Death without weeping : the violence of everyday life in Brazil

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Title:

Author:

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy.

ISBN:

9780520075375

Personal Author:

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy.

Publication Information:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c1992.

Physical Description:

xiii, 614 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

General Note:

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

Contents:

Prologue: Sugar House -- Introduction: Tropical Sadness -- Ch. 1. O Nordeste: Sweetness and Death --Ch. 2. Bom Jesus: One Hundred Years Without Water --Ch. 3. Reciprocity and Dependency: The Double Ethic of Bom Jesus -- Ch. 4. Delirio de Fome: The Madness of Hunger -- Ch. 5. Nervoso: Medicine, Sickness, and Human Needs -- Ch. 6. Everyday Violence: Bodies, Death, and Silence -- Ch. 7. Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death -- Ch. 8. (M)Other Love: Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking -- Ch. 9. Our Lady of Sorrows: A Political Economy of the Emotions --Ch. 10. A Knack for Life:. The Everyday Tactics of Survival -- Ch. 11. Carnaval: The Dance Against Death -- Ch. 12. De Profundis: Out of the Depths --Epilogue: Acknowledgments and Then Some.

Subject Term:

Poor women -- Brazil, Northeast.

Mother and infant -- Brazil, Northeast.

Infants -- Brazil, Northeast -- Death.

Violence -- Brazil, Northeast.

Geographic Term:

Brazil, Northeast -- Social conditions.

Brazil, Northeast -- Social life and customs.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168015694470	303.60981 S325D 1992	1	Searching... Unknown

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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.