Modern Asian Studies http://journals.cambridge.org/ASS Additional services for Modern Asian Studies: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Farmers’ Suicides as Public Death: Politics, Agency and Statistics in a Suicide-Prone District (South India) DANIEL N. MÜNSTER Modern Asian Studies / Volume 49 / Issue 05 / September 2015, pp 1580 - 1605 DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X14000225, Published online: 27 May 2014 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X14000225 How to cite this article: DANIEL N. MÜNSTER (2015). Farmers’ Suicides as Public Death: Politics, Agency and Statistics in a Suicide-Prone District (South India). Modern Asian Studies, 49, pp 1580-1605 doi:10.1017/S0026749X14000225 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ASS, IP address: 178.26.8.149 on 06 Aug 2015 Modern Asian Studies 49, 5 (2015) pp. 1580–1605. C Cambridge University Press 2014 doi:10.1017/S0026749X14000225 First published online 27 May 2014 Farmers’ Suicides as Public Death: Politics, Agency and Statistics in a Suicide-Prone District (South India)∗ DANIEL N. MÜNSTER Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany Email:
[email protected] Abstract This paper argues that Indian farmers’ suicides may fruitfully be described as public deaths. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian district of Wayanad (Kerala), it shows that farmers’ suicides become ‘public deaths’ only via the enumerative and statistical practices of the Indian state and their scandalization in the media. The political nature of suicide as public death thus depends entirely on suicide rates and their production by the state itself.