Mother's Love Death Without Weeping Analysis

In the ethnography, “Mother’s Love: Death Without Weeping” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, the author discusses her fieldwork of observing the poverty-stricken mothers who refuse to care for their sickly children in Northeast Brazilian shantytown, Alto do Cruzeiro. She questioned the kinship system on the severe hardship of poverty in relation to a bond between a mother and infant. Two theoretical perspectives that strongly portrays in the article is cultural materialism and individual agency, as cultural materialism is the central theme that overrides Scheper-Hughes’s agency.
Scheper-Hughes stationed in the area of Alto do Cruzeiro with a volunteer company called Peace Corps, in 1964, and began her kinship network with the Alto community. Twenty years later, she conducted her research as an
The child had suffered from malnourishment and by her own hands, she provided him with the proper care and treatment. She used her money to buy him food, clothes, and took him to a day care center—where she received laughs for saving a child who was going to die anyway. As Zezinho’s health improved, Scheper-Hughes felt skeptical giving back the child because she feared the mother would neglect her child’s health again. In other words, Scheper-Hughes’s individual agency relied on the symbolic use of money that was used to treat the child. Like cultural materialism, money that allowed for Scheper-Hughes’s individual agency could be used to educate the Alto’s community in which people could conduct personal research on medicine or hospitals to go. Scheper-Hughes states, “At worst, clinic personnel will give tranquilizers and sleeping pills to quiet the hungry cries of ‘sick-to-death’ Alto babies”. (Scheper-Hughes 2009:129) With the right education and decision-making, there are better options to take care of their own