Nancy Scheper-Hughes 
Death Without Weeping 
The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside ‘favela’. Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing – and controversial – is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.


This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and dea

Tabla de materias

Prologue: Sugar House

Introduction: Tropical Sadness

Chapter 1: O Nordeste: Sweetness and Death

Chapter 2: Bom Jesus: One Hundred Years Without Water

Chapter 3: Reciprocity and Dependency: The Double Ethic of Bom Jesus

Chapter 4:
Delírio de Fome: The Madness of Hunger

Chapter 5:
Nervoso: Medicine, Sickness, and Human Needs

Chapter 6: Everday Violence: Bodies, Death, and Silence

Chapter 7: Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death

Chapter 8: (M)Other Love: Cultue, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking

Chapter 9: Our Lady of Sorrows: A Political Economy of the Emotions

Chapter 10: A Knack for Life: The Everyday Tactics of Survival

Chapter 11:
Carnaval: The Dance Against Death

Chapter 12:
De Profundis: Out of the Depths

Epilogue: Acknowledgments and Then Some

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Sobre el autor

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (California, 1979) received the Margaret Mead Award in 1981. She is the winner of the 2000 J. I. Stanley Prize of the School of American Research.