting in what he termed “egoistic” suicide). Suicide also occurs frequently when societies face institutional crises, economic fluctuations, political turmoil, and other forms of discontinuity, producing in individuals a deep sense of insecurity, or “anomie,” that similarly inclines many toward self destruction (in his terminology, “anomic” suicide). There is also a historical dimension to what Durkheim finds to be a dramatic increase in self-destruction in Europe over the course of the 19th century: “As societies become greater in volume and density, they increase in complexity, work is divided, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all men” (1893/1984, p. 336). He concludes that this “grave and rapid alteration” is a source of pervasive morbidity, an inclination to self-destruction inherent in modern society: “what the rising flood of voluntary deaths denotes is not the

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increasing brilliancy of our civilization but a state of crisis and perturbation not to be prolonged with impunity” (1893/1984, p. 369). A fourth type of suicide follows from the logic of his paradigm, but Durkheim finds it inconsequential and thus omits it from his conclusions and discusses it only in a footnote: It is the suicide deriving from excessive regulation, that of persons pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline . . . To bring out the ineluctable and inflexible nature of a rule against which there is no appeal, and in contrast with the expression “anomy” . . . we might call it fatalistic suicide.” (1897/1966, p. 276ff)

Durkheim downplayed the significance of fatalistic suicide in modern society, with the dismissive explanation that “it has so little contemporary significance and examples are so hard to find . . . that it seems useless to dwell upon it” (1897/1966, p. 276). He even went so far as to classify suicides in the military as “altruistic,” overlooking the obvious fact that reported suicides in the military would probably never have resulted from self-sacrifice in battle (Kushner & Sterk, 2005, p. 1142), and that circumstance of fatalism offered a much better explanation. Although, with the relegation of fatalistic suicide to a footnote, Durkheim’s presentation of his fourfold typology of suicide seems haphazard, once all the ingredients are in place it has an elegant logical consistency that lends itself to the arrangement in Figure 1. If the logic of his typology is symmetrical, why did Durkheim not present it in a way that reflected this coherence? In particular, why did he downplay the significance of fatalism for modern society? The most likely reason seems to be that he was set upon

High social integration High social regulation

Low social integration Fatalistic

Altruistic

Low social regulation

Egoistic

Anomic

Figure 1. The causes and categories of suicide according to Durkheim.

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presenting a picture of his own society that emphasized its proclivities toward disintegration and deregulation, with corresponding effects on individuals of egoism and anomie. His approach to the study of suicide reflected his mission to connect the scientific study of society with institutional and moral reform. For him, the place of sociology was to guide the course of social reform to the fullest extent possible toward conditions of social regularity, cohesiveness, and security. This was reflected in his particular remedy for suicide, situated not so much in efforts to increase the bonds of faith or family, but in the development of occupational groups, which he saw as the most important agents of economic life, and therefore in the best position to tighten and strengthen the meshes of the social fabric (1897/1966, p. 381). Along with others in his immediate intellectual circle, Durkheim surmised that principles of solidarity could best be promoted through an increased role for professional groups (Fournier, 2006, p. 243), a position that uncomfortably combines the social conservativism of one who seeks to temper and control the pace of change with a socialist vision of comprehensive institutional reform (Niezen, 2014, p. 45). Fatalistic suicide had no place in this vision. The idea that some forms of social solidarity in industrial society could be excessively constraining and create conditions favorable to suicide ran squarely against his assumptions about the ills and possible remedies of modernity, particularly with what he saw as its inherent tendencies toward fragmentation and incoherence. Such limitations following from Durkheim’s assumptions about the nature of modernity have not been prominent in the commentary on Suicide. Much of the discussion surrounding his work in the century or so since its publication has concentrated on his use of statistics, above all the conclusions he based on an uncritical use of information gathered in different ways, following different criteria in various countries in Europe and arrondissements in France. Maurice Halbwachs, a member of Durkheim’s “inner circle,” was among the first to systematically assess Durkheim’s use of statistics, finding that, for example, changes to the rules of record keeping in Prussia in 1868 were associated with a sudden increase in the number or suicides reported—a type of fact that Durkheim’s 1897 study does not consistently take into consideration (1930/2002, pp. 17–18). Halbwachs, with deferential indirectness, pointed out that Durkheim explained such changes in suicide frequency in terms of social dislocation, without adequately taking into consideration the more prosaic disjuncture in the manner of suicide record-keeping that might correspond with the same event. But Halbwachs also elaborated a more substantive critique of Durkheim’s Suicide. He questioned his assumption that significant regularities in the method chosen are tangential to the social causes of suicide, that is to say, that the method of self-destruction may depend on social causes, but that these do not have explanatory value as determinants of suicide. Durkheim’s solution to the problem of regularities in the method of suicide was simply to emphasize an “affinity” between the method chosen and the social cause, reverting to the overarching influence of basic conditions of social integration and regulation to explain both suicide rates and what Gane refers to as the “scenography,” the mood and motive of the act of suicide (which Durkheim considered to be epiphenomenal); and he was never tempted to do a thoroughgoing analysis of the connection between them (Gane, 2005). Halbwachs was not so

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prepared to dismiss what he found to be “astonishing regularity” in the distribution of methods of suicide in Europe. The fact that there were clusters of traditions and customs [ensembles de traditions et de coutumes], corresponding to different geographical zones, revealing the preferences of various groups of states or nations for one method of suicide rather than another, suggested to him a connection between the choice of means and the social causes of suicide (1930/2002, p. 49). Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and closest collaborator, also elaborated an alternative approach to the study of suicide in a short piece on the “collective suggestion of the idea of death” among the Maori of New Zealand and Aborigines of Australia, an essay that he frames in his concluding sentence as an extension and confirmation of Durkheim’s theory of anomic suicide (1926/2004, p. 330). According to Mauss, suicide can sometimes result from the elaboration of collective ideas, above all moral and religious ideas oriented toward a rupture, caused by magical forces or sin, with spiritual forces that support the community, which then compel individuals toward self destruction “by suggestion.” This influence on individual behavior of shared ideas about acceptable or inevitable death resulting from spiritual forces was, he proposed, a clear indication of the influence of social life on the motives and behavior of individuals, following patterns created by institutions and ideas that have disappeared from “our” (European) society. For Mauss, group pressure was able to create conditions of belief that, under the least provocation, could release “ravages or overexcitement of forces” (1926/2004, p. 315), resulting in deaths “caused brutally, elementarily among many individuals, quite simply because they know or believe (which amounts to the same thing) that they are going to die” (1926/2004, p. 313; my translation). This seems straightforward enough, even if it is imbued with prejudices and stereotypes common at the time, but Mauss does not seem prepared to acknowledge that his account of the influence of changeable systems of belief on intense concentrations of suicide takes us beyond Durkheim’s insistence on social disintegration and deregulation as the ultimate determinants of self-inflicted death, giving some independent explanatory value to the ideas that shape the essence of group belonging in the sociological analysis of suicide. Halbwachs and Mauss independently arrived at approaches to the study of suicide that gave credence to the influence of ideas on social patterns of suicide, but without calling into question the theory of social cohesion that was a foundation or raison d’eˆtre of Durkheim’s study. The task of elaborating an alternative approach to the sociology of suicide fell largely to Gabriel Tarde, a Sorbonne professor for whom suicide was not a central subject matter and who was widely considered to have “lost” a debate with Durkheim about the foundational subject matter of sociology.

Suicide in Tarde’s sociology of communication and imitation For Tarde, individuals are the elementary agents of society: “there can only be individual actions and interactions. The rest is only a metaphysical entity,

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mysticism” (1969, p. 140). The combined influences of extraordinary individuals can fuse to form a collective product, which only has an appearance of exteriority, but which is in reality merely the result of psychological synthesis (1969, p. 139). This phenomenon, which defines the essence of social interaction in families, classes, and nations, he termed “inter-mental psychology.” A central task of his sociology thus turned toward understanding the complex dynamics of interaction between individuals, the means of communication and forms of imitation (Niezen, 2014). How, through exchanges between individuals, are social institutions created or reformed? How are ideas with implications for collective action and conditions propagated? In one line of enquiry, Tarde anticipated the close connection between the themes of identity and communication, now very much in the forefront of culture and media studies. He observed in an 1893 essay “The Public and the Crowd” that, “not all communications from mind to mind, from soul to soul, are necessarily based on physical proximity. This condition is fulfilled less and less often in our civilized societies when currents of opinion take shape” (Tarde, 1969, p. 278). For Tarde, newspapers in particular, had a profound impact on the dynamics of society. In his time he saw that newspaper media, “transformed, both enriched and leveled, unified in space and diversified in time, the conversations of individuals” (1969, p. 304). A consequence of this was a paradox in which social sameness and difference simultaneously become more salient: “As nations intermingle and imitate one another, assimilate, and morally unite, the demarcation of nationalities becomes deeper, and their oppositions appear more irreconcilable” (1969, p. 306). “Therefore,” Tarde concludes with a very contemporary-sounding paradox, “even though the absolute difference between nations diminished, their relative and conscious differences grew” (1969, p. 306). This emphasis on communication “from mind to mind” as a source of collective behavior had important implications for the study of society, including the significance of social conditions for the frequency of suicide, a topic to which Tarde gave only passing attention. Consistent with Durkheim’s account of egoistic suicide, he saw a reported increase in youth criminality and suicide as resulting in part from a decline of consistent church membership and belief (1969, p. 268). He made the general point that a diminished religious pedagogy was resulting in “vague spiritualism” and misguided ethics, which explained the wayward behavior of youth more readily than did defects in their education. For Tarde’s more direct views on the topic of suicide we have only a few letters and a posthumously discovered folder marked “Contre Durkheim a propos de son Suicide” (against Durkheim concerning his Suicide), containing only recently published notes outlining his objections to Durkheim’s investigation of suicide. These fragments reveal a unique point of departure, in which the collective nature of suicide is to be found in the simple fact that “those who end this way are moved for the most part by pressures or ideas germinated in social relations—all imitative, if one examines them separately—with their contemporaries” (Tarde, 2000, p. 12).1 Following from his emphasis on communication and imitation, Tarde takes issue with Durkheim’s approach to suicide, an approach in which the essential social fact

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behind self-destruction consists of “the constraint of the individual under the yoke of a society that is exterior and superior to him, a kind of divine individual” (2000, p. 11).2 The fundamental error in this conception of society is that Durkheim “personified it [and] unwittingly built a mythology around it—and a mythology is merely a fictive sociology” (2000, p. 16).3 For Tarde, the ultimate source of all the phenomena that went into Durkheim’s mystical account of society is the very simple, natural process of imitation. Beyond the direct emphasis on communication and imitation, Tarde posited a secondary explanation for suicide that made a connection between density of civilization and a greater potential for disappointment. “The overstimulation of desires and hopes . . . is proportional to the density of the social group, to its moral density above all, that is to say, to the multiplicity of the psychological relations of its members in a given place and time” (2000, p. 51).4 Civilization increases the amount of individualism and the need for fulfillment, which can in turn become sources of overstimulation of expectations along with the potential for deep disappointment. “Moral density” in this sense accomplished two things. First it provided Tarde with a partial answer to the problem of the social origins of suicide, in essence appropriating an aspect of Durkheim’s argument, which he situated in an excess of disappointed “desires and hopes.” At the same time, he saw this density of the social group as being proportional to the reach of communication and the power of imitation, which to him comprised the basic, ultimate points of reference for any coherent theory of suicide.

Social patterns of aboriginal suicide Taking its premises concerning social integration and regulation into account, the intellectual divide following from Durkheim’s sociology is especially informative in the context of studies of aboriginal suicide. One trend, consistent with a Durkheimian approach, emphasizes the importance of historical trauma and dislocation as an explanation for high rates of suicide and the corresponding importance of social cohesiveness and resilience as hedges against suicide. Another, less prominent body of literature is more consistent with Tarde’s sociology of imitation, in that it considers distinctive cultural attitudes and choices that influence the acceptance, methods, and patterns of self-destruction, including the quintessentially collective phenomenon of “cluster suicides.” Illustrating this divide in the literature on suicide in aboriginal societies calls for us to engage in some reading between the lines because terms like “culture” and “aboriginal” are often used in ways that make it difficult to see premises that are ultimately derived from either a Durkheimian model of society or an approach more consistent with Tarde’s sociology of imitation, which leaves more room for the persuasive power of ideas and the public influence on identities. Let us now consider these two basic trends in the literature on aboriginal suicide in more detail.

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Institutional crisis and resilience A substantial portion of the literature on aboriginal youth suicide offers testimony of the durable influence of Durkheim’s sociology of suicide. Grossman, Milligan, and Deyo (1991, p. 873), for example, take an explicitly Durkheimian approach in their exploration of the risk factors for suicide attempts among Navajo youth, using a scaled questionnaire that assesses the respondents’ connectedness with family and community, and through this technique find a connection between high frequencies of suicide attempts and social alienation, along with corroboration from “numerous uncontrolled studies in other populations, including Durkheim’s sociologic analysis of suicide.” A more implicit Durkheimian approach to aboriginal suicide can be found in the work of Michael Chandler and Chris Lalonde (1998, 2009), which highlights the importance of “cultural continuity” as a protective factor for aboriginal youth. The central markers of cultural continuity—the pursuit of land claims, regimes of selfgovernment that include local control of education services, police services and health services, the development of aboriginal cultural facilities, and the active participation of women in the positions of chief or band councilor—are shown by Chandler and Lalonde to protect the personal identities of youth and therefore to cumulatively act as a hedge against suicide and self-destructive behavior. If connecting with family and community is an important part of the healing process, then a condition of disconnection from family and community is evidently a significant part of the background to high suicidality; in other words, it introduces a Durkheimian scenario favoring egoistic suicide. Suicide, they argue, increases as individuals lose their attachments to long-established institutions, are subject to instability and are no longer integrated in families and communities. The central place Durkheim gave to pathological conditions of integration and institutional discontinuity would appear to be confirmed. An alternative approach to the data brought out by Chandler and Lalonde, however, hinges on their use of the term “cultural continuity” to characterize those key features of communities with low rates of suicide. Although they characterize the institutions that appear to act as hedges against suicide as representing “cultural continuity,” it is more realistic to see them as politically and institutionally innovative, creating opportunities where few or none previously existed. In what sense can the adoption of formal education, health, and police services be considered “cultural continuity” in the context of societies in which fur trading and subsistence hunting were foundations of social life within living memory? The obverse of the “cultural continuity” approach is the historical etiology of suicide that emphasizes the historical trauma and interruptions of tradition that accompanied settler colonialism. The concept of historical trauma, first applied to Native American communities by Maria Braveheart (1998, 1999) has been applied in a specific direction to draw a connection between histories of Indian residential schools and high frequencies of aboriginal suicide (Bombay, Matheson, &

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Anisman, 2014; Elias et al., 2012). The “historical” origins of trauma is called into question by Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses (2014), who find that ongoing structural violence more clearly illuminates the persistent suffering of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Applying the term “postcolonial” to the historical background of suicide is similar to use of the concept of historical trauma, though with a closer temporal focus. Michael Kral (2012, 2013), pursuing a somewhat different line of inquiry from his earlier work on the significance of ideas in accounting for suicide frequencies, considers the connections between very high rates of suicide among the Inuit in Nunavut (83.9 per 100,000 in 2009) and the social dislocation brought about by colonial settlement and assimilation schemes imposed by the Canadian government, most poignantly in the 1950s. Even with elements of “social logic” evident in the choice and method of suicide, Kral’s emphasis is now on the policy decisions and dislocations of the “post-colonial social disorder” (2013, p. 73). We should be open to the possibility that collective manifestations of selfdestruction can follow from dramatic interruptions of collective life, the impossibility of recognized alternatives, and, out of these circumstances, a turn to suicide as an unprecedented solution. This possibility is elaborated in a historical overview of mass suicide by Mancinelli, Comparelli, Girardi, and Tatarelli (2002, pp. 91–92), who point out that for centuries mass suicides sometimes followed from exogenous factors of defeat or colonization, leading to a shared decision to end all normal activities and to “escape from a reality in which human dignity is not acknowledged.” Obversely, lower frequencies of suicide might tend to occur in circumstances in which formal institutions and political agendas of engagement with states have created a bridge to viable “post-colonial” social and cultural conditions. The Durkheimian terminology and interpretation of Chandler and Lalonde’s data can therefore be substituted by a more considered recognition of the influence of culture on expressions of depression, anxiety, and self-destruction. At the very least, this alternative interpretation means that we should re-examine the social conditions prevalent in aboriginal communities with high rates of suicide, particularly with a view to recognizing the influence of shared ideas on the patterns by which people act to end their lives.

Suicide “clusters” and the cohort effect One of the challenging features of aboriginal youth suicide is a common pattern in which self-inflicted deaths and attempts occur with high intensity in particular communities or even within specific families. Ward and Fox (1977), for example, investigated a “chain of deaths” in which eight suicides took place over a 12-month period from 1974 to 1975 in a large reserve community in northern Ontario, resulting in a rate of 267:100,000 for that year. John Spaulding (1986), in a study of the same region, finds a suicide rate of 61.7 per 100,000 in ten Ojibwa (Anishnawbe) bands in northwestern Ontario for the years 1975 to 1982, with suicide deaths concentrated among young males who used firearms as a method. A study of the Minnesota Chippewa points to the unevenness of the distribution of suicide among

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aboriginal peoples (similar to the findings from British Columbia brought out by Chandler and Lalonde [1998, 2009]), in which the Chippewa are found to have a lower rate of suicide than the total U.S. population or the general population of Northern Minnesota, but within this wider population the Shoshone-Bannock tribe has a particularly high rate of suicide, attributed “to events perpetrated by members of the same few families ever since records were first kept in the 19th century” (Levy & Kunitz, cited in LaFromboise & Bigfoot, 1988, p. 141). Such “suicide clusters”—concentrated episodes of self-destruction that occur within relatively closed communities, such as school campuses, prisons, barracks, or aboriginal villages—by their very nature, embody the contradiction that has been inherent in the sociological study of suicide from its beginnings in France in the late 19th century. A defining quality of these clusters is a paradox in which those who take their own lives are driven by a profound sense of social isolation and loneliness, yet act to end their suffering in ways closely resembling the suicidal acts of others, often in the same social milieu, demonstrating “a linkage between individuals, a true group or collective behavior beyond the society’s norms” (Coleman, 1987, p. 3). There is also an element of fatalism (consistent with Durkheim’s implicit model) associated with cluster suicides because they seem to occur most often in circumstances in which all avenues for public action in a particular sector of society, usually a particular coterie of youth, are blocked. Acting upon self destruction can occur in “clusters” within a cohort, most often young people of similar age in the same community who often act dangerously or lethally in acts of self-destruction. The widely publicized crisis among the Innu of Davis Inlet of the late 1990s (which I discuss further below) is among the most prominent situations of this kind, but there have been others that have received varying degrees of media attention in aboriginal communities elsewhere in Canada and in other parts of what is now sometimes referred to as the “indigenous world.” The term “cohort effect” describes the influences unique to a particular group of people, such as those born in a particular society or community within a 5-year period. Behavior patterns specific to the cohort group, including political activity, criminality, or high vulnerability to suicide, can persist throughout a lifetime, often through significant social change (Stockard & O’Brien, 2002, p. 855). In a previous article, I described the origins and effects of just such a cohort effect in a suicide cluster in an aboriginal community in northern Manitoba (Niezen, 2009a). A particular network of youth connected by relationships of kinship and friendship became highly vulnerable to suicide when one member, recognized as a leader and focus of security for young people with troubled family lives, killed himself with a firearm. From this point, a high toll of suicide attempts and deaths occurred in two distinct suicide clusters, spaced some 10 years apart, with a corresponding difference in the age group most affected. This observation led me to consider the possibility that a distinct kind of “cohort effect” was taking place, in which ideas about self destruction, including acts of suicide, had become sources of interpersonal connection and identity.

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Colin Samson provides an account of a very similar pattern of self destruction, that of the Innu of Labrador in the late 1990s, which he characterizes as a “communal tragedy.” It was most obviously communal in the expression of bereavement, in which “almost every Innu in Sheshatshiu and Utshimassits attends the long and emotional funerals [which] are reminders of the collective trauma of the Innu as a people” (2003, p. 228). There was also a collective dimension to the heavy volume of press coverage of the suicides, particularly following the suicide of the 15-year-old son of community spokesperson Jean-Pierre Ashini, who at the time of his son’s death was in London to present a human rights report titled Canada’s Tibet. The dramatic and ironic nature of this event gave the press a “handle” with which to cover the wider suicide epidemic among the Innu. The media’s emphasis on the publicly appealing pathos of this story stood in the way of a deeper understanding of the crisis. As Samson puts it, “virtually all the major newspapers in Canada carried the story, but none provided much context for understanding how so many young Innu end up on the wrong end of the gun” (2003, p. 228). Tarde’s emphasis on the social significance of communication media points to one of the ways that ideas can influence the shaping of identity, sometimes resulting in collective acceptance of self-destruction as part of the nature of one’s being. Media coverage that portrays the youth of a particular community as self destructive and without hope can indirectly reinforce self-stereotyping in that direction. The scripts for possible lives communicated by media can directly and indirectly include the purposeful end of one’s life. Representations of a community in crisis, suffering not only from the immediate effects of suicide, but in the simplest explanation conveyed to the public consumers of suffering, committing suicide in response to high levels of poor health, addictions, family violence, poverty, and unemployment, can indirectly add force to ideas about how one is expected to suffer and act upon a condition of suffering. Popular depictions and explanations of suicide risk reinforcing preexisting stereotypes of aboriginal social pathology and behavioral irresponsibility, solidifying the place of self-destruction in the feedback loop of personal identity.

The politics of suicide prevention and intervention The issues that were central to the nascent discipline of sociology as developed in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries continue to have implications for suicide prevention and intervention that go beyond therapeutic relationships and techniques. Suicide can have a politico-economic dimension, which follows especially clearly from Durkheim’s emphasis on conditions of social integration, to the extent that the failure or success of public policies and institutions will have a profound influence on individuals’ senses of belonging, possibility, and hope. It is in circumstances in which the choices available to young people have been shrunk to next to nothing, in which they experience illegitimate powerlessness in nearly every aspect of their lives, that self-destruction can become a way to belong and to see oneself in the future. Political and institutional failure can increase the salience

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of suicide, simply by reducing the range of possibilities by which emerging, autonomous selves can be imagined by youth. There is an affinity in studies of aboriginal youth suicide between Durkheim’s emphasis on social disintegration and the use of historical etiology, emphasizing the interruptions of defeat, disease, colonial occupation, and political marginalization, to explain high frequencies of selfdestruction. According to this view, those who inherit legacies of displacement, who have lost the security of tradition, also tend to be those whose attachments to life are insecure, who experience a disproportionate burden of despair and selfdestruction. The most likely corrective, as recently suggested by the work of Chandler and Lalonde (2009), involves the quintessentially Durkheimian project of institutional reform aimed toward creating conditions of cultural continuity and collective agency. Despite the inherent plausibility of this approach to the explanation of suicide, the connections between legacies of suffering and current acts of self-destruction are indirect and unpredictable. This can be seen in the “clustering” of aboriginal youth suicide, in which suicide takes historically unprecedented forms, in which we can see the workings of public sympathy, both in the immediate village context and through the communication or media feedback with a wider audience of consumers of suffering and violent death. With reference to the foundational ideas of sociology, these new patterns of suicide are best explained with reference to Tarde’s emphasis on communication as a process that inspires both innovation and imitation. Tarde’s sociology of imitation also has political implications for suicide prevention and intervention, which remain to be adequately investigated, particularly in the context of suicide clusters in indigenous communities. Above all, it suggests that high-profile crisis intervention can inadvertently promote conditions in which suicidal ideas are likely to become more current and possibly more readily acted upon. Making suicide visible to the public in the form of memorials or as part of a media-based strategy of consciousness (or conscience) raising almost always reinforces the images and ideas of self-destruction both inside and outside the community. Whether or not press coverage is knowingly integrated in a suicide prevention and intervention strategy, it can, in the absence of political will, become part of the process by which a community is compelled to deal with a crisis. This could well have important consequences for the construction of collective identity and, ultimately, the frequency of suicide. Campaigns that allow or make use of media and public outreach can promote images and depictions of self-harm and self-destruction that heighten the currency of the will to die. Even an effective campaign that garners public sympathy by portraying the youth of a community in crisis as self-destructive and without hope can indirectly reinforce just that kind of self-stereotyping. When suicide becomes a reference point for public sympathy and community mobilization, then all the ideas and emotions associated with it can, among vulnerable individuals, become a reference point for personal agency (Niezen, 2009b, p. 143). Under these circumstances, the decision to end one’s life can be encouraged by collective ideas and actions.

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Public depictions and discourse intended to prevent suicide can unintentionally build a model of self-understanding based on the idea of suicide that becomes available to those already in conditions of collective insecurity. Once we understand the possibility that ideas of self-destruction can reach as far as the criteria of social inclusion in groups of youth, the central task of prevention becomes dealing with the spontaneous ways that youth, in the absence of intergenerational transmission of values and viable, respected choices in life, can turn toward alternative forms of identity, including self-destruction as a groupsanctioned reference point for the emerging self, a way to become a memorable person. This is a complex undertaking because the idea of suicide, like an immunological disorder, is able to infiltrate the processes by which people try to make themselves well. Acknowledging the significance of all forms of communication for the acceptance and performance of the idea of suicide allows us to see more clearly how self-destruction can insinuate itself in the feedback loop of public representation and self-image, in which public intervention can add currency to the idea of self-inflicted death and make it more readily available as an item in the repertoire of possible selves.

Conclusion The Durkheim–Tarde debate began with distinct starting points in understanding collective life, the most essential features of which involve a distinction between social solidarity as a supra-individual force that can be compromised in varying degrees by the individualism and dislocations of modernity, versus a conception of society that begins with the natural separation of individuals, with collective life seen as an accomplishment, the outcome of cumulative powers of creativity and communication. I have shown that these different conceptions of the basic starting points of social inquiry have significant implications for our understanding of the end of life by suicide, implications that were publicly recognized by Durkheim in his Suicide, and privately elaborated by Tarde in his Contre Durkheim notes. The literature on aboriginal and Inuit youth suicide reflects these two starting points. Studies with an implicit or explicit Durkheimian perspective have long dominated the field, with an emphasis on the dislocations and traumas of colonial domination, and with individuals who intentionally end their lives seen as being somehow cut off from a sense of place and purpose. Tarde’s emphasis on communication and imitation offers another avenue to the interpretation of and intervention in collective manifestations of suicidal behavior. From this starting point, it becomes possible to see more than the harms of historical oppression and illegitimate domination at work, but also the way self-destruction can be communicated and understood as a source of belonging, as an essential aspect of the self in company with others. There can be a perverse sociability at work in suicide crises that responds to the currency of ideas about self-inflicted death, including, quite possibly, those ideas intended to bring public attention to the crisis, to overcome apathy, and to create conditions of recognition and redress of grievances.

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Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. A` mes yeux, [le suicide] est social ne´anmoins, parce que celui qui sort ainsi est muˆ en majeure partie . . . par des pressions ou des ide´es germine´es dans des rapports sociaux—tous imitatifs, si on les examine se´pare´ment—avec ses semblables. (My translation.) 2. . . . consisterait dans la contrainte de l’individu sous le joug de la socie´te´ exte´rieure et supe´rieure a` lui, sorte de personne divine? (My translation.) 3. . . . c’est qu’il l’a personnifie´e, c’est qu’il a fait de la mythologie . . . et la mythologie n’est qu’une sociologie fictive. (My translation.) 4. La surexcitation des de´sirs et des espe´rances . . . . se proportionne a` la densite´ du groupe social, a` sa densite´ morale surtout, c’est-a-dire a` la multiplicite´ des rapports psychologiques de ses membres dans un espace et un temps donne´s. (My translation.)

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Ronald Niezen, BA, MPhil, PhD, holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the Faculty of Law and of Arts at McGill University. He also holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Law. He is currently Principal Investigator of a Longitudinal Study of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools, funded by SSHRC, and, most recently, author of Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press). His other published work focuses on the origins and activities of the global indigenous movement and on the dynamics of public persuasion in human rights and social justice causes.

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