Death Without Weeping Ethnography Review

Ethnography Review: Death Without Weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes

As an ethnography, Death Without Weeping describes the way of life of people in a Northeast Brazilian shantytown. As the author herself says, it is an attempt at a "good enough" ethnography: one that seeks to give voice to these people without futilely trying to sweep the anthropologist's personal perspective under the rug (28). Scheper-Hughes considers the relationship between this town, Alto, and colonialism, power, capitalism, religion, and the overall history of hardship and horror. Scheper-Hughes approached her fieldwork with an interesting participatory tactic, which has allowed her to make unique conclusions but which also raises the question of audience.

The author began her relationship with the people of Alto when she was stationed there with the Peace Corps in 1964. In this role she was a community organizer and was very much an actor in the daily lives of the people there. When she came back as an Anthropologist almost twenty years later, it seems she had to confront the disparate characters of community participant and community ethnographer. It is in her fusing of these two roles that she was able to construct Death Without Weeping as a realistic representation of a place and a people.

The first step in this is acknowledgment of the Western Enlightenment tenets which have created a potentially flawed view of what knowledge should be. Scheper-Hughes rejects that knowledge can or should be acquired objectively, and adopts what she calls a phenomenological approach. The world is personal, and that what works in one place does not have to work universally in order to be legitimate practice. There is no "universal and absolute truth" or scientific neutrality; the best solution is to try and look at individual and community aspects of perception of phenomena (24). As an innately non-neutral observer, Scheper-Hughes participated in the political and social movements of Alto (setting up the childcare center and UPAC change group). She essentially combined her actual ethnographic work with a public stance on the living conditions of the people of Alto, resulting in an especially well informed radical action.

With her focus mainly on women and children of the Nordeste, Scheper-Hughes interviewed hundreds of women about their reproductive history, and talked to hospitals, morgues, the Church, politicians, and any person who was a part of a woman's life there. The most in depth of her lines of inquiry was in the lives of a handful of women who were her friends. She had even delivered some of their children while she was in the Peace Corps there, and as an Anthropologist came back to study their families as they survived the luta (struggle) of every single day. Her methods and interactions are ideal for an ethnography as they do not reduce a people to data points and they present more than just a personal diary type of description.

Her research question concerned the ability of women to cope with the loss of so many children. As an American, this seemed impossible and perhaps even loveless at times. As she learned about the full process of getting by in Alto, she developed a sense of what she called "selective neglect" in which the consciousness of the mothers "constantly shifts back and forth between allowed and disallowed levels of awareness" (390). After experiencing the loss of children to starvation and disease, women would not allow themselves to become attached to and care for their new children. The investment was too physically and emotionally costly. They would not do this neglect consciously, but in the end they acknowledged the trade off they had to make to get by with so much loss. Death Without Weeping as a research project is an explanation of the social and economic conditions that can lead to a strategy such as selective neglect of children.

The Nordeste is an area of extreme poverty in the silent shadow of a violent military history, colonialization, and most recently, the sugar industry. Scheper-Hughes describes it as a "satellite of the sugar plantation and sugar mills, and anonymity, depersonalization, and surveillance are used [...] to create a climate of fear, suspiciousness, and hopelessness" (532). Here she acts as a Medical Anthropologist in identifying the cause of an area-wide sickness. The history of oppression and the absolute indifference of the government to its people in Nordeste are the root of what she calls "the diseased tissues of the social body gone awry" (26). The comparison can then be drawn between selective neglect and inflammation in response to infection, say, as both are symptoms of illness because they are both coping strategies.

In rejecting the fly-on-the-wall ethnographic method, Scheper-Hughes does not trip on the fine line between reducing her subjects to purely victims and romanticizing their resistance. The people of Alto are oppressed by the government as well as by the economic environment created by the sugar plantations. This does make every action of the poor Altoans the result of the government or the sugar companies, as they are still autonomous individuals. Exploring the strategies they supply to cope with the oppression, such as their dark humor or cultural practices shows how resistant the Altoans are to the waves of injustice that variably crash over their hill. However, this discounts the suffering and terror they must live through. Scheper-Hughes walks a middle ground, acknowledging "the destructive signature of poverty and oppression on the individual and the social bodies, [...] but also the creative, if often contradictory, means the people of the Alto use to stay alive and even thrive with their wit and their wits in tact" (533). The message is not of victimization or resistance, but of existence. The people are just surviving.

Ultimately, Scheper-Hughes is describing a curse of silence on the Nordeste. The people do not speak out in public due to the fear of imprisonment or shunning, and they have little voice to begin with due to the widespread illiteracy in the community. The fearful and miserable silence of the Altoan citizens is only met with silence from the government and institutions in their complete lack of acknowledgement. The bureaucratic indifference toward the suffering of the shanty-towns creates a wall against which the Altoans must push all their lives. This theme of silence is embodied in the mute little ghost of Mercea, the daughter of one of Scheper-Hughe's friends who died as a surprise (502). Biu, the mother, finally allowed herself to love and invest in Mercea when the girl died suddenly of pneumonia. Her image came to her sister for many years after, silent and searching. Mercea symbolizes the silence forced on the people of Alto, the silence of the fleetingly alive children, and the silent withholding of personal connection that painful loss forced Altoans to embrace.

While her stance as community activist and also careful ethnographer has allowed Scheper-Hughes to beautifully describe the silence and suffering of the people of Alto, this calls forth the question of her audience. If she seeks to give a voice to the silent, who then does she want to listen? Whose ears and eyes are meant to understand this story? Who can take action? If the book is published in English for the academic Anthropological community, how does this help the Nordeste? Will the Brazilian government read Death Without Weeping and build a public school for everyone in Alto? Will the sugar mills read the book and pay higher wages? Understanding the social work of Death Without Weeping requires exploring the role of Medical Anthropology in modern global health.

As Scheper-Hughes describes, she is pointing a trembling hand toward the diseased and ill fabric of society. In this way, she is acting as a muckraker: initiating action simply by describing the horror and hoping whoever reads her words will be surprised enough to act. This can be very effective: in 1906, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle about the meat packing industry shocked Americans so much that the government had to react and ultimately created the Food and Drug Administration, though this did not address the author's main concerns about wage labor (Dawson). In this sense, Death Without Weeping is an expose, one that has the ability to create change by putting knowledge into enough hands.

Is there a more direct job to do for Death Without Weeping and Medical Anthropology in general? Is the role simply to direct powerful eyes towards regions of broken threads and suffering? According to anthropologists James Pfeiffer Mark Nichter, Medical Anthropology must grow a political pair of lungs and not just show everyone interested where to pour their attention, but translate the needs and perceptions of groups of people into a language that the global health arena can understand (2008). That way, whoever may be concerned about a problem can see the bigger picture of what they actually could do to help. Critical Medical Anthropology takes careful awareness of the destructive and confused birth of global health and combines this with the practice of cultural brokering to direct the most effective and wholesome solutions to complicated problems.

The question of just who Death Without Weeping sought to teach is a more general question of who should be the actor of health change. Scheper-Hughes worked on changing the perspective of the people in Alto by setting up open discussion forums, action groups, and communal care centers. She was doing this simultaneously with her ethnographic work. It seems that Death Without Weeping is actually meant to show how communities are the source of social change, and that whoever wishes to enact change must, like her, understand and accept the way of existence of the people whose lives they want to change. Their job has to be giving the people a voice loud enough to be heard by those who hold the most sway over life. In doing so, communities like Alto become a paradigm for other changes. An NGO official can read this book and focus on providing the resources to give their target community a local voice enough that they and their government and surroundings can find their own solution.

Sheper-Hughes was a part of the community she sought to learn about in the Nordeste region of Brazil. That way, she constructed a holistic representation of life in the poor shantytowns. She addressed the historical background of the area, the total institution created by the sugar industry there, and the troubling question of love and personal investment in a community so stricken with death and frantic hunger. Her theme of insidious and thorough silence helped to illuminate the importance of community voice. At first it seems her point is to cast a large net to attract people into the cause of these people. This, however, is not the case. Looking at the ideal future role of Medical Anthropology as described by Pfeiffer and Nichter, it becomes clear that Scheper-Hughes’s actual message is to learn from Alto’s example. Her action there was to give Altoans more of a voice in their area and against the Brazilian government as well. Those seeking to help oppressed communities in the future should do the same.

Works Cited

Dawson, Hugh J. 1991. "Winston Churchill and Upton Sinclair: An Early Review of

The Jungle". American Literary Realism, 1870-1910. 24 (1): 72-78.

Pfeiffer J., and Nichter M. 2008. "What can critical medical anthropology contribute

to global health?: A health systems perspective". Medical Anthropology

Quarterly. 22 (4): 410-415.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in

Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.