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.
Chapter 12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “De Profundis: Out of the Depths”
Chapter 12 discusses one of the few remaining outlets for popular dissent and protest in Northeast Brazil: liberation theology. Liberation theology is a popular movement that blends Christian doctrines and theology with social justice politics. For the residents of the Alto, liberation theology presents not only a means of religious experience and community-building, but one of the few forms of genuine political activity available. The history of the Northeast, as the author describes, contains a history of political repression, in which popular movements―both nonviolent and violent alike―have been either crushed by the authorities or co-opted. On top of this, intense surveillance blunts residents' initiative to organize; in parts of the Northeast, this surveillance has bred a culture of silence. The author tells the story of UPAC, a popular collective-action organization, and its descent into infighting and ineffectuality, to emphasize this point.
Thus, liberation theology exists in part to fill this space of collective action. The significance of the doctrine of liberation theology is potent, as it presents a space for the political imagination to blend with elements of traditional and popular culture. A sermon by the "peasant-worker priest" Padre Andreas, an El Salvadoran liberation theology missionary, illustrates this blending: in the sermon, he describes the Alto do Cruzeiro as Calvary, likening its peoples’ suffering to that of Jesus Christ. In doing so however, he calls out the greed and indifference of the upper classes―an indictment typically left out of conventional Catholic sermons. Above all, liberation theologians argue that the kingdom―a community free of injustice―must be established on earth, rather than in heaven. The author provides some critiques to this message; for example, its silence on the issue of women's reproductive health. Moreover, the author questions whether or not even the bold new doctrines of liberation theology can do what other religious traditions have not: to give voice to those who have been silenced.
Chapter 12 Analysis
The closing chapter of Death Without Weeping settles upon questions of collective action, religious expression, and political imagination. In this way, this chapter engages directly with the conspicuous lack of popular political expression on the Alto―its proverbial "silence."As expected, this culture of silence is largely created by the intense surveillance and lingering threat of political violence from the authorities; religious expression has created alternate avenues for political expression and collective action. Liberation theology plays a significant role in the articulation of political consciousness, and the emergence of a distinct social body. To do so, liberation theology employs the political imagination towards tasks of meaning-making. In so doing, liberation theology finds itself both supported by and at odds with local culture.
For the suffering community of Bom Jesus and the Alto, meaning-making is a suspiciously politically-neutral affair. Child death, for instance, is "explained" with the explicit sacralization of God calling his "angels"; the immediate causes of death are seldom invoked or explained. Chronic malnutrition, poor sanitation, insufficient medical treatment for new mothers―these causes are widely-known by the populace, but seldom decisively-linked to the poor state of public services and inequality in the community. While the threat of political violence is real, the people's religiously-inspired explanations speak to a larger need of the residents to bring meaning to their suffering―meaning which is inviolate and transcendent. This need to project otherworldly meaning creates tension with the liberation theologians, who in an attempt to inspire justice-on-earth, work to relate the spiritual to the earthly. Theoretically, there is little distinction; in practice, however, complications arise: while for liberation theologians the depiction of the Alto as the suffering Body of Christ appears as the first step to an awakened political consciousness, such a notion is, for its more conservatively-minded residents, already the realization of the ideal. Although there is ample convergence in the desire for a more just, utopian vision of society, the cultural obstacle to this political ambition is not what people want, but what they are willing to accept.
