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

Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil Reviews

• 
  Steve

  This may be the first ethnography I've read; what a great effort it is. I imagine dozens of dimensions constituting cultural mores and I further imagine tens, or perhaps hundreds, of thousands of cultures that either currently exist or have existed through history. Yet I evaluate the world through the lens of only one, the culture I live in now. Ms. Scheper-Hughes does a wonderful job bringing us inside the culture of poverty in northeast Brazil, in the process revealing the raw biases afoot in my thinking. I'm glad serendipity led me to this important, well-researched and written, book.
  
  I once referred to my therapist as an agent of the state, a proponent of the status quo. He seemed to resist very much this thought. So I was pleased to come across the following text in Ms. Scheper-Hughes' work:
  
  

  In advanced industrial societies and in modern, bureaucratic, and welfare states, the institutions of violence generally operate more covertly. A whole array of educational, social welfare, medical, psychiatric, and legal experts collaborate in the management and control of sentiments and practices that threaten the stability of the state and the fragile consensus on which it claims to base its legitimacy. We can call these institutions, agents, and practices the "softer" forms of social control, the gloved hand of the state.

  
  
  I wonder if Ms. Scheper-Hughes is free to grab a coffee sometime?
• 
  Lexington

  This was an amazing read.
  
  It was a requirement for one of my college classes and was painfully difficult to get through because of the extreme poverty that the author helplessly witnessed. It's one of the few books that I have read which inspired me to do additional research.
  
  For all of the happy-ending-story-loving people out there -- be warned! This is a very depressing read, but I would argue that feeling something from a book is better than nothing.
• 
  Melinda

  Controversial and criticized for her work, I couldn't put this book down. Scheper-Hughes was a requirement for one of my Anthropology classes, and it forced me to think outside the box. Having spent 30+ years of her life with these people, she doesn't exactly give an un-biased Anthropological report, as we're taught as students. Personally I feel like it’s kind of refreshing to read an account of the lives of these people with flair of bias and personal experience. Whether or not you believe her depiction of the 'loveless mother', this book still captures life in a Brazilian shantytown quite well.
• 
  Núria Araüna

  Besides the description of the violence in Brazil she gives very interesting insights of the strategical functions of this violence to establish control and sustain inequalities. Her theory has applications in other contexts of marginalisation such as the police management of drug issues and reinforment of penal systems in the european liberal democracies.
• 
  William

  This is a brave book, if not for its subject matter, then at the very least for its broad interpretive strokes. While you may not agree with every interpretation, you have to give NSH credit for her boldness. Good to argue with yes, but even better to think with.
• 
  Michelle

  Anthropology to what end? What do we owe to the people we study?
• 
  Shul

  My Anthropology class used this as one of my reading topics this semester. I found the content of the book very interesting and the discussions that came out of the book equally so.
  
  In this book, Nancy Scheper-Hughes delves into the lives of the people of Bom Jesus (name changed for privacy) and how they and their children are starving to death every day. It goes very deep into the reasons behind the daily actions of the people living in Bom Jesus and the ways they handle the trauma of death that surrounds them constantly.
• 
  Helen Stout

  Was a difficult read, but only because of the sad subject matter. I would recommend this to anyone who has an interest in understanding the complexities that can sometimes exist in infant mortality and motherhood. I enjoyed it and found it to be really eye opening.
• 
  Carrie

  A thorough and heart-wrenching examination of how endemic poverty and the church and state's indifference to it can challenge the notions of everything we understand about family, love, and survival. This book will stay with me for a long time.
• 
  Barbara

  This is probably the saddest book I've ever read.
• 
  Ryan Mahon

  Brilliant, haunting and moving. Medical anthropology that reads like a riveting novel. This is a must read. The Tolstoy of her genre and field.
• 
  Kristin

  I liked this book a lot, it gave a very close insiders-perspective into this Brazilian village. Scheper-Hughes has spent years and years (almost 30 I think) with these villagers and represents their culture very well, although I definitely thought that she crossed a line at some point and got way to close to these people....closer than any anthropologist should get I think. I'd almost call it interference. Nonetheless it was very interesting.
• 
  BadReetReviews

  The author worked as a community nurse in a pueblo in the NE of Brazil and returned there to do her thesis. It's a heartbreaking book to read (unless you're a vegan, and used to the heartlessness of humans), because the people she writes about are so very poor that it doesn't mean much to them when one of their babies dies. One less mouth to feed.
  
  What is infuriating is the attitude of capitalists towards the poor here, whose poverty they caused, as their attitude is everywhere.
• 
  Courtney Shore

  A beautifully written, honest portray of life in Brazil and constant violence due to famine, poverty and death. This was an emotionally difficult book for me to read but I recommend it for anyone looking for a deep look at Brazilian life and struggles. Specifically those focused around maternal love of and relating to child and infant death (due to illness) and infanticide.
• 
  Karem Diaz

  25 años de trabajo de campo y más de 500 hojas de resultados que tienen la magia de poder resumirse en una palabra: saudades (obviamente enmarcada en todo un capítulo). Sirve un montón para la discusión sobre el “naturalismo” de la maternidad en las mujeres, súper fácil de seguir también (y el uso del lenguaje-cambiar al portugués cuando es necesario- es 💯).
• 
  Pablo

  I don’t even know how or what to say about this book. It just speaks to how difficult it was to read this book. I wish everyone would read the insights on motherhood.
  
  All I can say is, I love that ethnographers are subtly (or not) undermining the work of analytic philosophers... and the philosophers won’t ever find out because I doubt they��re reading ethnographies.
• 
  Michael Andersen-Andrade

  Death Without Weeping helped me understand why the responses to death and violence by my Brazilian family and friends who live in the favela are sometimes quite different that what I would normally anticipate. It's a must read for anyone who wants to understand favela life.
• 
  Zoe

  Heartbreaking and infuriating ethnofraphic about the impact of class striation and commercialized agriculture in second world economies. It's a huge read, and I had to finish on a shirt schedule as I was reading it for a class, but I wish I had had more time to really digest the information.
• 
  Tatiana

  The picture that Scheper-Hughes paints with her writing about life in the Alto is an intense one. While at times what she writes and describes might seem unimaginable, the things in this book will stick with you. Especially the introduction.
• 
  لميا

  beautifully written book, but I felt it had questionable ethics in terms of the ethnography conducted and the research question asked. It felt like voyeurism at one point and I was not comfortable reading it.
• 
  Rock Angel

  Author, an Professor of Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley, lived 30 years locally before writing this book.
  
  To do: search for an edition of New Internationalist ~1994 on this subj / then i wont have to read 600pp!!
  
• 
  Tim McNulty

  This book was illuminating and heartbreaking. It is, however, a very thick book lol. I think it balanced theory and anecdotes and statistics well, but as you can see it took me quite some time to get through it.
• 
  Tl

  My favorite anthropologist!!
• 
  Ryan Lincoln

  Recommended by anthropologist Michael Jackson as an example of anthropology that connects scholarship to advocacy.
• 
  Calen

  Read this in Medical anthropology. Interesting. Heartbreaking. Phenomenal.
  
• 
  Tara Bianca

  a classic, the narrative is gripping...
• 
  Kerry

  Although very depressing, this book paints a very real picture of the struggle of everyday life and how people deal emotionally with the very high rates of child death in Brazil.