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, Nancy Scheper-Hughes 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.
"Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, in its original form--now integrally reproduced in the new edition--is a most important seminal study of an Irish community."—Conor Cruise O'Brien
Published to great acclaim in 1993, the book in this new edition includes an incisive foreword by David Ansell, a physician who worked at Mt. Sinai Hospital, where much of the Banes family’s narrative unfolds.
This book combines perspectives from anthropology and sociology to offer compelling new readings of the body.
In this book, France's leading medical anthropologist takes on one of the most tragic stories of the global AIDS crisis—the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa.
This 56-page guide for "Death Without Weeping" by Nancy Scheper-Hughes includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis covering 12 chapters, as well as several more in-depth sections of expert-written literary analysis.
"Drawing on interviews with artists and poets and on his own experiences in the Brazilian Northeast, Arons has written an account of how drought has impacted the region's culture.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 1993 to 1998 among the matrilineal Papel, who reside in the Biombo region, this work includes theoretical discussion of reproductive practices, conceptions of children, childcare customs, ...
This is an ethnographic examination and an appraisal of the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot based on the author's long fieldwork in the area.
Koss, Koss, and Woodruff 1991, p. 342. From November 1995 to May 1996, the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control jointly conducted a national telephone survey that confirmed the high rates of assault against ...
"A wake-up call to those who are honestly concerned with global childhood safety."—Carol Stack, author of All Our Kin