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 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Our Lady of Sorrows: A Political Economy of the Emotions”
Chapter 9 looks to explain the "death without weeping" observed in the reaction to infant death in the Brazilian Northeast. The context of this analysis is the content and meaning of "mother love"; the author looks to show the historical and socioeconomic context of this concept―that is, to show how the way North American and middle-class concepts of "mother love" are suited to those socioeconomic contexts. In doing so, the author forcefully argues against the implicit view that mother love is absent among the mothers of the Alto and Bom Jesus; instead, the author seeks to illustrate how "mother love" may be understood from the folk and cultural practices surrounding infant death, and the circumstances governing women's reproductive lives.
The first stage of this argument examines how attitudes of mothering and child-rearing changed with the decline of infant mortality and fertility. This historical phenomenon, the author charges, allowed women to "invest" more―materially and emotionally―in children they were confident would survive. In contexts where development has not occurred, or has been arrested, a more pragmatic, ostensibly colder ethos emerges, in which women do not bond with children not expected to survive. This economical approach to bonding is what the author observes on the Alto. Another element of this argument contends that in middle-class contexts, individuality is more emphasized, and conferred to all members of the community, even infants. Contrary to this, the author describes culture in Bom Jesus as collectively-oriented, with infants often treated as interchangeable until they accrue their own identity and personality. Finally, the author describes the intense sacralization, even fetishization of infant death; infants are described in death as "angels," and their deaths are seen to be a blessing. Remarkably, in some contexts, a mother's tears are said to impede an infant's progress to heaven, providing a strong imperative for a mother to observe the death of her infant without weeping.
Chapter 9 Analysis
The author wishes to orient readers within a cultural context dissimilar to theirs, whose practices and beliefs are shaped by material, concrete forces that typically do not exist in the readers' own contexts. This is the basic statement of the "materialist" object of her argument―that economic and political contexts shape belief systems and cultural practices. Within the circumstances she describes in Bom Jesus and the Alto, it is difficult to argue otherwise: the rampant infant death is a fact of culture, one which―tragically―exists outside of mothers' control.
One example of a fundamental difference in thinking between many cultures and the culture of Northeast Brazil is the notion of identity, and whether or not this identity is implicit in the life of a human being. In postindustrial, First-World cultures, the answer is clearly yes: a child immediately has an individual identity, and it’s a given that a child will. This is not necessarily the case among Northeast Brazil’s poor; since the infant death rate is so very high, ascribing an individual identity to a child has negative connotations, and may also impede that child’s path to heaven, should they die. This idea is so very counter to identity in many other cultures that it may be difficult to fully process. Scheper-Hughes contends such ideas are based in class and materialism: the poor essentially have to believe in things that the middle class does not.
