Death Without Weeping Analysis

The readings titled "Death without Weeping" and "When Does Life" provide quite shocking yet fascinating information regarding how different cultures and societies define when a child is considered a person. In "Death Without Weeping" the author, Nancy Schepper-Hughes, describes how poverty and desperation in Brazil's shantytowns became the primary reason for many mothers' indifference to the deaths of their infant children. According to Schepper-Hughes, the extreme poverty, high fertility, and poor ecological conditions were all factors that inevitably contributed to the casual routineness regarding so many young children's deaths. One of the most shocking parts of the article was the story of a little boy named Zezinho. Schepper-Hughes describes
Morgan describes how various cultures perceive the beginning of human life and personhood. According to the author, the time when a human life begins and when a human being is allowed to become a person is strictly a cultural concept. In her essay, Morgan describes many cultures and their customs of recognizing personhood in a human being. One of the most shocking examples that the author is using is the case of the Ashanti children of Ghana. Since the Ashanti of Ghana do not recognize children as human beings until adolescence, there have been reports of children's who died bodies being thrown onto a village's landfill as they did not deserve proper burial without first being officially personified and accepted into the community. This particular example truly shocked and horrified me. While studying this and other anthropology classes, I have been trying to develop the ability to analyze and understand much foreign to me customs from the emic perspective. Although challenging, the approach of attempting to understand many unfamiliar customs has vastly opened up my eyes and helped me understand and see many aspects of life in new and fresh ways. This was until I read about this particular custom in Ghana. From my culture's perspective, this kind of treatment of the human in life and death seems quite scandalous. There were other practices in the article that seemed hard to understand, such as perceiving premature fetuses as animals or regarding twins as evil spirits, but nothing compared with the cruelty of the treatment of young children by the Ashanti of Ghana. I think it is easier to understand certain customs regarding personifying human life when a human is still a fetus or even an infant. In my opinion, however, children in their adolescence most likely already possess self-awareness and some degree of self-identity. Therefore, it is difficult to understand that they would be treated so ‘un-humanlike,'