Death without weeping : Death without weeping : the violence of everyday life in Brazil / Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, author.

Contributor:

American Council of Learned Societies.

Series:

ACLS Humanities E-Book.

California series on social choice and political economy ; 21

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Infants--Brazil, Northeast--Death.

Infants.

Mother and infant--Brazil, Northeast.

Mother and infant.

Poor women--Brazil, Northeast.

Poor women.

Violence--Brazil, Northeast.

Violence.

Brazil, Northeast--Social conditions.

Brazil, Northeast.

Brazil, Northeast--Social life and customs.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 614 p. ) ill. ;

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, California : University of California Press, 1993.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

O Nordeste: sweetness and death

Bom Jesus: one hundred years without water

Reciprocity and dependency: the double ethic of Bom Jesus

Delírio de Fome: the madness of hunger

Nervoso: medicine, sickness, and human needs

Everyday violence: bodies, death, and silence

Two feet under and a cardboard coffin: the social production of indifference to child death

(M)other love: culture, scarcity, and maternal thinking

Our lady of sorrows: a political economy of the emotions

A knack for life: the everyday tactics of survival

Carnaval: the dance against death

De profundis: out of the depths.

Notes:

"A Centennial book"--Half t.p.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 567-587) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 25. Nov 2020)

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780520911567

0520911563

9780585197579

0585197571

OCLC:

1224279231