Phenomenology,Cultural Meaning,and the Curious Case of Suicide: Localizing the Structure-Culture Dialectic

Abstract

Sociology has largely followed Durkheim’s lead in ignoring the question: why do people die by suicide? This negation prioritizes a positivist, structuralist approach and stymies sociology’s contribution by closing off a wide range of tools sociologists might employ. An interpretivist turn in suicide studies accompanied by the growing adoption of qualitative methodology has opened up an array of opportunities to produce insights lost in a Durkheimian approach, but has yet to confront their own weaknesses. This paper shows we need not abandon either tradition, advocating for a third path that integrates the strengths of both approaches.

1. Introduction

In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim (1895 [1982], 52) did not mince words when he identified “a category of facts … of manners of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual.” They are neither “organic” nor “physical” insofar as they exist apart from “individual consciousness” (1982, 52). A few years after writing that methodological treatise, Durkheim (1897 [1951]) wrote the gold standard sociological text on suicide, establishing the method and theory that has shaped sociological inquiry into suicide for more than a century. For Durkheim, the subjective, social psychological, or cultural meanings of suicide were out-of-bounds as he sought to draw sharp distinctions between psychology and sociology. Instead, he reasoned that suicide rates aggregated within and between large populations, or what we might call a positivist-structuralist account, was the principal means for understanding and explaining suicide and, more broadly, social health. As several prominent reviews conclude, Durkheim’s method is the dominant method (Mueller et al. 2021; Wray, Colen, and Pescosolido 2011)—even as some fruitful efforts have shifted the lens from population-level research to meso-level networks (Mueller and Abrutyn 2015; Pescosolido and Georgianna 1989; Baller and Richardson 2009). ¹ Despite his looming shadow, the weaknesses of a positivist-structural approach has been detailed first by ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists (Atkinson 1978; Douglas 1968; Johnson 1969; Smith 1983; Wilkins 1967, 1970) and more recently those adopting a strong cultural relativist perspective (Chandler et al. 2022; Fincham et al. 2011; Fitzpatrick 2011, 2014, 2022; Hazan and Romberg 2022) that overlaps with what is often called critical suicidology (Chandler 2019; Chandler, Cover, and Fitzpatrick 2022; White et al. 2015). On epistemic and ontological grounds (Abrutyn and Mueller 2021; Ahmed 2006; Hjelmeland and Knizek 2010; Standley 2022; Staples and Widger 2012), social scientific suicide research has begun to incorporate qualitative methods (Chua 2014; Gulbas et al. 2015; Ozawa-de Silva 2021; Stevenson 2014). While this has not replaced Durkheim, it has certainly opened new possibilities for how to simultaneously answer theoretical and empirical questions about suicide and suicidality without sacrificing scientific validity or rigor. In this vein, the following paper looks to push forward both the Durkheimian and the alternative projects, the latter of which we will call culturalist for the sake of brevity, by offering a synthetic approach.

The logic for such an effort rests on Durkheim’s own decision-making: suicide is an excellent case for developing sociological theory and methods: it is presumed to be the ultimate psychological act; its end is final, which raises questions for action theory; it also highlights the potential promise a sociological explanation may offer for helping organizations and communities deal with social problems. Durkheim’s model, however, falls short of dealing with the last two points. Durkheim was clear he was not interested in why people die by suicide, but rather was interested in showing social forces shape suicide. As such, his contribution to action theory and to practical interventions is severely delimited, even though some have advocated moving his theory to the meso-level where the causal link between integration, regulation, and action are more directly observable (Abrutyn and Mueller 2016, 2018; Pescosolido 1994). The phenomenological perspective rightly pushes for taking meanings of suicide more seriously as well as including culture into the structuralist approach Durkheim posited. But, the phenomenological approach is not without its weaknesses, either. In the desire to push back against positive psychology, which dominates the interdisciplinary field of suicidology, the phenomenologists advocate hard for qualitative methods but have not yet fully incorporated the methodological advances sociologists have made available with regards to qualitative research (Rinaldo and Guhin 2022; Timmermans and Tavory 2012; Vaisey 2009). Thus, both Durkheimians and culturalists provide several opportunities for moving sociology into the 21st century, but require some more work to realize these tantalizing extensions.

To preview our argument, we propose that (1) what we loosely label as the culturalist approach becomes insufficient for explanatory purposes when we consider that different levels of social reality reveal different emergent properties (Turner 2010). In part, the classic phenomenology of suicide only matters when one’s overriding interest hews closely to methodological individualism (Atkinson 1978; Douglas 1968) while more recent critical phenomenology of suicide misses the meso-level that sits between the micro and the macro (White et al. 2015). (2) Durkheim was correct in focusing on the etiology of suicide at a level above the micro, but erred in which level he focused on, because it is (3) at the meso-level that we can observe, more directly, the relationship between structure, culture, and social psychological processes (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003; Fine 2012). That is, the meaning of suicide becomes meaningful in situ and in places where we have adequate “distance” from the individual that we can sketch out general theoretical ideas about suicide and contribute to the explanation for why people choose to die by suicide.

Consequently, (4) the common sense expressed by individuals about suicide is meaningless unless local cultures have become imbued with the meanings specific suicides have come to take as generated in and sustained through chains of interaction rituals (Collins 2004). That is, suicide, as a cultural object, rarely becomes causally related to people’s decision making unless it has become real to the shared history, place, and collective identity of a real group of people, whether they are a small group, an organization, a neighborhood, or a small community. This is not to say cultural meanings do not activate singleton suicides, but the ecological fallacy that delimits our assessment of the causal relationship between Durkheim’s integration/regulation and individual-level choices remains salient for most suicidological models of culture (e.g., Colucci and Lester 2012); that is, for most models that take for granted the meso-level and local structure and culture. (5) Therefore, an adequate explanation requires a transition from common-sense understandings toward a systematic study of the relations between structural and phenomenological knowledge, especially by situating suicides within multiple dimensions of culture—internal and external, and proximate and distal, both of which correspond to various levels of social reality. As a starting point, then, we begin, as suicidology began, with Durkheim and a structural strategy for studying suicide. We subsequently introduce what we broadly construe as culturalist projects that heavily rely on phenomenological knowledge and their problems of overindividualizing suicide research and overprescribing structural patterns. Finally, through a consideration of how to rethink interpretivism through merging structural and phenomenological knowledge, we call for a situating of culture as a requirement, fostering a translation of common sensical everyday experiences into generalizable theory.

2. Durkheim’s Structuralism and Its Discontents

Durkheim’s structuralist approach to suicide is founded on two simple principles. First, the structure of suicide rates is a function of the structure of social relationships. Second, the structure of social relationships varies according to their level of integration or regulation. The framework aims to explain why suicide rates vary across time in one place (e.g., France), with special attention paid to sudden increases, or between groups (e.g., Protestants and Catholics, or married and single people). What Durkheim loses in causal explanation, he gains in parsimony, which seems to have served the theory most efficaciously when it comes to egoistic suicides—or those predicated on low levels of integration. This social cause has received the strongest empirical support across disciplines, while its closest kin, anomic suicides (or low regulation) has received exceptionally inconsistent empirical support (Breault 1994). This is an empirical success, though, considering altruistic and fatalistic suicides have been virtually unstudied in any systematic fashion (Davies and Neal 2000; Park 2004; Stack 2004). In what follows, we look a little closer at Durkheim’s Suicide and point to some of the weaknesses in the theoretical architecture before pivoting to considering the culturalist approach.

One thing is certain, regardless of the veracity of criticisms (Atkinson 1978), Durkheim’s (1897 [1951]) theory remains elegant and, at least partially supported. However, only one of the four types Durkheim proposed as exhaustive has been well-supported by empirical research. Why? We believe the problems stem, at least in large part, from the etiological approach Durkheim took. Or, perhaps we should say the approaches he took, as there appear to be two different explanatory mechanisms at work.

The first, and the least prominent, is most pronounced in the third book of Suicide where he argues that three “social currents”—egoism, anomie, and altruism—circulate throughout a given social unit. By social currents, Durkheim (1895 [1982]) was thinking about generalized beliefs or ethos that characterized the majority’s influence over individual behavior. A “healthy” society was one in which these three opposed currents held each other in check, while “unhealthy” societies—approximated by suicide rates, for instance—were products of one or more of these currents growing dominant vis-à-vis the others. Egoism, for instance, characterized the type of communities that had come to celebrate the independence of the individual over against the collective—that is, highly liberal, urban, capitalist cities, regions, or even religions. A framework of three mutually opposed social currents that are constantly pushing and pulling the understanding people have about community, solidarity, and authority is vastly different from the conventional etiological explanation sociologists subscribe to. In this second framework, likely more recognizable to the reader, a model in which two independent, yet interrelated dimensions—integration and regulation—cause suicidality to expand from the three-opposed currents to four distinct types (Bearman 1991). According to a footnote in Suicide (1897 [1951], 276), this framework conceptualizes patterned social behavior as governed by the level of social support and/or the collective moral conscience that guides its members; a move that admittedly makes sense from a methodological perspective designed to operationalize otherwise ambiguously defined concepts. Where people are unattached or feel as though they have no obligations to anyone or anything, nothing protects them against suicide. Likewise, when people feel as though they have no choice, because sacrifices are demanded by society (altruism) or because they are severely oppressed (fatalism), then suicide may be obligatory or the only escape, respectively speaking.

In the first framework, collective beliefs matter and align with collective experiences and emotions that make some people at greater risk of suicide (see, for instance, the chapter and table on the Individual Forms of suicide [1897 (1951), 276ff.]). In the second framework, invisible structural forces like gravity impose themselves on collectives in ways that make them more vulnerable to suicidality. In both cases, what people think causes suicide or why someone believes they are suicidal is simply subjective information lacking in scientific import. Thus, we can measure the “moral density” (Pescosolido 1990) or homogeneity of social networks (Pescosolido, Lee, and Kafadar 2020) with or without regard to the subjective experience of integration (e.g., belongingness, loneliness, mattering) to explain why suicide happens simply by leveraging statistics. And, despite critiques of how official statistics of suicide may be biased (Smith 1983), others have shown with sophisticated quantitative analyses that the bias may be overstated (Pescosolido and Mendelsohn 1986), while Timmermans’s (2006) recent qualitative study of medical examiners shows just how much evidence is required to call a suspicious death a suicide.

Thus, the Durkheimian way suggests causally adequate explanations are essential, but because of the inherent problems of subjective self-reports, we should rely on statistical probabilities. Ultimately, this base of cumulative structural knowledge has a secondary consequence germane to our argument: not only does connectedness appear to objectively cause suicidality, but it also tacitly asks why we should believe subjective accounts will get closer to the truth about why people die by suicide. When people’s beliefs and behaviors are uncoupled across a range of mundane to more serious social activities and their self-reports are known to be biased, why should we even ask about the meaning of suicide or pursue phenomenological knowledge? Unsurprisingly, many sociologists do not ask these questions despite the aforementioned critiques by Douglas or Atkinson. Durkheim’s position and his framing, even amidst a discipline that fragmented decades ago into warring epistemological and ontological camps, remains unquestioned by most; a sort of “City on the Hill” when sociologists look to legitimize their disciplinary claims to authority and maintain their boundaries against rival social sciences. But, this taken for grantedness conceals an inconvenient fact: Durkheim’s steadfast deduction actually delimits its generalizability as several cases remain beyond its explanatory logic.

Hence, on the one hand, at the macro-level, the vagaries of human decision-making and goal setting dissipate like mist off a pond on a cool night. In their place, much broader and more consistent patterns emerge that lend themselves to more axiomatic approaches to theorizing (Turner 1995). One of the most successful sociological theories, the fundamental causes of disease (Link and Phelan 1996), has been verified through diverse methodological approaches in showing that health is not randomly distributed, but socially determined. As previously noted, the relationship between integration and suicide as discovered by Durkheim has been supported by an array of disciplines studying different types of social units (Baller and Richardson 2002; Wray, Colen, and Pescosolido 2011), but it is the only major contribution sociology has provided the interdisciplinary study of suicide (suicidology). As such, a series of interrelated concepts like integration, solidarity, and network or moral density provides a vocabulary that many social scientists have come to use to explain suicide and build prevention strategies that do not require common-sense terminology or phenomenological knowledge, which establishes structural knowledge. For these very reasons, suicidology and key organizations like the Centers for Disease Control have grown increasingly focused on the socioecological causes and risk factors of suicide, as the hyper-individualistic approach has thus far not turned back the rising tide of suicides in the US.

On the other hand, the macro-level obscures the ways in which people sift through the various behavioral responses available, accessible, and applicable to the problems they perceive as needing solutions. Not only can we not actually observe the sifting at this level, but also the Parsonian take on culture—that is, as a some society-wide system of symbols that shape feeling, thinking, and doing—has largely been replaced with a much more nuanced cultural sociology (Lizardo 2017; Patterson 2014; Swidler 1986; Vaisey 2009). If we want a sociological explanation of why people die by suicide, it is a fair question to ask whether Durkheim’s theoretical framework serves us best or whether it is worth modifying it in ways that borrow its greatest insights and parsimonious architecture. After all, if we take Weber’s (1921–22 [1978]) Verstehen seriously, there is no need to think that motives are always individualized. It is just as possible to imagine suicide becoming a social action insofar as it becomes a “traditional” responses to certain environmental conditions or a value in itself (e.g., martyrdom); or as a means to an “rational” end, which might fit the so-called justice or social control suicides Manning (2020) highlights in Chinese villages. To be sure, none of these criticisms are Durkheim’s fault, but more so the unique history of the discipline has crystallized as such. Durkheim could never have imagined contemporary sociology in which social psychology, emotions, and culture had become firmly entrenched in the basic toolkit sociologists use.

Clearly, then, the full-throated structuralist approach to suicide has its limitations. Durkheim’s model struggles to deal with the meaning(s) of suicide in an empirically and theoretically satisfactory way. That is, it lacks a cultural perspective of suicide (Barbagli 2015). But, we are also not prepared to throw the proverbial baby out. In short, it can be true that Durkheim was right, in one respect, and simultaneously wrong in another. Before rethinking Durkheim, then, it is best to outline the culturalist perspectives, asking the same questions: what is useful for an adequate explanation and what might need modifying?

3. Culturalism and its Discontents

Although suicide, as discussed above, is considered a social fact, it is also a social construction that involves meaning-making. It is fair to say that searching for the meaning of suicide is complex in at least two ways.

First, it involves defining the social object—suicide (and its related behaviors, such as attempt or planning)—itself. Action—defined as meaningful behavior—can be a completed unit or an ongoing flow of events (Schutz 1967). While Weber and others (Giddens 1993) argue that one can only “attach” meanings to retrospectively categorized acts, or “objective meaning,” others contend that meanings unfold throughout processes of bringing action forth through “subjective meaning” (Schutz 1967). To retrospectively categorize an elapsed act as a suicide attempt is—to some extent—subjective in another sense: one would need to identify the project of an action (in-order-to motives) to narrow down to a duration of the passing experience and then categorize it or imagine it as a completed act—for example, a suicide attempt or planned suicide, respectively (see also Giddens 1993). The latter scholars assert that human action must be examined through the tension existing between the course of experiences and the rumination on experiences lived through. Objective meanings, however, do not exist in this particular flow of action. In suicide attempts, those who committed the acts can still negotiate the meanings of the elapsed act, including if the project of their action was intended to kill oneself or to be understood, post hoc, to mean something else. In completed suicides, the actors can no longer “attach” meanings to the act, which does not negate the value of meanings obtained from attempters, but raises sticky methodological and empirical questions.

An additional set of meanings surrounds another source of meaning-making—the observer. The simple naming of an activity is interpretation in and of itself. An observer naming an act as suicide or suicide attempt has already interpreted it, for instance. Objective meaning, according to Schutz, is thus interpreting an observed behavior in a broader context. This is especially relevant for how completed suicides are classified in today’s world: coroners/medical examiners make sense of the deceased’s behavior—via interviews with other people to assess the deceased’s state of mind, for example (Atkinson 1978). In fact, many factors (their cultural meanings and hence their very selection, e.g., the deceased’s sanity or mental health state) come into play when an observer decides if a death is a suicide, and maybe more importantly in some cases, what is not a suicide (Timmermans 2006; Wilkins 1970). The very labelling of the death as suicide or not is thus already an interpretation of the deceased’s behavior, correctly or not (Smith 1983). The problem with ascertaining either type of meaning is that meanings are not fixed or intrinsic to objects, but rather subjective (please see Johnson 1969), although often patterned across groups. Culture (defined as the shared material and symbolic elements that constitute a group) related to any object, including suicide, resides in individuals (Rawlings and Childress 2021), and emerges in interaction as individuals use enculturated schematic associations to connect the dots to make inferences (D’Andrade 1991). For example, through these shared schemas (or prevalent narratives in a society, [Wilkins 1967, 1970]), an observer can fill in the missing information and “know” if a death (a social object) is or is not suicide, even if there is no way of objectively knowing.

Second, once the definition of an act as suicide is settled, one is in search of meanings again; meanings saturated in moral valuation. In the case of Little League Baseball teams, responses of coaches to the boys’ use of racial epithets (an object) define such words as “usable”—e.g., morally sanctioned or not in their group culture (Fine 1979). Thus, the act of labeling the act as suicide carries moral weighting which, in turn, causes a secondary meaning-making event: the response by the community, broadly defined, to the suicide (i.e., gossip in the community, avoidant/empathetic behaviors from neighbors). In other words, culture resides in interactions, as well (Rawlings and Childress 2021). For instance, in villages that stigmatize HIV/AIDS, individuals avoid interacting with anyone suspected as infected with HIV/AIDS and patients avoid seeking treatment due to this collective interpretation of HIV/AIDS (McDonnell 2016). Similarly, throughout Medieval Christendom, it was common for the Church or agents acting on its behalf, to shame the deceased by publicly mistreating the body and to shame the family by putting them on trial (Barbagli 2015). In turn, these meanings influence behavior in empirically important ways, such as delimiting help-seeking behaviors, motivating people to “cover up” a significant other’s suicide, and so forth. Suicide in society is, therefore, not just an event of a completed act, but a process involving suicidal ideations, communication of such intents, suicidal attempts, and negotiations with others about their meanings (Wilkins 1967). A broad culturalist focus thus widens our perspective to include what happens before and after, not just a completed suicide but also suicidal behaviors. Specifically, this perspective takes seriously the phenomenological concern with meaning (Ahmed 2006; Atkinson 1968) and adds the cultural concern with suicide as an object (Rawlings and Childress 2021). Furthermore, it challenges the Durkheimian position that emphasizes ultimate causes, or the sort of distal structural forces driving social action by pushing us to focus on the actor and the object, which in turn, casts light on the proximate causes that include unintended or contingent actions that contribute to suicidality (Wilkins 1967).

The clarion call for making meaning matter in the study of suicide has pushed hard to center cultural knowledge vis-à-vis positive psychology (Abrutyn and Mueller 2021; Hjelmeland 2010). Suicide is a social act, after all, and it is thereby impossible to detach from its cultural moorings. Consequently, it matters how we try to study suicide, because self-reports are notoriously messy and, in some corners of sociology, dismissed (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). Therefore, there are limits to what a full-throated individualistic phenomenological account, particularly one that takes seriously interpretivism, can achieve.

Most commonly, there is a tendency to assume culture is just “out there” external to individuals (often at a macro-level) and all we need to do is measure it quantitatively with questions about beliefs/attitudes or through some mixed qualitative methods (Lizardo 2017; Vaisey 2009). These approaches assume that there is an American or Japanese culture or set of meanings about suicide that can not only be apprehended but can shed light on why people die by suicide in one society or another. ² While these exercises do provide insights into cultural variation of suicide, they also imply—intentionally or not—that there is in fact a diffuse cultural system at the societal, national, or even regional level (Colucci and Lester 2012). This logic not only reproduces Durkheim’s own ecological fallacy—presuming that a macro, public, external culture does exist, can we demonstrate it causes or conditions suicide at the individual level?—but it also makes all of the mistakes that Parsons’s (1951) social system made in oversocializing action (Wrong 1962). Thus, in the effort to push back on the methodological weaknesses and epistemic orthodoxy of a suicidology steeped in clinical psychology, the “cultural turn” in suicidology—though necessary and one which we support—has much to gain, according to Abrutyn and Mueller (2021), from leveraging the tools sociology offers including cognitive-cultural sociology and social psychology.

For instance, some cases of suicide—though extreme—provide clear support for our rejection of the more rigid phenomenology of suicide advocated by Douglas or Atkinson. There are the cases where common-sense is far less important to understand why suicide happens, or those suicides Ruth Cavan (1928; Abrutyn 2023) called institutionalized—suicides that are “regarded as the ‘right’ course of action” (Berndt 1962, 181). The classic example Western social scientists have drawn attention to is the practice of sati in which a widow takes her own life following her husband’s death. In this case, suicide as a social object is not multivocal as the significance of the “sacrifice” is well-known throughout the community, with little room for misunderstanding (Barbagli 2015). In fact, the meaning her male relatives share, and sometimes she too, is so “tight” and “consensual” that the widow lacks choice in the matter, with the husband’s male kin being authorized to emotionally, and in some cases physically, coerce the widow into self-immolation (Abrutyn 2017). Unlike Durkheim’s belief that she self-sacrifices, though, non-Western sources underscore the choice she makes is very often between a life of social alienation and shame or religious grace. The point, though, is that why she dies by suicide is locally clear to all actors, even if she does not want to die or one of her husband’s relatives empathizes with her situation. The challenges in an extreme case such as this is that variation in meaning might be rare because community members agree and/or because in cases that they diverge in opinion, it is likely that respondents will be less than honest.

A second example is much more common than sati: suicide as an idiom or expression of revenge and social control (Manning 2012). In Counts’s (1980) ethnography of the Kallai, she remarks that “suicide as an expression of power, although it is not restricted to women, is an especially potent form of political action” (335). For those with no legitimate claim to public, political expression (e.g., women in traditionally gendered societies), suicide is a tool for symbolically representing grievance and imposing shame on the accused and his family. That these types of suicide are recognizable across time and place puts us on firm ground in asserting the structural nature of studying them as the causes, consequences, and presumed motives are delimited, routinized, and understandable by most observers regardless of cultural differences (Bohannan 1960, 27ff.). It is true that there are some unique elements of the formula. For example, the grievances suicide might express may be village- or culture-specific, but the cultural logic is not. In rural China, for instance, a relatively recent epidemic of female suicides across provinces and villages had little to do with distinct circumstances, and everything to do with the patrimonial system of governance, marriage, and kinship widespread (Fei 2010). Women, lacking any recourse to informal or formal mechanisms of social control against their husbands or husbands’ families knew suicide was the most effective means of being heard and getting “just desserts” (Manning 2012).

What these cases show us is that suicidology benefits most by continuing to follow Durkheim’s lead, in spirit though not in letter, and avoid centering highly idiosyncratic individual-level explanations—though admittedly interesting, rich, and sometimes salacious details of these stories. It is not that people have no agency or play no role in the drama, often they do. But, some suicides are so institutionalized, so ritualized, that typical sociological explanations focused on power and politics may suffice enough to diagnose the pattern and to point toward interventions. What these cases also show us, however, is that many suicides do not fit so neatly into this category, with institutionalization being a dimension measured more so in degree than kind and few cases falling close to either pole.

Indeed, unlike positive psychology or staunch Durkheimian ontological commitments, our approach leverages phenomenology, particularly the more critical phenomenological movement that, in recent decades, has focused on group-based phenomenological accounts linked to broader social structures and inequalities (e.g., class, sexuality, race, and gender) (e.g., Ahmed 2006; Chandler 2019; Dolezal and Petherbridge 2017). In these studies, “social injustices and inequalities … are matters that impinge on our embodied lives and our lived relations with others” (Dolezal and Petherbridge 2017, 3). However, within interpretive work that attends to structure, “a division over the extent to which action is seen as responsive to the conditions of those settings as opposed to viewed as resulting from forces separate from embedded practices” (Fine 2010, 356), is implicit but prevalent. Structure, from a micro perspective, takes shape through repeated and patterned interactions and governs the probability (not a definitive, universal pattern) of who enters and what unfolds in an interaction (Stryker 2008). This suggests the irreplaceable knowledge local groups offer: As meaning-making in these interactions relies on shared histories and established understandings (Fine 2010), one can emphasize subjective accounts sedimented by structural inequalities while still attending to variations across local settings even when such nuances do not necessarily negate the contour of the larger structural patterns (again, these social patterns only suggest probability). There is nothing here that precludes a subject-centered social research that allows their voices to be heard. Quite the contrary: the more interesting question asks how the generalized beliefs about suicide spread across individuals, communities, and places. An exclusive focus on individual stories shifts the explanatory focus from sociology’s bread-and-butter: systemic pressures and homogeneous cultural narratives; and, thereby, system-wide solutions to a patterned social problem. However, assuming structural forces are embodied without attending to the how and making room for variations, ignores a core sociological dimension—local groups (Fine 2010). As such, culture—especially that of a meso- and a micro-level as we will argue below—continues to matter, indeed perhaps more so, as it is difficult to explain variations in responses to similar conditions besides thinking about the distribution of the meaning of these responses (Gross 2009). The final step in our analysis is to untangle when and how phenomenological knowledge contributes to an adequate explanation of suicide.

4. Suicide and Adequate Knowledge

The first conclusion we made was that a macro-level sociology of suicide did not require a conceptual basis that made sense for those it studied. At a certain size and scale, patterns beyond the conscious decisions of individuals can be captured and made sense of. Our second conclusion, however, was that this is not the only or, for some research questions, most superior way to produce adequate explanations. For instance, when suicides cluster in time and space, such as in some prisons or Indigenous communities (Stoliker 2018; Wexler and Gone 2012), there are good reasons to suspect insider knowledge might help make sense of what is happening in the community and build better, more robust theories of suicide. That is to say, not to ask why people die by suicide but, instead, to rely solely on structural assumptions risks missing something that is only possible to observe in these small worlds (Wilkins 1967). Because, in small groups—observable interacting units (Fine 1979)—or meso-level, the distance between structure and the individual, culture and the individual, is drastically curtailed. In fact, it is in these small groups that culture is (re)produced and lived (Fine 2012). This acknowledgment of the need for local knowledge is not a repudiation of our earlier assertions. Rather, it is a reconfiguration of the relationship between structural and phenomenological knowledge in certain circumstances. It is possible in these “smaller communities” (Tousignant 1998) to feasibly teach insiders to teach outsiders how to think like an insider, which means moving the former closer toward structural categories and assumptions. That is, we must be honest and self-reflexive about our own assumptions, recognizing that we are powerless to really be naïve observers, as we already carry with us a host of structural assumptions about suicides. But, our respondents, in order for them to be useful, must be trained like a graduate student to become observers of their own (and others’) behavior, which suggests a dialectical process by which outsiders and insiders move toward a partnership in knowledge production. This dialectic relationship is not feasible if structural and phenomenological knowledge are not meeting in an observable interacting unit. In other words, both structural and phenomenological knowledge needs to be localized, to benefit from both interpretivism and positivism.

It is also the final brick in the foundational critique of the classic phenomenology, as revealing and accepting this dialectical process implies that phenomenological knowledge is not as common-sensical or individualistically subjective as others have suggested. Cultural objects never exist in a vacuum, apprehended by idiosyncratic meaning-making. Rather, social context often guides individuals to interpret a social object in a specific way (Griswold 1987). For instance, while HIV/AIDS as a social object has no inherent meanings, how they are discussed in newspapers, for example, provoke certain reactions from readers (McDonnell 2016). Similarly, social responses to suicidal ideations and behaviors also take shape in a repertoire of local beliefs (and even local, structural responses) and likely influence subsequent suicidal orientations and behaviors of vulnerable individuals (Wilkins 1967). We can only conclude, then, that cultural beliefs about suicide—at least the kind that have “teeth” in so far as they motivate thoughts and actions for both of those vulnerable to suicidal acts and those who live and work with (and by extension influence) the former, are likely to be group-based and locally delimited. These local definitions—like the invisible force of Durkheim’s integrative facts—are drawn from a well-worn set of cultural schemata of suicide, a schema that links a series of objects to sequences of behavior presumed to express subjective feeling and thinking and that are, in fact, shared among all suicidal and non-suicidal community members alike. Similarly, the critical phenomenology work, although it indeed confronts the classic’s individualistic subjective experiences, still treats structural forces as something clear-cut and external, ignoring the negotiated, local variations. Accepting this dialectic also reveals fine-grained social patterns or variations that could challenge and modify our structural assumptions as well as puts the “how” including individuals’ nonetheless constrained agency, to the fore.

5. Situating Suicide

Thus far, we are in general agreement with the cultural turn in suicidology in asserting studying suicide means contextualizing it as well. But, we suggest moving one step further and situating it as much as contextualizing it—a move that gets us closer to both the pragmatist and cultural traditions in sociology from which we borrow. For instance, social scientists concerned with the significantly high rates of suicide for prison populations want to make sense of why some prisons are at greater risk than others. In selecting their cases, they already begin to impose structural knowledge on their subjects. A good explanation, they know from their sociological training, rests on teasing out what varying attributes may be related to the outcomes they are interested in. Once they enter the prison, they are tasked with observing behavior, which presumably reveals more fine-grained structural and cultural aspects that are embedded within the larger contextual choices that informed their initial selection. How homogeneous or heterogeneous is the population? How is power distributed throughout the population? They may observe, across their cases, that suicide rates are higher in prisons with ethnic diversity and greater probabilities of violence (Dye 2010). The beginnings of an adequate explanation, sans common-sense, is already lying there: prisons with greater social disorganization put inmates at higher risk of personal disorganization and suicide (Stoliker 2018). However, it is also insufficient for making sense of why one prison is at greater risk than another and, ultimately, how to build interventions that may work in one place and not in another.

Hence, good researchers would also want to know two things. First, they would want to know—to the best of their abilities—why people who have attempted suicide or are contemplating attempting it want to die. They do not need to be naïve, but rather they are beginning from the logic of social disorganization theory. If their structural assumptions are correct, teaching their interlocutors to think like an insider in ways that help the outsiders understand “what is happening” allows the researchers to peek into the proverbial black box. However, a researcher must also triangulate because we know that cognitive biases shape how respondents justify their own behavior, especially when that behavior, like suicide, is often stigmatized and shamed (Wiklander, Samuelsson, and Asberg 2003). The moral stakes for the respondents may be too great to give a truly reflective, honest answer; they may not even really know themselves. Luckily, the researcher of a small social unit has unique advantages over other types of case selection: because a given prison population is known and relatively constant, the researcher can also strive to ask as many members as possible about the meaning of suicide. Compiling these second accounts could provide a much clearer picture about the cultural beliefs that most prisoners have access to.

In this instance, it is possible to both ask questions that translate phenomenological knowledge into structural knowledge (are these beliefs consistent or present across prison cases?) and confirm our structural assumptions (does integration affect suicide?). It may even illuminate aspects of the answers that our first sample of respondents provided. After all, people who attempt suicide should be borrowing some of the post hoc motive talk from the available local beliefs. And, if they are not, that is an interesting empirical observation worthy of greater investigation. However, as the researcher approaches a more adequate explanation, one that might satisfy Schutz more closely, a new problem arises that phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists rarely attend to because they are less interested in causality based on statistical probability (causality adequacy) than they are understanding or subjective adequacy: Do these beliefs cause action? While causality is complex (Tavory and Timmermans 2013), it remains a legitimate question as the shift from structural knowledge to phenomenological knowledge is usually prefaced by pointing to the inability of the former to ascertain causality in terms of probability and prediction.

6. Internal, External, Proximate, Distal

While it is commendable that culture, as an explanatory heuristic necessary for adequate explanation, has entered into suicidology, most suicidologists are psychologists and they usually argue two things: (1) culture is essential to the study of suicide but (2) culture is such a “slippery” concept that no one actually really knows what culture is (Hjelmeland 2010; Lester 2012). Yet, cultural sociologists have grown increasingly sophisticated in the methodological strategies for uncovering these meanings (Mohr et al. 2020); methods are not simply reliant on asking people why they did what they did (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). Without getting into the weeds, there are two key dimensions or distinctions that cultural sociologists make that may help suicidologists further develop their instincts that culture matters. ³

The first dimension refers to the difference between external, “public” culture (Swidler 1986) and internal, “personal” culture (Lizardo 2017). When we think of culture and suicide, it is usually the former—the culture that is “out there”—and not the latter that we think of (Hjelmeland 2010), similar to the critical phenomenological work in which the social forces are “out there” (Ahmed 2006; Chandler 2019). Cultural scripts, for instance, are a common cultural explanation for variations in suicide across some categories of people, like gender (Canetto and Lester 1998), but at the societal level; and, therefore, culture is external or public. While cultural scripts do tell us about the beliefs people carry about why this person or that dies by suicide, it does not really tell us whether scripts cause suicide, whether these scripts adequately reflect how those people think about their own situation and their potential choice of suicide, or whether a given local place—like the prisons we discussed above—is being shaped by these diffuse scripts or something indigenous to the environment in question. The best chance we have, then, for crafting adequate explanations based, in part, on phenomenological knowledge is through internal cultural knowledge.

Ahead of his time, Durkheim argued that individual and collective conscience were distinct, but that the former was inseparable from the latter as participation and observation of ritualized behavior led to the transformation of the individual’s own conscience. Our “schema,” or internal representations of cultural knowledge about objects and the relationships between them (D’Andrade 1991), are made applicable to our experiences through enculturation (Lizardo 2017). Some of this enculturation is repeated, unconscious practice that becomes preconscious (Bourdieu 1972 [1977]), while some is semantic, episodic, and more cognitive. The latter is what researchers usually have access to in interviews and surveys (Vaisey 2009), while the former is where the “action” is at (pun intended). Thus, simply asking what this or that means does not ensure we actually learn what it means, but rather we learn more about the justifications that are easily accessible to a respondent. We do not know if these justifications are diffuse or environment-specific, or whether they truly reflect why people do what they do. We just know they are how the individual makes sense of the structural assumptions embedded in the questions we ask.

In part, the distinctions we are making between external and internal culture are due to the second dimension: proximate versus distal culture. Distal culture is usually where sociologists find their explanations. Conceptual tools like “values,” “interests,” or “beliefs” are often presumed as external sources of motivated action (Franzese 2013). Because sociologists draw such heavy distinctions between themselves and psychologists, historically speaking, they must find their explanations in these distal forces. But, there is often no way to falsify a theory that presumes distal mechanisms cause individual behavior. Suicide contagion research demonstrates this problem perfectly. We know that exposure to media reports of suicide is strongly associated with spikes in suicide rates, but we are neither able to ascertain the mechanism by which they are connected to these spikes nor are we really able to ask if those who die by suicide following a report died because of the exposure (Gould 2001). Thus, we know a lot about attitudes and suicide (Phillips and Luth 2020), but we do not know about the causal link when we remain beholden to a distal cultural explanation.

Turning toward cognitive-cultural explanations, like schema, begins to change the equation (Rawlings and Childress 2021). Put differently, we are moving toward proximate explanations—an argument consistent with the suggestions put forth in a recent exchange on suicide cultures (Chandler et al. 2022) and echoed to some extent by some anthropologists (Staples and Widger 2012). ⁴ By shifting focus, we can accept the fact that we are exposed to diffuse, external culture but the meanings we acquire are refracted through our own idiosyncratic cognitive mechanisms and, importantly, the collectives that we are most attached to (Abrutyn 2013). This dual process of enculturation or socialization reflects, again, the dialectical nature of structural and phenomenological knowledge—primarily achievable when contextualized in local settings. On the one hand, we each experience “culture” individually, but on the other hand, even phenomenological knowledge is structural from the standpoint of the reference groups that directly and indirectly produce and reproduce our internal cultural schema. Thus, to speak of suicide scripts attached to vague social identities or structural inequalities like American or Japanese, Black or Jewish, or Male or Female is to gloss over the tremendous variation that a given sample of any of these categories likely reveals based on the practical and everyday realities that refract these broad beliefs, the relationships that allow these beliefs to emerge in mundane and spectacular rituals, and the real or imagined linkages between beliefs and actions. We thus move down the middle road of a proximate culture regarding suicide, where structural knowledge is extracted or modified.

7. Moving Forward

In the end, interpretivism, or specifically in this case, both classic and critical phenomenology, requires some adjustment, shifting from common-sense understandings and embodiment of structural inequalities to a systematic study of the structural-cultural dialectic of local groups. Though it is probably true that the best we can ascertain about culture and suicide is what people in a small collective believe about why their fellow community members die by suicide. It is likely that the causes of suicide are too diverse, idiosyncratic and, simultaneously, generic (psycheache) to produce a cultural explanation that is not simply adequate, but useful, too. Relying heavily on the maxim that any explanation that is not understandable by those we study is inadequate threatens to undermine not only generalizable theory but also the ability to even think causally. That is to say, is it the beliefs about suicide that matter or is it the exposure to those we share an affinity with that matters more (Baller, Shin, and Richardson 2005)? We have argued that it is worth understanding the former to also feel confident in the latter on the grounds that phenomenological knowledge of local settings both reveals and modifies structural knowledge and provides an important crucible to assess general theories about behavior. This also raises interesting questions about how to identify the boundaries of a local community and what it means to find more than one competing systems of meanings regarding suicide in a specific community.

An equally important reason for this epistemic shift is that when we situate cultural meanings, not solely in places or groups but both, we can better observe how close structure and culture are to practical and everyday experience. While national culture (including its power structure) is distant and refracted, local culture is immediate, embodied in physical landmarks and geography (Gieryn 2000), interactional patterns that reveal the rules of conduct most people obey (Goffman 1967), and in the people whom we recognize as belonging to the same place and space (Fine 2010). In that sense, internal, proximate knowledge—especially when triangulated through myriad interviews, observations, and content analyses of influential agents like state or religious actors, local media, and so forth—can be brought into dialogue with structural knowledge through uncovering the concrete mechanisms. This means when studying suicides in a specific locale, researchers need to spend enough time to be socialized into the local meaning system without framing their observations in their taken-for-granted assumptions. In addition, the science behind suicide that they possess can be adapted to local conditions more readily, translating structural into phenomenological knowledge and, once again, testing their explanations against those being offered by members of the community.

Though we are focused on suicide, as a singularly unique phenomenon with especially vexing methodological complexities, much of our points make sense for other spectacular, rare, and mundane sociologically interesting things. As Giddens (1993, 38) argued, “it is difficult to see why [common-sense terminology] should be deemed desirable or how it could be accomplished – given that, as Schutz himself points out, the interests, and therefore the criteria, that guide the formulation of sociological concepts are different from those involved in everyday notions.” Rather, the goal of localizing structural and phenomenological knowledge allows us to translate the local, everyday experience into something more abstract and generalizable, even if qualitative methods have limits to just how transposable our conclusions might be. They are, however, good means of testing and developing a better theory of human behaviors (Tavory and Timmermans 2013; Timmermans and Tavory 2012).