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.
Jocelyn Lim Chua is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"In this absorbing and moving ethnography of aspiration and the deaths in its midst, Jocelyn Chua takes on the deeply contextual yet starkly human question of what makes life livable. Offering careful insight into what suicide can tell us about the precariousness and disenchantment of modern life, she unpacks the ways suicide undermines, even as it authorizes, triumphal narratives of development. In the process, her deft and incisive account of life, love and medicine in south India portrays not only the stakes of modernity, but the high – and unevenly distributed - stakes of the idea that modernity and aspiration are to blame for suffering."—Sarah Pinto, author of Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India
"Chua makes a tragic and compelling case for Kerala’s transformation from a paragon of development into India’s suicide capital. Combining moving explorations of childrearing, labor migration, and clinical intervention with meticulous anthropological scholarship, In Pursuit of the Good Life reveals development as a literally life-and-death matter, provoking both soaring aspirations and fatal disappointments.”—Anand Pandian, associate professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and author of Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India
256 pp.6 x 9
9780520281165$29.95|£25.00Paper
Mar 2014