RR: Death Without Weeping - Shanai Auguis Professor Vogel...

Shanai Auguis
Professor Vogel
Cultural Anthropolgy
29 January 2020
RR: Death Without Weeping
The anthropologist who wrote this article is named Nancy Scheper-Hughes. She is a very famous
anthropologist who teaches at UC Berkeley. She has done fieldwork in Brazil since the 1960s.
This article is about an impoverished area called Alto do Cruzeiro, where the rate of infant deaths
was incredibly high. She writes that in the 1960s, the average woman in this area had 9.5 births,
3.5 child deaths (under 1 year), and 1.5 stillbirths. She was interested in researching how that
could happen, but also what the women thought of those deaths.
1. What surprised the author and why? (You can use direct quotes, but also put this answer in
your own words).
- Nancy was surprised by how normalized it was for women to have stilborn infants; with
the extremely high infant death rates in Alto de Cruziero, Scheper-Hughes noted how the
story had to finally come out to reveal that those deaths arent normal. Especially when
her friend, Biu, died.