Suchergebnisse

Cutting, burning, branding, and bone-breaking are all types of self-injury, or the deliberate, non-suicidal destruction of one's own body tissue, a practice that emerged from obscurity in the 1990s and spread dramatically as a typical behavior among adolescents. Long considered a suicidal gesture, The Tender Cut argues instead that self-injury is often a coping mechanism, a form of teenage angst, an expression of group membership, and a type of rebellion, converting unbearable emotional pain into manageable physical pain.Based on the largest, qualitative, non-clinical population of self-injurers ever gathered, noted ethnographers Patricia and Peter Adler draw on 150 interviews with self-injurers from all over the world, along with 30,000-40,000 internet posts in chat rooms and communiqués. Their 10-year longitudinal research follows the practice of self-injury from its early days when people engaged in it alone and did not know others, to the present, where a subculture has formed via cyberspace that shares similar norms, values, lore, vocabulary, and interests. An important portrait of a troubling behavior, The Tender Cut illuminates the meaning of self-injury in the 21st century, its effects on current and former users, and its future as a practice for self-discovery or a cry for help

This research offers a description and analysis of the relatively hidden practice of self-injury: cutting, burning, branding, and bone breaking. Drawing on over 150 in-depth interviews and tens of thousands of website postings, e-mail communications, and Internet groups, we challenge the psycho-medical depiction of this phenomenon and discuss ways that the contemporary sociological practice of self-injury has evolved to challenge images of the population, etiology, practice, and social meanings associated with this behavior. We conclude by suggesting that self-injury, for some, is in the process of undergoing a moral passage from the realm of medicalized to voluntarily chosen deviant behavior in which participants' actions may be understood with a greater understanding of the sociological factors that contribute to the prevalence of these actions.

Previous models of therapeutic treatment for self-injury have been focused on individualistic psycho-medical approaches that isolate and stigmatize people who cut, burn, and otherwise self-harm. The rise of cyber communities of self-injury, beginning in the early 2000s but evolving dramatically over the first decade of the twenty-first century, has offered a diversity of groups that individuals can join, cycling through different ones as their movement through their career of self-injury evolves. These groups offer a significantly different set of norms and values relating to self-injury, engaging in some combination of defining it, normalizing it, supporting it, and offering a range of techniques for combatting it. In this article we discuss the various ways different people participate in these cyber communities, their relationships between the cyber and face-to-face worlds, and the effects of the Internet on self-injury. We conclude by discussing the instrumental and expressive effects of cyber self-injury support groups, and the way these groups function to normalize the behavior and foster its moral passage.

Drawing on careers spanning over 35 years in the field of ethnography, we reflect on the research in which we've engaged and how the practice and epistemology of ethnography has evolved over this period. We begin by addressing the problematic nature of ethical issues in conducting qualitative research, highlighting the non-uniform nature of standards, the difficulty of applying mainstream or medical criteria to field research, and the issues raised by the new area of cyber research, drawing particularly on our recent cyberethnography of self-injury. We then discuss the challenge of engagement, highlighting pulls that draw ethnographers between the ideals of involvement and objectivity. Finally, we address the challenges and changing landscapes of qualitative analysis, and how its practice and legitimation are impacted by contemporary trends in sociology. We conclude by discussing how epistemological decisions in the field of qualitative research are framed in political, ethical, and disciplinary struggles over disciplinary hegemony