Death Without Weeping
Anthropology
“Mothers Love: Death Without Weeping.”
A shantytown called the Alto do Cruzeiro (Crucifix Hill), is one of the three shantytowns bordering the big marketplace area in the town of Bom Jesus in the sugar plantation district of Northeast Brazil, a solitary part of the countless regions of disregard that have materialized in the darkness of the now stained economic wonder of Brazil. The Alto women practice an unusual method of caring for their offspring especially when handling the death of their infants. The high rate of infant death can be credited to poverty and malnutrition. Illness and infant deaths are taken nonchalantly not by just the social institutions in the Alto but also by the child's own mother and this has become a component of their culture.
These women are allowing their children to die and the dying children are all too quickly considered as good as dead by its own mother. Mothers focus their assistance on babies who are "fighters" and permit themselves to become emotionally involved with their children only when they're confident the offspring will live on. These kinds of practices can be seen as active survival strategies- mostly practiced by civilizations in third-world countries.
The link connecting persistent child loss and poverty and a mother’s capability to convey motherly love is the essential topic of the article. Scheper-Hughes suggests that once circumstances of high fertility and high infant mortality exist, the demise of a child is the standard for unfortunate families; mothers do not mourn when a delicate child dies, and maternal compliance of child death may essentially endanger the life of certain children. Mothers commit only to those infants likely to live and detach themselves psychologically from susceptible infants and extract their love and care. This view discards modern research on mother-infant contact and the idea that mother love is a general phenomenon.
And one can only imagine what the
“Mothers Love: Death Without Weeping.”
A shantytown called the Alto do Cruzeiro (Crucifix Hill), is one of the three shantytowns bordering the big marketplace area in the town of Bom Jesus in the sugar plantation district of Northeast Brazil, a solitary part of the countless regions of disregard that have materialized in the darkness of the now stained economic wonder of Brazil. The Alto women practice an unusual method of caring for their offspring especially when handling the death of their infants. The high rate of infant death can be credited to poverty and malnutrition. Illness and infant deaths are taken nonchalantly not by just the social institutions in the Alto but also by the child's own mother and this has become a component of their culture.
These women are allowing their children to die and the dying children are all too quickly considered as good as dead by its own mother. Mothers focus their assistance on babies who are "fighters" and permit themselves to become emotionally involved with their children only when they're confident the offspring will live on. These kinds of practices can be seen as active survival strategies- mostly practiced by civilizations in third-world countries.
The link connecting persistent child loss and poverty and a mother’s capability to convey motherly love is the essential topic of the article. Scheper-Hughes suggests that once circumstances of high fertility and high infant mortality exist, the demise of a child is the standard for unfortunate families; mothers do not mourn when a delicate child dies, and maternal compliance of child death may essentially endanger the life of certain children. Mothers commit only to those infants likely to live and detach themselves psychologically from susceptible infants and extract their love and care. This view discards modern research on mother-infant contact and the idea that mother love is a general phenomenon.
And one can only imagine what the