Death Without Weeping Analysis

Critical Response #2 Death Without Weeping is an ethnography of daily life in Alto de Cruzeiro in Brazil. Nancy Scheper-Hughes details how “hunger, sickness …and loss” play out in the lives of the women and children she has worked with for generations (Scheper-Hughes 15). During her time in the Alto, Scheper-Hughes explores ideas concerning how anthropologists may ethically reflect on cultural practices without judging the practices in terms of Western values. Plagued by sickness, scarcity, and loss, this is an account of women struggling to survive in shantytowns on the impoverished slopes of Northeast Brazil. Scheper-Hughes recalls her attendance of a funeral of one of the Alto children and is disturbed by the reaction of the mother, a woman named Nailza. Not only did Nailza seem cold and detached after the loss of her child, but so did other village members.

Scheper-Hughes wrote a paper with Margret Lock describing the body in three perspectives: the individual body, social body, and political body. The individual body is explained as the “lived experiences of the body-self” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 7). The social body is representative of “a natural symbol with which to think about nature, society, and culture” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 7). The body politic refers to the “regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies… in reproduction and sexuality, in work and leisure, in sickness and other forms of deviance and human difference” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 8). Lock and Scheper-Hughes highlight that bodies are more than just biological because they carry social meaning as well. After reading Scheper-Hughes’ individual work, and after learning the views on breastfeeding in the harsh living conditions of the Alto, the question is raised of a possible additional body: the literal body, bound by the biological need for