Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

is the outcome of suffering does not simply describe but also reinforces this normative presumption, thus
rendering suicide as the outcome of an agentic choice in non-pathological/pathologised circumstances
impossible. In this paper I ask, then, what it means for theorisations of agency if certain acts are constituted
as impossible choices.
Arjun Shankar Thinking with Suicide: Agricultural Decay, Death, and Aspiration in South India
This paper sets out to understand how ethnography can be a useful tool in understanding farmer’s suicide in
relation to other social processes in a rapidly globalizing India. Based on fieldwork in rural areas adjacent to
Bangalore, India, I describe and analyze my ethnographic encounters with Manoj, who works for a
prominent Indian education NGO, and Nagraj, a ninth standard student in a village outside of Bangalore city,
after the death of their fathers, part of the growing number of farmer’s suicides in India, to consider the
impact of loss and suffering as it is connected to the changing state of agriculture in post-liberalization India.
What I find is that the impact of such widescale change is not just made visible through the loss of homes,
livelihoods, family, etc., but also in psychosocial changes – changes in values, aspirations, and dreams – that
induce new social configurations. How do death and life sit at a “crossroads”, creating possibilities in
moments that might also be symptomatic of a deepening decay in agricultural communities? I apply an
anthropological conception of affect to analyze these two stories, opening a space to think productively with
suicide, not just as moments of intense grief and loss, but also as producing complex potentialities that do
not neatly fit into simplistic paradigms predicated on the binary between the decay or flourishing of life.
Hae Seong Jang Suicide and Emotional Wellbeing among Indigenous youth in Australia
This study is about self-destruction, and emotional wellbeing in Indigenous Australia. It is based on fieldwork
in the rural community of Yarrabah, in Queensland, which was established by Missionary Ernest Gribble in
1897. I am well placed to conduct fieldwork in this community because I have done extensive fieldwork in
the area, leading to the writing of the monograph, social identities of the youth in 2008 for which I was
awarded my doctorate at the University of Sydney. In this new phase of the case study of Yarrabah, I use the
method of ethnographic interviewing with women and men in their twenties. The interviews will be in situ
because the interviewees will be studied in their original communities. With the aim of exploring how and
why the young Indigenous people face difficulties and extreme decision such as self-destruction. With a
focus on the crisis of emotional wellbeing and how these dynamics have evolved, this study presents the life-
­­‐ histories of victims of suicide. It extracts the stories in two ways, namely by interviewing relatives of those
who committed suicide, by interviewing survivors who attempted suicide in the community. This study
provides new material for discussion of the ways in which the crisis of Indigenous emotional wellbeing,
broadly understood as “personal or general problems in society” rather than structural phenomenon in
Indigenous Australia (Jang, 2013), are experienced by young Indigenous people. The focus on Queensland is
particularly important because, according to the Queensland Government Suicide Prevention”s report,
“Queensland has a significantly higher rate than nationally and the highest rates are evident in young
people, particularly young men, and in Indigenous populations” (the Queensland Government, 2003: 3).
Colin Martin Tatz (2005: 55) in his book, Aboriginal Suicide is Different also notes that “youth suicide,
unknown amongst Aborigines three decades ago, is now double, perhaps treble, the rate of non-Aboriginal
suicide. Despite the high rate of suicide among young people, scant attention has been paid to this
phenomenon compared to Indigenous “problems” such as alcoholism and drug abuse (Jang, 2013). As the
young Indigenous people of Yarrabah are continuously influenced by social institutions such as the family,
the school, the community and the mass media throughout their life, this research explores how the social
discourses from these institutions have influenced and shaped the crisis of the emotional wellbeing of the
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