Death Without Weeping

The Introduction begins with an account from 1965, in which Scheper-Hughes frantically helps to deliver a newborn child in the town of Alto do Cruzeiro. The mother is a 16-year old girl named Lordes who works in a tomato field; the delivery is brief, yet the attitude for everyone present seems to accept that the newborn will die. This is common, and even normal. The author describes the staggering deprivation of these communities she witnessed as an aid worker from 1964 to 1966.

In recounting her work as an aid worker in these communities, she describes some of their political and economic history. While in her role as an aid worker, the author is involved in the creation of a community center, and efforts to support "local action."Life in Alto, as the town is called, is dominated by sugarcane production. Most of the men of Alto primarily work in the sugarcane fields and factories, while women supplement this income with paid and unpaid domestic labor. Child-rearing adds to the precarious balance of life in Alto; infant and early childhood mortality is especially high in these regions. Understanding how this high infant mortality affects society, with respect to notions of womanhood and motherhood, is the author's primary task. However, to do so, the author argues that it is necessary to understand not only the thoughts and feelings of those living in Alto, but also the larger forces and contexts which shape Alto's environment. For the author, the function of an anthropologist and ethnographer is to reconcile these different scopes of analysis. She argues that anthropology is corrupted by the attempt to remain neutral and objective, and to retain moral relativity in the face of violence and injustice. Indeed, the explicit object of this book, described in its title, is not just the impassive observation of misfortune, or even a compassionate account of human suffering, but a critical, politically-pointed analysis of the forces and activities that permit this suffering.