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Women usually lived in unfit working conditions on sugar plantations as laborers clearing or weeding, working as servants for the wealthy, or washing clothes on the riverbanks.
She lived in Bom Jesus da Mata, the sugar plantation zone of Northeastern Brazil.
Scheper-Hughes lived with some of the most poverished women in the world.
The life expectancy was only 40 years old.
Women in Brazil did not have access to the same resources to that of women in Canada.
Scheper-Hughes saw that the women did not want their children to die, but due to the horrifying living conditions the mothers had no choice but to choose which of their children should live.
She began her research by being concerned about the effects of "chronic hunger, sickness death, and loss on the ability to love, trust have faith" on maternal beliefs and behaviors.
Her first trip to Brazil was as a Peace Corps volunteer.
She was trying to help the mothers and children of the Brazilian slums.
The first thing that caught Ms.Scheper-Hughes eye was the mothers indifference towards the death of a child.
Due to unstable marriages and lack of extended family, the mothers are forced to leave their children in the house with the doors locked and hope for the best.
In the terrible conditions Scheper-Hughes is able to understand why the mothers must leave their young.
After her study was published, she was criticized for the way she portrayed the Brazilian women. To which she replied "I have described these women as allowing some of their children to die, as if this were an unnatural and inhuman act rather than, as i would assert, the way any one of us might act, reasonably and rationally, under similarly desperate conditions. Perhaps I have not emphasized enough... the poverty, deprivation, sexism, chronic hunger and economic exploitation. If mother... love is... a seemingly natural and universal script, what does it mean to women for whom scarcity, loss, sickness, and deprivation have made that love frantic and robbed them of their grief, seeming to turn their hearts to stone?" (Scheper-Hughes 1989)
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is known for her writing one anthropology of the body, hunger, illness medicine, psychiatry, madness, social suffering, violence and genocide.
The study of Death Without Weeping has taught us that when exposed to a specific environment, your behaviors may be altered.
We think this because when learning about this topic we found that many of the mothers lived in terrible environmental conditions. They experienced tremendous loss and had to be able to carry on in order to survive.
The loss of their children may have affected them, but they were never able to fully experience the loss because they were so used to it.
Handout given to us by Mr.Naphin.
No Name. 9 May,2015. Death Without
Weeping. eNotes. Ed. Frank Northen Magill. May 9, 2015. <http://www.enotes.com/topics/death-without-weeping#critical-essays-death-without-weeping-1>
Do you think that, if put under the same conditions as these Brazilian women, you may treat the loss of a child the same?
Do you think the way the women acted,when met with the loss of a child, was wrong?
What are you thoughts on how these women became unaffected by the loss of a child?
Do you think that people of third world countries are less affected by the death of their loved ones than people in first world countries? Why?
Born: September 25, 1944. New York
City, New York.
Education: University of California,
Berkley.
Awards: Guggenheim Fellowship for
Social Sciences, US & Canada.
This topic is relevant to us today as we are still experiencing severe environmental conditions and loss. Although we may not experience death without weeping often in our country. People in third world countries may find this concept more relevant to their lives. The world is always changing and hopefully in the future we may never have to have a country face death without weeping.