Nancy+Scheper-Hughes

=**Scheper-Hughes, Nancy**=
 * (1944-present)**

Biography:

 * Peace Corp training in Brazil among sugar cane workers
 * Civil Rights Movement: worked on bringing government programs (food support) to small sharecroppers in the South; this work she participated in would lead to the development of the Food Stamps program
 * =====For an in-depth interview on Nancy Scheper-Hughes' life and work in anthropology and activism, see "Studying the Human Condition: Habits of a Militant Anthropologist--Conversation with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley," an interview with Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies.=====

Key works:

 * 2003a //Commodifying Bodies.// Co-edited with [|Loïc Wacquant]. London: Sage Publications. Series in Theory, Culture, and Society.
 * 1999 //Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood.// Co-edited with Carolyn Sargent. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 * 1993 //Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil.// Berkeley: University of California Press.
 * 1979 //Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press.//

**Key contributions to medical anthropology:**

 * Scheper-Hughes versus Marilyn Nations/Linda Rebhun debate

The Nancy Scheper-Hughes versus Marilyn Nations/Linda Rebhun debate that took place in the pages of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry illustrates several important, emerging tensions within the relatively young field of medical anthropology. All three had done fieldwork in the same area of northeastern Brazil with poor women who were experiencing the deaths of many of their children in the context of extreme poverty and scarcity. Nations and Rebhun write a response to Nancy Scheper-Hughes' work attempting to refute her notions of fatalism and neglect. In their article, "Angels with Wet Wings Won't Fly: Maternal Sentiment in Brazil and the Image of Neglect" (1988 (12): 141-200), Nations and Rebhun argue that the flat affect that Scheper-Hughes perceived was not evidence of a lack of emotional attachment to the infants that had died; they also contend that Nancy Scheper-Hughes' portrayal of these women did not do justice to the "real life bureaucratic and geographic barriers to access" (1988: 141) and ended up seeming to blame the women themselves. The discussion centered around the fact that women did not cry; Nations and Rebhun argue that the women believe that if they cry, their dead infants will not be able to ascend to heaven Nations, who had lost a baby herself, seemed enraged by the idea that maternal love was somehow unevenly distributed amongst children.

Scheper-Hughes responds that she was seeking to understand a phenomenon among women who seemed to be choosing which children had a better chance of surviving past infancy to attend to; as she writes in a response to their article, "I neither defend, nor celebrate, nor condemn this practice born of misery and of greatly reduced life chances. I want only to understand it."

Julius Richmond, a former Surgeon General, Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and known as the founder of the "Head Start" programs, wrote in an editorial in response to the debate defending the medical profession as one deeply embedded in social, political and cultural practices. He goes so far as to call her article "infantile leftist" (Lenin 1940), meaning that the left tended to attack their friends/allies instead of their enemies. Richmond calls for more epidemiology to understand the phenomenon and concerted interventions on economics and health. As he writes, "For the infant, it makes little difference whether the cause is an emotional problem such as maternal depression in a developed country or maternal despair resulting from grinding poverty in a developing country. The outcome in the infant is a wasting away in the absence of a constructive intervention" (1988: 427).


 * Critical Medical Anthropology: Nancy Scheper-Hughes has written thoughtfully about what she perceived to be the importance of "critical medical anthropology." In her article entitled "Three Propositions for a Critically Applied Medical Anthropology" (Social Science and Medicine 1991: 189-198), she writes, "To date, much of what is called critical medical anthropology refers to this later approach; the applications of marxist political economy to the social relations of sickness and health care delivery" (189). She argues that the anthropology taking place in the clinics at the time was of the "handmaiden" variety; that is, allying him or herself with the physician's goals. She argues that the search for legitimacy by anthropologists among a clinical world could be very dangerous for the enterprise itself and its products: "Clinical medical anthropology has become a new 'commodity,' carefully sanitized, nicely packaged, pleasant tasting (no bitter after-taste)--the very latest and very posisbly the most bourgeois product introduced into the medical education curriculum" (191). The rich, complex and often contradictory interpretations of medical anthropologists, in her view, become sanitized into positivist biomedical buzz words and slang, such as "patient's explanatory model." She concludes that medical anthropology must question the very foundations and tenets of the enterprise of biomedicine itself; who benefits, and upon what material foundations do they benefit; who loses, and what and how and why do they lose?


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