Death Without Weeping

Chapter 7 looks into the connection between local, cultural attitudes normalizing child death and the systems that precipitate this child death. The object of this chapter is to draw a connection between these "internal" attitudes and the external patterns of class conflict that draw critical resources away from the shantytowns. Both this "indifference" and its status as a "social production" invite the analogy of a mechanism, in which the "indifference" is necessary to the orderly function of social and economic life on the Alto. Proper outrage at the tragedy, one might surmise, would stop the machine. To this end, the normalization of infant death fulfills an important function; this chapter investigates where and whence this normalization comes from. In doing so, however, the accumulated accounts present a more complicated picture of agency than the author originally hypothesizes, and suggests more of a distinct character to the culture of Bom Jesus and the Alto than is originally presented.

Specifically, the "indifference" to child death, although theoretically instilled by the medical and technical structures, is endogenous to the lower classes―that is to say, specific to their circumstances and associated belief systems. Infant death in middle-class families is rare, rare enough that it is a tragedy, and, what's more, these deaths are an individual event. This is not so among poorer residents. Although every death is accompanied by real grief and mourning, these deaths are instantly contextualized within a larger pattern, and even expected, as is revealed in personal accounts and interviews. Whether from complications, dehydration, malnutrition, or infection, poor women learn to accept infant and child death in a way middle- and upper-class women simply do not. This has to do with the level of control over one's economic and reproductive life.