59 pages • 1 hour read
Nancy Scheper-HughesDeath Without Weeping
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Cardboard Coffin
The cardboard coffin symbolizes the powerlessness of the community to affect infant mortality, and the indignity to which the community is subjected. The coffins are mass-produced and shoddy; this symbolizes how little the dead matter, either in life or in death. The infants are not buried deeply enough, and often exhumed to be buried en masse; this re-internment illustrates the disregard and indifference given to infants in death, and the powerlessness of families to take care of their own in both life and death.
Instead, mothers and families are encouraged to think of children as "angels" in order to mitigate not only the pain of their death, but the senselessness: throughout the book infant death is sacralized as the choice of God, rather than the indirect effect of a failed social system. This sacralization reflects residents' replacement of social and economic causes with religiously-inspired mystification and rationalizations, which is a function of their socioeconomic circumstance as much as their religious belief. The episode of the middle-class man who seeks the priest after losing his child presents an alternative to this narrative. Yet the narrative persists, insofar as it fosters meaning and comprehensibility among members of a community amidst an atmosphere of unremitting misfortune.
The internalized concept of powerless is crucial to the persistence of this mindset. Between the middle and lower classes, the quantity of infant death creates vast differences in how this death is understood. For middle-class parents, infant death is a singular tragedy, the rarity of which rallies the entire community. The high degree of control in reproduction among middle-class communities is a factor; incidents of infant death are rare enough that they appear as exceptions, anomalies that cannot be rationalized. Thus, the priest of Recife can tell the professional the death of his son was not, in the end, God's will.
Among poorer communities however, infant death is frequent and familiar. The high frequency of infant death is affected by, among other factors, the low degree of control women and families have over reproduction and birth, and the scarcity of medical and nutritional resources. Yet what motivates this rationalization and sacralization is not just the lack of these basic resources, but how this lack is understood and accounted for: specifically, there is no expectation that the family or community have control over reproduction in the way middle-class families may use their resources to gain control over reproduction. Instead, for these poorer families and communities, what governs life and death in childbirth is treated as the express domain of the supernatural. Thus, the extent to which the community's belief structure attributes power and agency to a mysterious divine will correlates negatively to its expectation of its own power.
The Purple Milk Can
Another potent symbol of Death Without Weeping is milk. Milk is a staple of infant and child diets, whether served on its own, or blended with flour and water and made into a mingau, or porridge. In addition to this, the cans of milk themselves also serve as symbols of the community's social and domestic roles. Unfortunately, however, milk is also a symbol of both the deep economic problems of the community and how these problems are misunderstood. The origin and manner of which this milk arrives has its own constellation of cultural significance.
Providing milk is a symbol of fatherhood, accompanied by a ritual. In this ritual, the husband or presumptive father brings milk to the newborn's home. The purpose of this gesture is to "claim" this newborn―to show one's commitment in providing for its nutrition and basic needs. Within this ritual, however, there are finer distinctions. In addition to the quantity bought, and frequency of trips, the brand of milk is highly significant, with the top-shelf purple Nestrogeno label carrying the greatest status.
Unfortunately, however, there are serious nutritional deficiencies with the store-bought milk. Powdered milk is not a valid nutritional substitute for breastmilk, as the cans themselves say. Yet, there are serious social obstacles to breastfeeding in the community. Breastmilk is frowned upon by the community, as it’s seen as a symbol of an abandoned woman. In addition to this, women's attitudes about their own bodies add to breastmilk’s stigma. Women have little confidence in their own bodies' ability to produce enough milk for the children. There are two parts to this perception. The first is the public campaign to encourage the consumption of artificial milk, provided by international aid organizations and North American companies. The success of this campaign has made these products a permanent part of the marketplace, as well as the culture. Secondly, chronic malnutrition negatively affects both women's ability to produce breastmilk and their confidence in doing so. Women, themselves often suffering from malnutrition, complain that their bodies are "wasted," and cannot possibly sustain their infants. Moreover, the breastmilk they do produce is considered a "dirty" substance, and breastfeeding is stigmatized. Thus, in essence, the culture adapts to the conditions of economic deprivation in ways that jeopardize its most vulnerable members. This adaptation is accelerated by the lack of educational resources throughout the community. Ultimately, this stigmatization of the female body has fatal consequences. Most mothers are illiterate, and cannot read the instructions of the cans, which tell them the store-bought milk is not a substitute for their own milk. Most significantly, however, the can of milk is a symbol of dependency upon an economic system which takes what they have and offers little in return.
