1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910787604203321

Autore

Chua Jocelyn Lim

Titolo

In pursuit of the good life : aspiration and suicide in globalizing South India / / Jocelyn Lim Chua

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, California : , : University of California Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-520-95764-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (255 p.)

Classificazione

SOC002010SOC002000

Disciplina

362.280954/83

Soggetti

Suicide - Social aspects - India - Kerala

East Indians - India - Kerala - Psychology

East Indians - India - Kerala - Social conditions

Kerala (India) Social conditions 21st century

Kerala (India) Economic conditions 21st century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note -- Introduction -- 1. Between the Devil and the Deep Sea -- 2. Gazing at the Stars, Aiming for the Treetops -- 3. Tales the Dead Are Made to Tell -- 4. Care-full Acts -- 5. Anywhere but Here -- 6. Fit for the Future -- Afterword -- Notes -- References -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation's suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life.  Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world .In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours.  In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering



how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.