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Death Without Weeping
Death Without Weeping
Death Without Weeping
(1992) by American
anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows hundreds of poor and disabled individuals,
mostly women, in a severely impoverished area of northeastern Brazil over the course of
25 years. Scheper-Hughes won the prestigious Margaret Mead Award in 1979 for her
study of single male farmers in Ireland titled Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics. In 2009,
her investigations into an illegal organ donor gang led to several criminal arrests in the US.
Scheper-Hughes teaches anthropology at UC Berkley.
Death Without Weeping was praised for its thorough ethnography and graceful prose; it
was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. Its themes include
mortality, social stigma, and perseverance, as well as the importance of a feminist
approach to anthropology, the crushing effects poverty has on human qualities such as
love (or what the author calls “the political economy of emotions”), and the nuances of
class systems.
Just outside the city of Bom Jesús da Mata, there is a “shantytown” known as Alto do
Cruzeiro (the English translation is “Hill of the Crucifixion”). About 5,000 people live there.
Since the late 1960s, Scheper-Hughes intermittently worked throughout Brazil, and during
these travels and assignments with the Peace Corps, she developed a strong interest in
the community of Alto do Cruzeiro.
She describes this initial interest in the long introduction. The work has 12 chapters total
that each focus on the scientific, political, moral, or economic struggle of the community.
In vivid detail, Scheper-Hughes describes how the streets are full of mud and smoke. Most
of the people are emaciated from lack of nutrient-rich food. Unlike the developed world,
nearly 25 percent of infants don’t survive childbirth. A similar number don’t survive
beyond the age of 2. Many die from treatable situations, such as diarrhea and
dehydration. When Scheper-Hughes first lived with the villagers in the middle 60s, this
reaction shocked her; she returned to the area from 1982-1989 to then formally study this
phenomenon as an anthropologist.
All of the women Scheper-Hughes interviews have had their share of employment,
reproductive, and marital conflicts. Like most of the villagers, they each work on a
plantation. Under a grueling sun, they spend most of their day picking sugar cane. There
are class and racial tensions within this work and across the town.
Several forces support the continued poverty of the people living in Alto de Cruzeiro.
Firstly, the government tends to be apathetic or simply incompetent. Bribery is also a
frequent occurrence. The local doctors also, as dozens of the mothers reported, lack any
interest in keeping the women or their children alive.
Without any effective government structure, may people in the region have taken to
organizing themselves. They form gangs that fight for resources, killing many innocent
people in the process. It is common for residents to be “disappeared” by a gang. Even if
residents can find enough food and water, and live beyond the habitual violence, the
average life expectancy in the area is only 40 years.
Without access to quality education, many of the residents are superstitious. Others take
solace in the Roman Catholic church, which gives them emotional satisfaction but
prevents them from reaching their own political potential. Scheper-Hughes calls the
community acceptance of very high infant mortality–as well as acceptance of daily
gang/government harassment and visible pollution–“routinization.”
Scheper-Hughes posits that due to the overwhelming poverty of the region, new mothers
rarely have the energy to give their children the kind of attention and love that is often a
hallmark of new mother-infant relationships. In this shantytown, new mothers know that
there is a surprisingly high chance that their child won’t live. Consequently, they don’t
bond with them. They don’t name their child until it survives beyond the age of two, and
infants who appear sickly are simply ignored. Some mothers even seem to wish that weak
infants pass sooner so they can return their energy to their own survival.
The church, along with the apathy of the government, reinforces the impression that
childhood mortality is not a pressing social concern; thus, the problem never abates.