Death Without Weeping Summary
Response Paper: Death Without Weeping by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
As an ethnography, Death Without Weeping by Nancy Scheper-Hughes presents a description and explanation of the way of life of people in Alto do Cruzeiro which is a shantytown of Northeast Brazil. It is revealed that mothers in Alto do Cruzeiro were indifferent to the deaths of their children which is puzzling. The article provides readers an anthropological enquiry of the mother-infant relationship in the shantytown and leads to more profound thinking about mother’s love.
The author’s fieldwork experience in Alto do Cruzeiro spanned over 25 years. She was “a Peace Corps volunteer and a community development/health worker” in 1965. (Scheper-Hughes 1993, 8) After 15 years, she made several visits back in the community as an anthropologist. She used several methods while collecting information, such as participation observation and interviews. She completely participated in their daily lives and engaged in regular interactions with local people. …show more content…
she developed a sense of what she called "selective neglect" in which the consciousness of the mothers "constantly shifts back and forth between allowed and disallowed levels of awareness" (390). After experiencing the loss of children to starvation and disease, women would not allow themselves to become attached to and care for their new children. The investment was too physically and emotionally costly. They would not do this neglect consciously, but in the end they acknowledged the trade off they had to make to get by with so much loss. Death Without Weeping as a research project is an explanation of the social and economic conditions that can lead to a strategy such as selective neglect of
As an ethnography, Death Without Weeping by Nancy Scheper-Hughes presents a description and explanation of the way of life of people in Alto do Cruzeiro which is a shantytown of Northeast Brazil. It is revealed that mothers in Alto do Cruzeiro were indifferent to the deaths of their children which is puzzling. The article provides readers an anthropological enquiry of the mother-infant relationship in the shantytown and leads to more profound thinking about mother’s love.
The author’s fieldwork experience in Alto do Cruzeiro spanned over 25 years. She was “a Peace Corps volunteer and a community development/health worker” in 1965. (Scheper-Hughes 1993, 8) After 15 years, she made several visits back in the community as an anthropologist. She used several methods while collecting information, such as participation observation and interviews. She completely participated in their daily lives and engaged in regular interactions with local people. …show more content…
she developed a sense of what she called "selective neglect" in which the consciousness of the mothers "constantly shifts back and forth between allowed and disallowed levels of awareness" (390). After experiencing the loss of children to starvation and disease, women would not allow themselves to become attached to and care for their new children. The investment was too physically and emotionally costly. They would not do this neglect consciously, but in the end they acknowledged the trade off they had to make to get by with so much loss. Death Without Weeping as a research project is an explanation of the social and economic conditions that can lead to a strategy such as selective neglect of