Lecture 3 Suicide 1 Today I want to talk about our reading by Jason Manning I had you all read the Preface and Prologue of his book last week and the first chapter was due today So I want to dig into what he has to say and I want to hear your thoughts and opinions what did you agree with what did you disagree with what surprised you what don t you understand Maybe we should start at the beginning with the Preface Preface 1 Suicide is an interesting topic It goes back to sociology s founding Which classical sociologist wrote a famous book on suicide The answer is French sociology Emile Durkheim He wrote a book called Suicide A Study in Sociology published in 1897 Interestingly if you open Manning s book and look at the cover page it is called Suicide The Social Causes of Self Destruction And if you look at the bottom of the page it s published by the University of Virginia Press and it s a part of a series of books titled Studies in Pure Sociology That is a call back to Durkheim s classic book So suicide has a prominent place in sociology s history And that s one of the reasons why I want us to keep coming back this topic throughout the semester Suicide also poses a significant challenge for sociology right Sociology is trying to explain behavior with forces outside of the individual yet that isn t really how we think of suicide is it Manning tells us that sociology is not the dominant perspective from which we the general public view suicide How do we in Western society tend to think about suicide It s often not seen as the domain of sociology but of what The answer is psychology and psychiatry If we think about what Black wrote in the first paragraph of our reading from last week suicide seems to occupy psychological reality and possibly biological reality So suicide a topic that seems so personal and individual and as a result outside the realm of the social poses an interesting challenge for us So before we dive into what Manning wrote let me ask is it even possible to understand suicide sociologically Don t we need to probe the depths of the human mind to really allow us to predict when it s likely to occur What do you think 1 Lecture 3 Suicide 1 2 So last week we read a small section of Black s 1979 book chapter A Strategy of Pure Sociology In it he s clear that he thinks sociology is the scientific study of variation in social life Things in social life vary that is differ and it s our job to explain that variation Why is something this way and not another way If we think of sociology in this way what s Manning studying What s the variation that he s trying to explain in this book The answer at the bottom of the first page in the preface he states that he is asking why some conflicts are more likely than others to drive people to self destruction That s the variation he s trying to explain He s not interested in why someone kills themselves and why someone else doesn t Rather he s interested in the following when a moral conflict erupts when are some people going to respond to that conflict with suicide and others use a different strategy e g calling the police gossiping etc Prologue I think that nicely takes us to the Prologue If Manning is interested in when conflicts are handled with suicide and when they are not what conflict is he talking about Tell me about the conflict surrounding Mohamed Bouazizi What happened After Manning talks about the case of Bouazizi he tries to make the argument that we can and should view suicide from a sociological perspective To make his argument he raises three points What are these three points The answer is on pp 2 3 He states that suicide has social causes social consequences and itself is a social act If suicide has social causes social consequences and itself is a social act maybe the question I asked previously has it backwards Maybe we shouldn t ask if it s possible to understand suicide sociologically Instead maybe we should ask if it s possible to understand suicide without sociology Manning proposes a pure sociology of suicide He writes We see in Mohamed s story that suicide is a form of social behavior sparked by social causes It thus requires sociological explanation This book presents such an explanation a purely sociological theory of suicide p 4 Because he plans to present a pure sociology of suicide what does that mean for his independent variables Will he use psychological variables such as mental illness to help him understand suicide The answer is no What are the pros and cons of Manning s approach of ignoring psychology 2 Lecture 3 Suicide 1 Suicide and Conflict That ends the Prologue Let s move to the first paragraph of chapter 1 on page 5 Does anyone want to read this 1 There are two points that I want to highlight here The first is In the U S suicide is much more common than homicide When people want to kill either themselves or someone else what method is most successful The use of a gun absolutely Now let me ask out of all the gun deaths in the United States what percentage are self inflicted and what percentage are inflicted against someone else In other words out of all the people who die by guns in a given year in the U S what proportion is suicide and what proportion is homicide The answer is 60 and 37 respectively Literally two third of people who die by gun in the U S every year do it to themselves 2 Also in the first paragraph Manning makes a really interesting point about homicide and suicide and how it relates to wealth What does he say In modern societies like the contemporary U S homicide tends to collect among the poor Whereas suicide tends to be more widespread across social classes effecting both rich and poor more equally I just want to pause and emphasize that this is how I m encouraging you to think this semester How are sociologically independent variables like wealth related to sociological dependent variables like homicide and suicide Social life is hierarchical people have different degrees of wealth and homicide is more common at lower elevations in social reality among the poor We can take this idea and articulate it in a simple clear theoretical statement that says homicide varies inversely with wealth This statement is known as a proposition Propositions are the goal of science They help us make sense of the variation that we are seeing Why do some people resort to homicide while others don t Well it s partially because of the social class of the perpetrator the amount of wealth and