The Return of the Native: A Cultural and Social-Psychological Critique of Durkheim’s Suicide Based on the Guarani-Kaiowá of Southwestern Brazil*

This article argues that Durkheim’s theory of suicide is deficient because of its monocausal reasoning, its conception of suicide as an action without subjects, and its characterization of preliterate societies as harmonious, self-contained, and mor-phologically static. It shows that these deficiencies can be overcome by including cultural and social-psychological considerations in the analysis of suicide—specifi-cally by including culture as a causal force in its own right and drawing links between social circumstances, cultural beliefs and values, and individual dispositions. The authors make their case by analyzing ethnographic and quantitative data on the preliterate Guarani-Kaiowa ́ of southwestern Brazil, one of the most suicide-prone groups in the world. More than a 100 years after its publication, Durkheim’s Suicide continues to inspire debate over its theoretical, methodological, and empirical claims. Yet few authors have ventured a critique that shows the impact of each of those claims on one another. The importance of such a critique lies in the fact that it is not possible to resolve some of the contradictions in Durkheim’s work unless one examines both the underlyin