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 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Delírio de Fome: The Madness of Hunger”
Chapter 4 begins with an incident of infanticide: in 1965, a young mother murders here infant child and 1-year-old; when questioned, she replies that she wanted to stop them crying for milk. The mother is called an "unnatural creature," a description with which the author takes issue. Indeed, the claim the author wishes to make is that hunger is a force that actively suppresses and destroys what is "good" and "natural" in any other light. Building from anthropological and literary sources, the author seeks to investigate whether or not chronic hunger is a force that tears apart society or brings it together.
Next, the author describes what she believes is a "taboo" in scholarly literature, in regard to the study of hunger as a form of "lived experience"―that is, through the eyes and in the immediate context of those who experience it. Effectively, chronic hunger is normalized, causing severe collective trauma in a community.
In the next section, the author recounts the chronic malnutrition in economic terms, describing the dramatic drop in buying power of the average rural family of Northeastern Brazil; the effect of this decline in buying power can be seen in a contest of beans versus corn. Whereas beans were once a staple of the rural diet, they have been replaced with corn and farinha (flour), the nutritional value of which is far less. Compounding this loss is the widespread loss of individual family plots, from which more nutritional food stuffs could be grown to supplement a family's diet. As a result, the average rural worker consumes only about 1700 calories a day, a value far insufficient for the sustained physical labor of agricultural work. The physical evidence of malnutrition is everywhere: the average lower-class laborer is more than two inches shorter than their middle-class counterpart, and, on average, girls receive their periods roughly two years later―a phenomenon described with the controversial term "pygmitization."In addition to these differences, poorer, malnourished children suffer from a host of additional diseases and developmental disorders.
The latter part of this chapter reemphasizes how this chronic hunger has become a fact of life, changing the culture around it: families live with the expectation that many of their infants will not survive early childhood. Sex is regarded, self-consciously, as a substitute for the hunger of food, whereas eating itself becomes a highly social act, one marked with certain taboos and guidelines. In such communities, where pursuing the basic necessities is a daily struggle, a pervasive feeling of powerlessness emerges, knowing that even small victories are evidence of a larger, conspicuously-fruitless war.
Chapter 4 Analysis
The fourth chapter of Death Without Weeping discusses hunger in the Alto and Bom Jesus. The focus of this chapter is not specifically the economics of poverty and its effect on malnutrition, but instead the role of "hunger" (broadly-conceived) in people's lives. The author is interested how chronic hunger becomes a fixture of life, so much so that culture circulates around it. The argument is that the "sugarcane monoculture"―that is, the outsized presence of the sugar industry in people's lives―has introduced different kinds of "famine" into these communities. In this line of thought, while physical hunger is the most manifest and destructive of these, death from starvation and malnutrition comprise a small portion of what is threatened, and what is lost.
Like the previous section's subject, "thirst", hunger―specifically the "delirium" it brings―warps values and fractures social codes. The idea is relatively new, the author contends, as most inquiries on hunger choose to focus entirely on the history, economics and biology thereof, and very few look into its localized cultural ramifications. She argues that one reason for this is Westerners' relative unfamiliarity with hunger; that is, familiarity outside of specific historical catastrophes. She speculates that the shock of such incidents such as the Irish Potato famine of the late 1840s, or of Allied soldiers rescuing victims of the Holocaust, was in part from a relative unfamiliarity with hunger and starvation. This point is difficult to argue―much less prove―without implicitly minimizing the suffering and horror of these catastrophes and crimes. However, the author does examine and substantiate the profound normalization of chronic hunger in Northeast Brazilian life, and its disastrous effects. Despite the ravages of infant mortality, child death, developmental impairment, and cognitive and reproductive harm, the social fabric persists, processing and normalizing these frequent tragedies into a notion of "daily life."This is the "delirium" of hunger the author describes, broadly conceived: in the struggle for survival, the corresponding concept of life becomes a distorted and shrunken image of itself―pygmitized by an atmosphere of unending trauma.
