Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Born in 1944, Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a medical anthropologist whose work mainly focuses on violence, suffering, and premature death as experienced by those on the margins and peripheries of our societies. Born in 1944, Scheper-Hughes is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she directs the doctoral program in Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body and has done research in many areas related to public health in Latin America (UC Berkeley, 2019). Her research interest was sparked by her volunteer work in community development and public health for the Peace Corps in the Alto do Cruzeiro, Brazil in 1965. While in Brazil, Scheper-Hughes witnessed life in the shantytown following the military coup of 1964, and she returned more than 15 years later in 1982 to conduct more in-depth research into what she had observed about mother love (Scheper-Hughes, 1989).

Beyond Brazil, Scheper-Hughes’s main regions of interest have been Ireland, Cuba, and South Africa. Her work focuses on the anthropology of violence, madness and culture, inequity and marginality, and childhood and family. More specifically, she has researched transitional violence, justice, and reconciliation in the slums, shantytowns, and squatter camps of Brazil and South Africa, as well as AIDS and human rights in Cuba and clerical celibacy and child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Most recently, she has been researching the global traffic of human organs, which she views as a form of invisible and sacrificial violence (UC Berkeley, 2019).

Scheper-Hughes has written or compiled four books, most of which either directly relate to Latin America or can be applied to the region. Written in conjunction with Loïc Wacquant, her most recent work, Commodifying Bodies, considers different conceptions of the body and covers a range of topics, including the cultural treatment and disposal of bodies, the international trafficking of kidneys, and the development of ‘transplant tourism.’ In another book, Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois have compiled an extensive anthology that treats how humankind has struggled to make sense of human-on-human violence and includes works that examine everyday violence as well as sudden instances of extreme violence, like Argentina’s Dirty War. One of her better known works is Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, in which she considers schizophrenia among bachelor farmers in County Kerry, Ireland and deals with issues of emigration, celibacy, childrearing, intimacy, and suicide (UC Berkeley, 2019). While these books may not focus on Latin America, many of the issues discussed still apply, and should be considered as important topics of concern in public health in Latin America.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s most consequential work for Latin America is Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, which arose out of her time in the shantytown of the Alto do Cruzeiro in northeast Brazil and covers the madness of hunger, maternal thinking, and infant mortality among the families of the town (UC Berkeley, 2019). Death Without Weeping exists in the form of both a short article and a full-length book and describes a phenomenon that Scheper-Hughes calls mortal selective neglect, but is also often referred to as passive infanticide. This phenomenon is defined as a pattern in which mothers confronted with high rates of infant mortality nurture children and babies perceived as strong "survivors" and leave those who are struggling and perceived as weak and "wanting to die" with virtually no care, essentially neglecting them until they do eventually die. Scheper-Hughes observed this phenomenon in the Alto do Cruzeiro in 1965 when she was working there as a Peace Corps volunteer and later returned with the intention of researching it further. The work produced covers the historical background of the shantytown, the cultural conceptions of death in the Alto, the routinization of death by mothers, the state, and the Church, and the various psychological explanations for the prevalence of mortal selective neglect in the community. Scheper-Hughes especially highlights the regional disparities in health that exist in Brazil, with the Alto a historically underserved and marginalized community in the impoverished Nordeste region (Scheper-Hughes, 1989).

Scheper-Hughes’ own conclusion is that the Western psychological definition of mother love—that it is an innate aspect of motherhood—does not take into account mothers like those in the Alto who are faced with extreme social marginalization and poverty. She asserts that while Western psychology would seem to fault the Alto mothers for their lack of grief at the deaths of their children, their indifference is instead a natural coping mechanism provoked by the constant poverty, deprivation, sexism, hunger, and economic exploitation that they face. She places the blame for infant deaths not on their mothers but on the society, state, and church that have been indifferent to the plight of poor women and children in Brazil and around the world (Engle, 1994).

This indifference and structural violence perpetuated by society, church, and state are of particular concern to Scheper-Hughes in Death Without Weeping. Generally defined as large-scale social and economic arrangements that cause injury to and impede an individual’s ability to reach their full potential, structural violence is insidiously present in many communities in Brazil and elsewhere (Farmer, Nizeye, Stulac, & Keshavjee, 2006). Scheper-Hughes illustrates in her work the extent to which structural violence can impact a particular group, in this case the mothers of the Alto do Cruzeiro and their children, both those living and dead. She carefully depicts the consequences of such violence while at the same time trying to demonstrate the strength and bravery with which the mothers of the Alto have continued to live their lives (Scheper-Hughes, 1989).

The importance of Scheper-Hughes’s work is considerable in Latin America and in the world as it deals with issues of violence, neglect, social marginalization, and malnutrition and how they combine to impact the health of individuals and populations. Scheper-Hughes’s work, especially in Death Without Weeping, draws attention to the structural roots of a serious public health problem, and critiques the indifference of the state to its most vulnerable populations. Works like this are incredibly important in helping public health officials and laypeople better understand health in Latin America and its intersection with other political, cultural, and economic factors. In addition, Scheper-Hughes’s work shifts power away from Western psychology and brings to light the populations that are ignored or neglected by it. In this way, her work is also important because it offers an important resource as mental health is integrated into public health, and avoids using Western norms when considering a non-Western region and population.

Her work in Death Without Weeping has also provoked conversations in broader areas of public health about how mother love is defined, how bonding occurs between mother and child, and the importance of malnutrition to mental health and mother love. In general, some scholars seem to view her work as lacking some of the more technical, scholarly evidence to support her specific claims about psychology and malnutrition (Engle, 1994; Mull & Mull, 1994). However, most of those who have read her work acknowledge that it skillfully examines and depicts what life is like for mothers at the margins of Latin American society, making it an impactful book regardless of some of its drawbacks.

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Additional Resources

Chappell, J. (2018). Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (1993). Death Without Weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (2001). Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental illness in rural Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (2003). Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (2003). Commodifying Bodies. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

References

Engle, P.L. (1994). Death Without Weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (book review). Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 8(3), 346–349.

Farmer, P.E., Nizeye, B., Stulac, S., and Keshavjee, S. (2006). Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine. PLOS Medicine, 3(10), 1686–1691.

Mull, D.S. and Mull, J.D. (1994). Death Without Weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (book review). Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 8(3), 349–351.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (1989, October). Death Without Weeping: Has poverty ravaged mother love in the shantytowns of Brazil? Natural History, 8–16.

UC Berkeley. (2019). Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Retrieved from https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/nancy-scheper-hughes.