The Durkheim-Tarde debate and the social study of aboriginal youth suicide

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 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. OPEN IN VIEWER

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 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 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’être 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, 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 self-destruction. 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 self-destruction. 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. 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 inter-generational transmission of values and viable, respected choices in life, can turn toward alternative forms of identity, including self-destruction as a group-sanctioned 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.