Revisiting Durkheim's Social Regulation: Fatalism and Anomie in South Korea

Abstract

In this dissertation I explore Durkheim’s suicide-typology in the context of South Korea. Given that suicide rates are globally high in the country, I interview 29 South Koreans in their 20s-30s to gather perspectives on how they conceptualize suicide, and what elements of society and life they deem related to globally high suicide rates. In doing so, I link interviewees’ ideas about suicide to Durkheim’s original four suicide types. Moreover, I find evidence through these interviews that complicates the exclusivity and distinctiveness of these suicide types. Chapter Two takes a historical look at well-known cases of suicide in Korea and puts into conversation the multiple Durkheimian interpretations one can take when classifying suicides. Chapter Three explores how interviewees related suicide to a tension created from differing values forced upon them by older generations, relating to concepts of anomie and fatalism simultaneously when thinking about motives for suicide. Chapter Four posits that people often slide between Durkheim’s types, and specifically between fatalism and anomie given anomic reactions when people fail to meet fatalistic social expectations. Chapter Five operationalizes Durkheim’s four suicide types and demonstrates the intersection of social regulation and integration; times at which where people at times relate to all of Durkheim’s suicide-types at once when conceptualizing motives for suicide. In concluding this dissertation, I rethink Durkheim’s suicide theory and demonstrate that in exploring individual suicide types, there is overlap between the types in terms of how people think through suicide, as well as what elements of social life they relate suicide to.