The practice of suicide through the ingestion of a fish poison juice (konaha) among the Sorowaha, a indigenous people that lives on the medium river Purus (AM, Brazil) and speaks an Arawa language, mediates closely the relations between the individuals and their society and projects a social totality by means of a individual ritual drama. The phenomenon relevance are evident not only by the mortality rates that the suicide causes - about a hundred times the western averages - but also by the unusual frequency that attempts happen there. The present essay examines the sociological variables of that death pattern and proposes another analytic dimensions.
Sorowaha; Arawa; South-American ethnology; death; suicide; individual
