Suicide Social Dramas Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere

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Synopsis

Through an ethnohistorical chronicling of the emotionally-laden treatment of selected suicide media-events, this book offers a neo-Durkheimean account of suicide, addressing its social-moral threat and the ensuing need to gloss over its unsettling incomprehensibility. An analysis of the social dramas, cultural performances, and suicide talk aired in the Israeli public sphere, it suggests that such public glossing practices atone for and bring about the symbolic rectification of the socially detrimental effects of suicide. Drawing on Durkheim’s thought on the social significance of suicide and the sacred cohesive power of society’s self-representations through rituals and commemorations, the authors revamp the contemporary pertinence of these cultural devices, showing how, in the process of reconstituting and redressing the disrupted order, suicide talk constitutes a revival mechanism of communal ‘life giving’. A rekindling of the Durkheimian approach to suicide that examines how society deals with suicide’s shattering of normative we-feelings, Suicide Social Dramas: Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and anthropology with interests in social theory, Israel studies, suicide studies, and the interpretation of societal and cultural processes.

Book details

Series:
Routledge Advances in Sociology
Author:
Haim Hazan, Raquel Romberg
ISBN:
9781000411560
Related ISBNs:
9780367568719, 9781003099741, 9780367568702
Publisher:
Taylor and Francis
Pages:
176
Reading age:
Not specified
Includes images:
No
Date of addition:
2021-07-15
Usage restrictions:
Copyright
Copyright date:
2021
Copyright by:
N/A 
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Categories:
Nonfiction, Social Studies