59 pages • 1 hour read
Nancy Scheper-HughesDeath Without Weeping
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “(M)Other Love: Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking”
Chapter 8 provides an in-depth examination on how situations of poverty, scarcity, and high infant mortality affect conventional practices of motherhood. The chapter begins in describing patterns of "neglect" among the mothers of Bom Jesus. The author describes situations in which mothers will come to believe that their young children cannot or will not survive; a host of reasons is invoked in these determinations, usually revolving around the child's demonstrated ability to combat diseases and accept nutrition.
The author has extreme difficulty with this situation―both as a volunteer worker and as an anthropologist―yet it is indicative of the gulf between the author's beliefs, and those of her subjects. The author however, makes the connection between attitudes and practices of women in this community, and those of 19th-century Western Europeans; the argument is that when infant mortality is generally higher, the acceptance of death is more prevalent. Furthermore, the author surmises, when looking at materials one or two generations removed from these higher-mortality periods, the attitude of women in these situations is similarly likened to a form of "neglect."Interviews with women in Bom Jesus confirm yet complicate this hypothesis, as the women in these communities report an ethic of scarcity, wherein poor women are deprived of intensive medical care and nutrition for newborns, as well as being pressed for their own time and energy from raising children and working. The result is that women must make a grim, economic calculation based off of this environmental scarcity. The folk practices which then ascribe liminality to these children, or fatalistically deem them as "angels," evolve to rationalize and obscure these choices. The author emphasizes that this ethos appears to outsiders as a corruption of maternal love by neglect, but in actuality speaks to a higher form of neglect and injustice active in that society.
Chapter 8 Analysis
Chapter 8 describes how the cultural conventions of motherhood are directly affected by circumstances of high infant mortality. Its focus is amplified by its placement between three axes of concern: the socioeconomic deprivation of the Alto and Bom Jesus, the latent public-health crises that predicate such high infant mortality, and the cultural practices by which people navigate these circumstances and create meaning.
The creation of meaning is the most significant and challenging theme. Specifically, this theme of meaning-making provides the biggest obstacles for the author's own position―that is to say, her motivated, critical subjectivity, and her insistence on acting within the lives of her subjects. The story of Zé and Lordes is perhaps most illustrative of this conflict and said conflict’s non-resolution: Zé is all but abandoned by his mother, Lordes; the author intervenes to provide care, which is successful. However, many years later, Zé is murdered. The murder is seen among many of the community as the fulfillment of the fate of a "doomed" child: Ze was born poor, fated to have a difficult life, and, therefore, his murder isn’t tragedy so much as it is predestination.
The fallacious character of this reasoning strikes the author as artificial and motivated, the attempt to bring "meaning" to tragedy. The presence of this supplemental "meaning-making" function undergirds much of the experience and practice of motherhood, in the context of trauma, deprivation, and confusion: this reaction to the inability of the community to provide care and safety in this way is something the members of this community themselves recognize―their faith becomes a grounding, organizing force. Thus, births and deaths become explicitly directed by an agency beyond their own, a move that mirrors their own relative powerlessness over these circumstances. This supposition is implicit throughout the author's treatment of these practices; although the author strives to sympathize with these mothers, it becomes clear to her that the desperation and trauma of these mothers' circumstances has created an ethic wholly alien to her own.
