Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Centennial Book) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "We begin, then, with the context, the "600,000 square miles of suffering," as Josue de Castro (1969) described them, that constitute the pockmarked face of..." (more)
Key Phrases: carnaval play, shantytown association, creche building, Bom Jesus, Born Jesus, Dona Maria (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Brazil's shantytowns, poverty has transformed the meaning of mother love. The routineness with which young children die, argues University of California anthropologist Scheper-Hughes, causes many women to affect indifference to their offspring, even to neglect those infants presumed to be doomed or "wanting to die." Maternal love is delayed and attenuated, with dire consequences for infant survival, according to the author's two decades of fieldwork. Scheper-Hughes also maintains that the Catholic Church contributes to the indifference toward children's deaths by teaching fatalistic resignation and upholding its strictures against birth control and abortion. This important, shocking study resonates with the emotion of Oscar Lewis's ethnographic classics as it follows three generations of women in a plantation town. The compelling narrative investigates the everyday tactics of survival that people use to stay alive in a culture of institutionalized dependency ravaged by sickness, scarcity, feudal working conditions and death-squad "disappearances."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This book by an anthropology professor from Berkeley, formerly a Peace Corps volunteer in northeast Brazil, is simply breathtaking. Its controversial theme--that mother love as conventionally understood is a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as poor women in Brazil cannot, that their infants will live--is, in the best sense, illuminated by deconstructionist and feminist thought. The author's understanding of these lives on the edge is at times sympathetic, passionate, and sophisticated. But what makes the book as exciting to read as a good novel is her long-term interaction with a group of people that she clearly loves and the complete lack of the sense of the "other" that is so often found in anthropological writing. This work should have as much influence on studies of the relationship of women and children as did Margaret Mead's Growing Up in Samoa (1936) on the shaping of adolescence or Oscar Lewis's The Children of Sanchez (1961) on the cultural effects of poverty. Highly recommended.
- Nancy Padgett Lazar, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 628 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (November 9, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520075374
• ISBN-13: 978-0520075375
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #61,215 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for the faint of heart, October 9, 2002

By	Leonardo Alves (Houghton, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews

Scheper-Hughes's book is certainly the most impacting book I have read in months. I cannot call it entertaining but it is riveting in presenting a mind-boggling situation of abject poverty in Northeastern Brazil with its consequent infant and child mortality and impacts on the family structure.

Death Without Weeping is a very original, very relevant, and carefully written book although not perfect. The book is the result of extensive field research by Dr. Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley but nevertheles very readable. I could understand and enjoy most of it without having had extensive training in Anthropology.

The author does a wonderful job in translating Alto do Cruzeiro reality into something the average American can understand. This "translation" certainly adds a bias but is still indispensable in my opinion. I consider that the author's religious beliefs strongly affected the outcome of the book and that I think could have been avoided.

I understand that the author has it's ethics and wouldn't reveal in the text the actual location name for Bom Jesus da Mata. I'm not tied by the same ethics so I can tell it: Bom Jesus da Mata is actually Timbauba, a 60,000 inhabitants town on the outskirts of Recife. The book subtitle, "The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil" couldn't be worse. Timbauba is not Brazil. It has its own very specific problems and to read the book without understanding the great diversity among Brazil's regions would be very unfair to the country. Even in a local scale, Alto do Cruzeiro is not Timabuba and Timbauba is not Pernambuco. If you read the book don't rule out the possibility of going down to Brazil and having a wonderful time there. Tourism is a very good way of alleviating if not solving the problems presented in the book.

I have read now dozens of books written in English by the so-called Brazilianists who most of the times are not Brazilians themselves. Most of the books have the same problem of Death Without Weeping: there's a total sloppiness in spelling the Portuguese words. I can't believe UC Berkeley couldn't hire a Brazilian graduate student to proofread the originals. Moreover, the Geraldo Vandre quote on the very first page of the book, which gives the book its name was completely fabricated. Disparada is a great song and for writing songs such as "Disparada" and "Para Nao Dizer Que Nao Falei Das Flores", Geraldo Vandre was captured and tortured by the military dictatorship in Brazil. He was later released but severely braindamaged. However, the verses Scheper-Hughes quoted do not exist in "Disparada".

I was shocked to learn on the book's Epilogue who Seu Jacques, whom the book is dedicated to, was. But this suspense I'm not going to break.

Leonardo Alves - Houghton, MI - October 2002

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nancy Scheper-Hughes takes a critical-interpretive approach., November 10, 1999

By A Customer

Nancy Scheper-Hughes' book "Death Without Weeping" is an outstanding piece of a true anthropological approach to studying a difficult concept: Mothers in Brazil do not mourn for dead infants. Coming from America, it seems difficult to understand the lack of innate "Mother Love." Scheper-Hughes looks at both the political-economic problems in Brazil as a coutry as well as the beliefs and meanings that mothers living in a Shantytown place on their infants (dead or alive). By looking at records, talking to officials, and researching the history of Brazil, Nancy Scheper-Hughes is able to understand how the state of the political and econimic system in Brazil is partially responsible for the horrible deaths and indifferent mothers living in these shantytowns. Alternatively she has been able to get a true understanding of what meanings these women place on their infants death. By looking at both sides, the way Scheper-Hughes has done, we can obtain a better understanding of the true problem and how the people deal with it. Although Nancy Scheper-Hughes does not offer solutions in this book, she tells all of the clues needed to find a solution. Great Book!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Modern Ethnography, April 27, 2005

By	Earl Dennis (San Francisco, California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Scheper-Hughes not only crafts a thorough, complex ethnography, but she takes a risk by putting a piece of herself into it as well. Here is the introduction I wrote for a term paper about this book:

Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes covers rough territory in Death Without Weeping, an ethnography about sugar cane workers in Northeastern Brazil. In chapters eight and nine she discusses the concepts of maternity and infanticide in a manner that dissolves their seemingly diametric natures and exposes an enigma of conflict and confluence inherent in their layered reality. But how can we contrast our established notions of maternity and infanticide with Scheper-Hughes' statements about them in a context that is emically true to the population her research is based on? Some things about maternity might seem clear: positive maternity encompasses nurturance and doting love, while negative maternity suggests neglect and even murder; yet Scheper-Hughes brings into question commonly held notions about the biological necessities and cultural expectations of maternity that reveal contradictions, blind alleys, and misleading parochial assumptions. This ethnography about the sugarcane workers of the Alto do Cruzeiro slum in the town of Bom Jesus, Brazil causes us to re-evaluate our understanding of maternity in the face of established cultural and biological contexts, and invites a more detailed, elemental, philosophical gaze. The observations made in Death Without Weeping force us to retreat in search of a neutral ground free from the biases we may hold about `American' or `Brazilian' maternity, and abandon our fear of naivety by asking, what in fact is maternity, and what do we know about it?

A gripping book, a masterful ethnography.