Critical Analysis Of Nancy Scheper-Hughes

The article’s opening paragraph informs us that Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a Peace Corps volunteer in Alto do Cruzeiro, one of three shanty towns outside of Bom Jesus in the sugar plantation zone of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil. This was a community of abject poverty, violence and death, where employment opportunities for the women she eventually studied were limited primarily to domestic positions in Bom Jesus or work on the sugar plantations. Soon after her arrival she asks her host, Nailza, about the church bells frequent ringing, to which Nailza responded “its nothing, just another little angel (failure to thrive infants) gone to heaven.” She returned fifteen years later in 1982 and made several subsequent visits to study the women of Alto do Cruzeiro and their children with emphasis on how “some of them managed to stay alive” and what, to an outsider, appeared to be the casual indifference to the death of children. Her key statement for me was; “societies characterized by high child mortality and by a correspondingly high….fertility, cultural practices of infant and child care tend to be organized primarily around survival goals.” It was in other words a survival strategy for the mothers. In the end she concludes that the mothers keep their distance, do not become attached to those children unlikely to survive, and invest their energy and emotions (become attached) to those children who are robust, and appear likely to survive.

In the excerpt of the book that we read, Dr Schepper-Hughes gathered information related primarily to infant birthrate, infant mortality and the interactions between mothers and their children. Data was collected in a variety of ways/sources. She used interviews, observation of mothers and t...

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...e are often convinced that the way we do things is right and any deviation is wrong. For me this article reminded me that not everyone, every culture deals with things in the same way. For these women and their children this was/is a survival mechanism, to protect the women’s sanity/emotions and at the same time allow the birthing and parenting process to continue. Children are born “without traditional protection of breast feeding,”fresh produce, “stable marriages and adult caretakers,” where “single parenting is the norm, and women are frequently forced into the shadow economy…”. Born into an environment of food shortages, poor education, “political and economic chaos”. Such an environment makes it extremely difficult to successfully raise a child and given the infant mortality rate, the mothers must find a survival skill or coping strategy to survive.