Documents of life and death: Identities beyond the life course in coroners' suicide files

In keeping with recent critiques of literature on the body and the life course, the argument of this paper is that social identities can, to a certain extent, be constructed post-mortem and in the absence of a living body. The authors make this case with reference to a sociological autopsy study of a hundred suicide case files in a coroners office in a medium-sized British city. The research draws on ethnographic approaches to documents. There is discussion of some of the diverse data sources in the coroners files: medical reports, witness statements and suicide notes. The identity work revealed in these sources is as much about the living as the dead and is especially bound up in the process of avoiding blame.