Introduction

​ “Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ ethnography Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil is a disturbing, controversial, and deeply moving book, based on the author's experience, in the 1960's as a Peace Corps worker and in the 1980's as a social anthropologist, among the [Brazilian] poor of the Pernambuco Zona da Mata…Scheper-Hughes paints a social picture of the bustling town she calls Bom Jesus da Mata in northern Pernambuco, economically dependent on the three sugar mills in the município and the endless cane fields that surround them. The author's focus is on life in Alto do Cruzeiro, the crowded shantytown where urbanized rural workers live precarious lives without decent housing, sanitation, or clean water. Indeed, children in these shantytowns are “born without the traditional protection of breast-feeding, subsistence gardens, stable marriages, and multiple adult caretakers that exists in the interior.” Nevertheless, in a study undertaken during her fieldwork, Scheper-Hughes noted that Alto women had, on average, 9.5 pregnancies to the 3.3 pregnancies experienced by middle-class women.  She wonders, “why do these poor Brazilian women have so many babies?  Are they ignorant of birth control methods, or are they spiritually battered by the sterile and uncompassionate teachings of the Catholic church…?” Birth control and religion are certainly factors affecting the pregnancy rate among the women of the Alto. 

But as Scheper-Hughes learns, many other factors including technological advances that disrupt work life for men, low marriage rates, and illiteracy do not extinguish the human passion for sex. These factors combine with poverty, injustice, and deprivation, resulting in a high prevalence of infant death that haunts the Alto, where, in response, women have adopted a maternal philosophy that is startling, and challenges the Western social sciences paradigm of a universal “natural maternal instinct”

Pregnancy

​ Life in the Alto is a microcosm of the lifeways of people inhabiting a region, the Pernambuco, consisting of mutually dependent agribusinesses and surrounding shantytowns, which defines much of the 600,000 square miles of Northeastern Brazil today.  The Portuguese initially colonized the Pernambuco, enslaving the local Amerindian population and, later, importing black slaves from Africa.  “By 1630 there were 144 sugar plantations” in the region and by 1965, when Scheper-Hughes began her work there, just one Usina alone, a large and modern sugar plantation, produced over 1.2 million tons of sugar each year, up from 6,000 sacks in 1927.  “The transformation [by mechanization and the consolidation of landholdings] of the plantation economy, completed by the mid-twentieth century, had a disastrous effect on…the tenants, sharecroppers, and conditional squatters” that had traditionally cut, harvested, processed, and cleaned the sugarcane fields.  These displaced people became “rural migrants…forced off their small subsistence plots by large landowners wanting to use every available piece of land for sugar cultivation…[making] the Alto do Cruzeiro…the oldest, the largest, and the poorest of the shantytowns.” As Scheper-Hughes observed, men continue to dominate the rural sugarcane day-labor positions, earning about $10.87 per week in 1985. 

​ This left women in the Alto to work for Patronas (patrons), middle-class and wealthy Brazilians that occupy the walled villas and estates of Bom Jesus da Mata, earning about $1.00 a week washing, drying, ironing, and starching clothes.  “On the Alto do Cruzeiro, where as much as 75 percent of family income is spent on basic food purchases, the net result [is] hunger.” Modern relationships and families in the Alto, then, are characterized as sometimes transient, and usually by subsistence-related motives, as men and fathers always provide groceries, usually weekly, to help women sustain their households. “People of the Alto form households and families through an inventive bricolage, then fashioning and making up relations as they go along, following a structured improvisation. Women do sometimes fashion husbands…of weekend visitors… [One woman described] her ‘husband’ during the months that he visited her on Saturday nights, bringing her a Feira basket of groceries. When the groceries ended, so did the relationship.”

​ These conditions, poverty, hunger, fluid relationships, and a religious “stigma” associated with birth control have contributed to high infant mortality rates in shantytowns of Northeastern Brazil.  Women “object” to birth control for traditional fears that the medication causes cancers or other illness, and as it serves as a reminder that they are disobeying the teachings of the Catholic church, exciting a strong religious aversion to the use of birth control. The overall effects on the mothers of the Alto are “conditions of high mortality and high fertility… [and a] reproductive strategy [emerged]: to give birth to many children and on the expectation that only a few survive infancy, to invest selectively in those considered the ‘best bets’ for survival in terms of preferred sex, birth order, appearance, health, and perceived viability.”

​Maternal Philosophy

​ As a result, “a very different sort of maternal thinking, [that] just as surely calls forth different maternal attachments, feelings, and sentiments, such as those implicated in the mortal neglect of ‘high-risk’ infants and babies on the Alto do Cruzeiro or the absence of deep grieving or a profound sense of loss accompanying the death of each and every fragile child” develops in the shantytowns across the Pernambuco.  Scheper-Hughes notes from the fieldwork data that “[t]he ‘average’ woman in the sample…had experienced 9.5 pregnancies and had 4.2 living children.  She had 1.6 miscarriages, abortions, or stillbirths, and she had lost 3.6 small children (2.9 of those infants) among those born live to her.” (306) “[D]uring the first twelve months of life…81.5% of all child deaths take place.”

​ Selective infanticide and exploitative relationships with men and Patronas, then, driven by hunger, contribute to the maternal thinking of mothers on the Alto.  With few resources and a stigma surrounding breastfeeding, many poor Alto women “produced patterns of nurturing that differentiated between those infants thought of as thrivers and survivors and those thought of as born already ‘wanting to die.’ The survivors were nurtured, while stigmatized, doomed infants were left to die…’of neglect’… Although [Nancy Scheper-Hughes] found that it was…hardly difficult…to rescue infants and toddlers from death by diarrhea and dehydration…it was more difficult to enlist a mother herself.”  Some infants were perceived by Alto mothers as “ill-fated,” “better off dead,” and already considered “angel[s]” and therefore left to die without nourishment. This “mortal selective neglect,” or “passive infanticide” is not only unique to Third World shantytowns, it also “may have its correlates in our own impoverished urban communities.”

​ On the Alto, Scheper-Hughes maintains, there is a “medicalization of hunger” (Scheper-Hughes 1992:74) and a “social production of indifference to child death” manifested in the loosely defined “psychosomatic folk syndrome…, [a] common and extreme state of nervousness,” (563) called nervosa generally, and referred to in those afflicted persons, including infants, as Fraquez, a “weakness, frailty, shortcoming, [or] helplessness.” In one passage from Death Without Weeping a midwife intervenes in the care of a young mother’s baby and explains, “When a baby is born [healthy and robust], I instruct the mother to give the infant a cleansing herbal tea… [to] strengthen the baby.  But if the infant is born puny and wasted or [ill-fated], I instruct her to withhold tea…No one is going to let a newborn die of hunger.  We let Jesus decide the appropriate hour, according to his plan.” Adults and infants alike are prescribed “tonics” or “tranquilizers” for complaints of nervosa or Franquez, but the doctor does not prescribe food.  Breastfeeding is seen “as a mark of not being an urban person…primitive and uncivilized” and Alto women, in their exploitative relationships with men and fathers, take pride in receiving groceries and powdered milk substitutes. “And so a good part of learning how to mother on the Alto includes knowing when to let go of a child who shows that he wants to die.  The other part is knowing just when it is safe to let oneself go enough to love a child, to trust him or her to be willing to enter the Luta (struggle or fight) that is this life on earth.”

​Maternal Instinct

​ Having spent over twenty-five years working with the people, and especially with the women on the Alto, Scheper-Hughes aims for a “good enough” approach to anthropological fieldwork and in the resulting, comprehensive ethnography Death Without Weeping.  “The anthropologist is an instrument of cultural translation that is necessarily flawed and biased.” As noted, Scheper-Hughes discerned the startling maternal philosophy of the women on the Alto and disrupted the commonly accepted wisdom surrounding a universal “natural maternal instinct” demonstrating that the “maternal instinct” so prevalent in Western societies can be interrupted when gender roles are severely skewed by extreme poverty, injustice, and deprivation.  Instead, Scheper-Hughes notes that “[m]other love is anything other than natural and instead represents a matrix of images, meanings, sentiments, and practices that are everywhere socially and culturally produced.” The cultural production of motherhood combines with the economic and political realities expressed in the maternal philosophy on the Alto, highlighting the unique way that women mother and cherish their babies in this impoverished area.  One that asks the reader to “look dispassionately at the problem of child survival and conclude that a child died from mortal neglect, even at her or his mother’s own hands, without also blaming the mother – that is, without holding her personal and morally accountable.”

​ The most popular form of birth control on the Alto is sterilization, but it is expensive and requires “one to be politically connected… Consequently, only 13 percent of the seventy-two Alto women [of the field study] were able to arrange for sterilization, although many more had tried to do so.” And, while middle- and upper-class women have easy access to this permanent form of birth control, the poor do not.  So, a culture of blame has developed, where the rich blame the poor and, consequently, the poor blame themselves, for the high birth rates on the Alto.  Men, for their part, want to provide for families and consider it a matter of pride to be able to produce and support a household offering a sense of “mission” and “cultural competence” for them. With abundant work for women at lower wages, and a machismo that dominates the work in the already crowded sugarcane fields preventing women from working these fields, men are underemployed compared to women, further eroding men’s confidence.

Furthermore, “It erodes women’s respect for men in some cases even though they know perfectly well that the men simply don’t have access to [as] many jobs as women do.” “On the Alto do Cruzeiro a mother and her surviving children form the stable core of the household and…fragile infants, casual ‘husbands,’ and ‘weekend’ fathers are best thought of as detachable, exchangeable, and circulating units.”

“In all, what is created is a social environment that minimizes the ‘individual’ nature of the infant. The infant is viewed as human, to be sure, but as decidedly less human than the older child and certainly than the adult. Hence, it is entirely plausible that Alto women who have lost one or more young babies do not feel the depth of sorrow and grief that our theories of attachment, separation, and loss suggest must or should be there.”

As outlined, Scheper-Hughes’ ethnography carefully draws attention “[to] the political and public processes that routinize child death as the average, expectable outcome for poor families and to the indifference of the Catholic clergy to infant death amid obsessive Catholic cant on the social evils of birth control and abortion.” Combined with the cultural moors in Brazil and selective feeding practices for infants, unique conditions are created among the poor people’s living in the Alto do Cruzeiro “that allow for death without weeping.”

​ Taken as a whole, Scheper-Hughes’ “good enough” approach casts her in both roles, as anthropologist/ethnographer and human being, as a person “that can hardly help becoming involved in the lives of the people [she had] chosen to be [her] teacher”. (24)  She notes, to wit, “[t]hat I have been ‘thrown’ into human existence at all presupposes a given, moral relationship to an original (m)other and she to me.” In this way, her ethnography truly represents, as Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas graciously encouraged, a radical work.  “A work conceived radically is the movement of the Same towards the Other which never returns to the Same.” It is in this radical way, as both learner and teacher, that Scheper-Hughes, through her many years living among the women of the Alto, revolutionized the fields of medical anthropology and ethnography, reimagining the “natural mother instinct” as a product of cultural and social conditions for women the world over.

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References

Flowers, Nancy M. "Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil." Cadernos de Saúde Pública. Vol. 8, ed. 2. 1992.

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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley. University of California. 1992.

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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. The Gender/sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. Ed. Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela Di Leonardo. New York. Routledge. 1997.