When Dying Is Better than Living: Female Suicide among the Gainj of Papua New Guinea

Paul Bohannan (I960:24) commented that only tenable position in the present state of the literature is that the suicide situation in various primitive societies is open to investigation, but has not been investigated. Twenty years later, not a great deal has changed. Many ethnographers have reported suicides in preliterate societies, but with some notable exceptions they have approached suicide as an essentially individual phenomenon.2 Little effort has been made to examine suicide as part of a system. This is surprising for a discipline that professes to be concerned with the study of culture and society and that at least pays lip service to Emile Durkheim. Perhaps the most important feature of Durkheim's (I 95 ) classic work was his emphasis on the social nature of suicide and his insistence that the act could only be explained through an analysis of structure. Again quoting Bohannan (1960:28)