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".

Table of Contents

Prologue: Sugar House Introduction: Tropical Sadness Chapter 1: O Nordeste: Sweetness and Death Chapter 2: Bom Jesus: One Hundred Years Without Water Chapter 3: Reciprocity and Dependency: The Double Ethic of Bom Jesus Chapter 4: Delirio de Fome: The Madness of Hunger Chapter 5: Nervoso: Medicine, Sickness, and Human Needs Chapter 6: Everday Violence: Bodies, Death, and Silence Chapter 7: Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death Chapter 8: (M)Other Love: Cultue, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking Chapter 9: Our Lady of Sorrows: A Political Economy of the Emotions Chapter 10: A Knack for Life: The Everyday Tactics of Survival Chapter 11: Carnaval: The Dance Against Death Chapter 12: De Profundis: Out of the Depths Epilogue: Acknowledgments and Then Some Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

Reviews

In Brazil's shantytowns, poverty has transformed the meaning of mother love. The routineness with which young children die, argues University of California anthropologist Scheper-Hughes, causes many women to affect indifference to their offspring, even to neglect those infants presumed to be doomed or ``wanting to die.'' Maternal love is delayed and attenuated, with dire consequences for infant survival, according to the author's two decades of fieldwork. Scheper-Hughes also maintains that the Catholic Church contributes to the indifference toward children's deaths by teaching fatalistic resignation and upholding its strictures against birth control and abortion. This important, shocking study resonates with the emotion of Oscar Lewis's ethnographic classics as it follows three generations of women in a plantation town. The compelling narrative investigates the everyday tactics of survival that people use to stay alive in a culture of institutionalized dependency ravaged by sickness, scarcity, feudal working conditions and death-squad ``disappearances.'' (May)

"Hauntingly beautiful. . . . [The] richly detailed qualitative analysis has thoroughly convinced this reader, at least, of her arguments linking maternal behavior and child death."--"American Anthropologist

This book by an anthropology professor from Berkeley, formerly a Peace Corps volunteer in northeast Brazil, is simply breathtaking. Its controversial theme--that mother love as conventionally understood is a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as poor women in Brazil cannot, that their infants will live--is, in the best sense, illuminated by deconstructionist and feminist thought. The author's understanding of these lives on the edge is at times sympathetic, passionate, and sophisticated. But what makes the book as exciting to read as a good novel is her long-term interaction with a group of people that she clearly loves and the complete lack of the sense of the ``other'' that is so often found in anthropological writing. This work should have as much influence on studies of the relationship of women and children as did Margaret Mead's Growing Up in Samoa (1936) on the shaping of adolescence or Oscar Lewis's The Children of Sanchez (1961) on the cultural effects of poverty. Highly recommended.-- Nancy Padgett Lazar, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit