Adaptive Suicide

Read, Dwight ANTHRO (Read@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Mon, 24 Oct 1994 09:58:00 PDT

Quinlan writes:

"But still I think that there must be some reasoning process
leading to the decision to commit suicide that includes cost/benefit
analysis ."

I take it that Quinlan using cost/benefit more metaphorically here, than
literally. Just a quick comment to note that in one of the films on the san
peoples, an elderly couple decides not to migrate with the group essentially
for the reason that they would be too much of a burden, yet knowing that not
migrating with them would lead to their death (I am assuming here that the
film ethnographer has accurately protrayed the actual circumstances and this
is not a "story").

D. Read
READ@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU