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When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside “favela”. Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, the author follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing – and controversial – is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live. The author also wrote “Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland”.
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Amazon Average Rating 4.0/5.0
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
This book doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Also it tries to interpret events. Anybody with internet access can read about favelas of Rio and the “parallel government” that rules the shanty-towns.
In fact, at least two groups in Rio give tours of these slums. And you will find things quite peaceful (the tour operators have not been injured in over 15 yrs of giving tours).
In a word: it’s all about (drug) money.
Rating: 2 / 5
As readers, people should always be careful about the way they write a review of a book such as this: it is not in any way shape or form a representation of “life in Brazil.” It is a representation of what life in some, I repeat, some poorer areas of Brazil can be like… but even so, being originally from Brazil and having traveled in my country, I can give anyone a million examples of poor or people who live under the poverty line, who are loving, decent, clean, concerned with the well-being and protection of others first before their own. I despise it when people file anything under the “generalization” category about other countries, and Brazil seems to always get a bad wrap in this sense. Brazil is an amazing country, culturally rich and diverse, geographically gorgeous and varied, and when speaking of a country with 186+ million inhabitants, how can anyone generalize under any one specific term about this or that factor? Not all mothers — by a very very long stretch — in Brazil fit the mode portrayed in “Death without weeping,” and hope to have made that absolutely clear here: misinformation of this kind is absurd, and using the subhead “The Violence in Everyday Brazil” even more irreponsible from such a noted author.
Rating: 2 / 5
Although this book is to be praised as a fine piece of scholarship and field work, I did not enjoy reading it that much. Here I will jump off into pure personal opinion. I think the author interceded way too much between the reader and what she observed in shantytown life in northeast Brazil, interpreting things for the reader from start to finish. I feel the reason she did so is because she was afraid to simply tell the reader what she observed, because she felt there were 999 chances out of a thousand that the reader would “not understand”. Mostly the author “interpreted” without even telling the reader what the facts were which she was interpreting. It was obvious that the author had seen hundreds of stories of what a normal observer would call child neglect to the point of where the child died, yet it was like she was these people’s mother and couldn’t bear the thought of what she had seen as being, in some else’s eyes, perhaps akin to murder. I wish she had given us the facts, and then she could have given us her opinion, while letting the reader make up their own mind. The real story of a culture where mothers starve their children to death every day would be fascinating, and then we could decide whether we wanted to forgive them or interpret the situation as does the auther. I’m not saying she’s wrong, but she simply didn’t give us the “real story”, ie, all the facts. She may well be right, but the facts would be fascinating.
Michael Chesser
Rating: 3 / 5
Nancy Scheper-Hughes book “Death without Weeping” is an excellent anthropological account of life and survival in modern day Brazil. This book is definitely worthwhile. As a newcomer to Latin American studies or as a research tool to those well studied in this area, this book offers endless amounts of information. The facts are well coupled with excellent discussions involving specific individuals. I would absolutely recommend this book!!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
It’s hard to take this work seriously when it’s so full of errors. The author became a self-proclaimed Brazilianist overnight and it shows. A good ethnography requires more than what went into this work, although it’s an interesting topic and a great job of anthropological showboating.
Rating: 2 / 5