Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Encyclopedia
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of Anthropology
and director of the program in Medical Anthropology
at the University of California at Berkeley. She is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, psychiatry
, madness, social suffering, violence and genocide
. In 2009 her investigation of an international ring of organ sellers based in New York
, New Jersey
and Israel
led to a number of arrests by the FBI.
Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology
in 1980. The book established Scheper-Hughes’ ability to provoke controversy through her writing. Especially in Ireland, many readers took umbrage at her portrayal of the disintegration of rural Irish family life due to the collapse of the agrarian economy. In the 20th anniversary edition of the book, Scheper-Hughes provided an update on the transitions the community was undergoing at the time of her original research. She also discussed the challenges and ethics of ethnography, issues that are pushed to the fore as anthropologists increasingly work in communities that can read and critique their work.
Her subsequent book Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday life in Brazil (1993) is a study of mother love and child death in a context of extreme scarcity and chronic hunger in a Brazilian shanty town in the sugar plantation zone of Pernambuco
, Northeast Brazil. The book, criticized the concept of innate maternal bonding and mother love as myth. Once again, her work had many critics, both inside and outside Brazil, given its depiction of women forced by horrific circumstances to ration their love and favor towards infants and toddlers who seemed to have the best chance of survival, and (even more controversial) her description of mothers "collaborating" and "hastening" the deaths of infants thought to be lacking a will (desejo), a knack (jeito), or a taste (gusto) for life. Death without Weeping has become something of a classic within the field of medical anthropology.
In addition to her full-length monograph
s, Scheper-Hughes has published on AIDS
/HIV
in Brazil
and Cuba
, human rights
, death squads, apartheid and shanty town violence in South Africa, and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, coining or popularizing such terms as the "mindful body" (1987, with Margaret Lock), "political economy of the emotions" (1993a), "life boat ethics" (1993b), "neo-cannibalism" (2001), "sexual citizenship" (1994b), the "genocidal continuum", "militant anthropology" and anthropology "with its feet on the ground" (1995). One of the central themes unifying Scheper-Hughes’s scholarship is how violence comes to mark the bodies of the vulnerable, poor, and disenfranchised with a terrifying intimacy. Her work in Latin America, South Africa
, Ireland
, and Eastern Europe traces the insidious invisibility of everyday violence, which often makes the vulnerable and exploited into their own wardens and executioners.
Besides her own original research she has helped disseminate the work of scholars such as radical Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia
, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire
, and the Brazilian physician and radical ecologist Josué de Castro
, to a wider North America
n audience.
Volunteer in Brazil
in the 1960s. She has worked as an activist and with social movements in Brazil (in defense of rural workers, against death squads, and for the rights of street children) in the United States (as a civil rights worker and as a Catholic Worker
for the homeless mentally ill, against nuclear weapons research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
) and internationally in defense of the rights of those who sell their kidneys.
In October 2008, she appeared on the BBC
program HARDtalk
expressing her strong opposition to the open free buying and selling of organs, even if there were Government oversight through regulation. Her reason for this position is that she feels it will eventually corrupt the entire field because of the inevitability of brokers engaging in satisfying the demands of wealthy buyers for higher quality donors. She is opposed to the Iranian government's regulated organ donor program, involving cash rewards, and predicts it will fail. Her preference is for free voluntary donations from family or friends. She has characterized the efforts of patients waiting for an organ transplant to save their lives through purchasing a replacement organ from a volunteer as just "a new form of commodity fetishism." She deplores the fact that to the dying patients waiting for a transplant, "in the late or postmodern consumer-oriented context, the ancient prescription for virtue in suffering and grace in dying can only appear patently absurd." She recommends instead that the now lethally long waiting lists for organ transplants be trimmed by questioning "the rights of infants and those over 70 to be on the waiting list."
In the 2000s, Scheper-Hughes investigated an international ring of organ sellers based in New York, New Jersey and Israel. She interviewed several hundred third-world organ donors, and reported that they all felt that they had been taken advantage of, and were often left sick, unable to work, and unable to get medical care. Some of them were tricked into donating organs, and threatened at gunpoint when they tried to resist. Some transplants took place at major New York City hospitals, and Scheper-Hughes said that the hospital personnel knew illegal transplants were taking place. She informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which led to arrests several years later. When the events became public, she said that much of the world's illicit traffic in kidneys could be traced to Israel
. In a 2008 lecture, she is reported as identifying two motivations of Israeli traffickers as "greed" and "Revenge, restitution—reparation for the Holocaust." She is reported as describing speaking with Israeli brokers who told her "it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’"
Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology
in 1980.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes was awarded the first Berkeley William Sloane Coffin Jr. Award in April 2007. The award recognizes moral leadership among members of the community at University of California, Berkeley. The award is named for William Sloane Coffin
, a chaplain at Yale University, and an activist in the civil rights and peace movement
s.
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and director of the program in Medical Anthropology
Medical anthropology
Medical anthropology is an interdisciplinary field which studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives...
at the University of California at Berkeley. She is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
, madness, social suffering, violence and genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
. In 2009 her investigation of an international ring of organ sellers based in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
and Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
led to a number of arrests by the FBI.
Career
Scheper-Hughes' first book, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1979), was a study of madness among bachelor farmers, and won the Margaret MeadMargaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology
Society for Applied Anthropology
The Society for Applied Anthropology is a U.S.-based professional association for applied anthropology, established "to promote the integration of anthropological perspectives and methods in solving human problems throughout the world; to advocate for fair and just public policy based upon sound...
in 1980. The book established Scheper-Hughes’ ability to provoke controversy through her writing. Especially in Ireland, many readers took umbrage at her portrayal of the disintegration of rural Irish family life due to the collapse of the agrarian economy. In the 20th anniversary edition of the book, Scheper-Hughes provided an update on the transitions the community was undergoing at the time of her original research. She also discussed the challenges and ethics of ethnography, issues that are pushed to the fore as anthropologists increasingly work in communities that can read and critique their work.
Her subsequent book Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday life in Brazil (1993) is a study of mother love and child death in a context of extreme scarcity and chronic hunger in a Brazilian shanty town in the sugar plantation zone of Pernambuco
Pernambuco
Pernambuco is a state of Brazil, located in the Northeast region of the country. To the north are the states of Paraíba and Ceará, to the west is Piauí, to the south are Alagoas and Bahia, and to the east is the Atlantic Ocean. There are about of beaches, some of the most beautiful in the...
, Northeast Brazil. The book, criticized the concept of innate maternal bonding and mother love as myth. Once again, her work had many critics, both inside and outside Brazil, given its depiction of women forced by horrific circumstances to ration their love and favor towards infants and toddlers who seemed to have the best chance of survival, and (even more controversial) her description of mothers "collaborating" and "hastening" the deaths of infants thought to be lacking a will (desejo), a knack (jeito), or a taste (gusto) for life. Death without Weeping has become something of a classic within the field of medical anthropology.
In addition to her full-length monograph
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
s, Scheper-Hughes has published on AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
/HIV
HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...
in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
and Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
, death squads, apartheid and shanty town violence in South Africa, and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, coining or popularizing such terms as the "mindful body" (1987, with Margaret Lock), "political economy of the emotions" (1993a), "life boat ethics" (1993b), "neo-cannibalism" (2001), "sexual citizenship" (1994b), the "genocidal continuum", "militant anthropology" and anthropology "with its feet on the ground" (1995). One of the central themes unifying Scheper-Hughes’s scholarship is how violence comes to mark the bodies of the vulnerable, poor, and disenfranchised with a terrifying intimacy. Her work in Latin America, South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
, Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, and Eastern Europe traces the insidious invisibility of everyday violence, which often makes the vulnerable and exploited into their own wardens and executioners.
Besides her own original research she has helped disseminate the work of scholars such as radical Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia
Franco Basaglia
Franco Basaglia was an Italian psychiatrist and neurologist, professor who proposed the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, pioneer of the modern concept of mental health, Italian psychiatry reformer, charismatic leader in Italian psychiatry, figurehead and founder of Democratic...
, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of critical pedagogy.-Biography:...
, and the Brazilian physician and radical ecologist Josué de Castro
Josué de Castro
Josué de Castro, born Josué Apolônio de Castro , was a Brazilian physician, expert on nutrition, geographer, writer, public administrator, and activist against world hunger....
, to a wider North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
n audience.
International activism
Scheper-Hughes served as a Peace CorpsPeace Corps
The Peace Corps is an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, as well as a government agency of the same name. The mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping...
Volunteer in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
in the 1960s. She has worked as an activist and with social movements in Brazil (in defense of rural workers, against death squads, and for the rights of street children) in the United States (as a civil rights worker and as a Catholic Worker
Catholic Worker
The Catholic Worker is a newspaper published seven times a year by the Catholic Worker Movement community in New York City. The newspaper was started by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin to make people aware of church teaching on social justice...
for the homeless mentally ill, against nuclear weapons research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952...
) and internationally in defense of the rights of those who sell their kidneys.
Organ trade
In 1999, Scheper-Hughes joined with three other professors to launch Organs Watch, an organization dedicated to research on the global traffic in human organs, tracking the movements of people and organs around the globe, as well as the global inequities that facilitate this trade.In October 2008, she appeared on the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
program HARDtalk
HARDtalk
Hardtalk is a flagship BBC television programme, consisting of in-depth half-hour one-on-one interviews.It is broadcast four days a week on BBC World News and the BBC News channel. Launched in 1997, much of its worldwide fame is due to its global reach via BBC World...
expressing her strong opposition to the open free buying and selling of organs, even if there were Government oversight through regulation. Her reason for this position is that she feels it will eventually corrupt the entire field because of the inevitability of brokers engaging in satisfying the demands of wealthy buyers for higher quality donors. She is opposed to the Iranian government's regulated organ donor program, involving cash rewards, and predicts it will fail. Her preference is for free voluntary donations from family or friends. She has characterized the efforts of patients waiting for an organ transplant to save their lives through purchasing a replacement organ from a volunteer as just "a new form of commodity fetishism." She deplores the fact that to the dying patients waiting for a transplant, "in the late or postmodern consumer-oriented context, the ancient prescription for virtue in suffering and grace in dying can only appear patently absurd." She recommends instead that the now lethally long waiting lists for organ transplants be trimmed by questioning "the rights of infants and those over 70 to be on the waiting list."
In the 2000s, Scheper-Hughes investigated an international ring of organ sellers based in New York, New Jersey and Israel. She interviewed several hundred third-world organ donors, and reported that they all felt that they had been taken advantage of, and were often left sick, unable to work, and unable to get medical care. Some of them were tricked into donating organs, and threatened at gunpoint when they tried to resist. Some transplants took place at major New York City hospitals, and Scheper-Hughes said that the hospital personnel knew illegal transplants were taking place. She informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which led to arrests several years later. When the events became public, she said that much of the world's illicit traffic in kidneys could be traced to Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
. In a 2008 lecture, she is reported as identifying two motivations of Israeli traffickers as "greed" and "Revenge, restitution—reparation for the Holocaust." She is reported as describing speaking with Israeli brokers who told her "it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’"
Awards and recognition
Scheper-Hughes' first book, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1979), a study of madness among bachelor farmers, won the Margaret MeadMargaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology
Society for Applied Anthropology
The Society for Applied Anthropology is a U.S.-based professional association for applied anthropology, established "to promote the integration of anthropological perspectives and methods in solving human problems throughout the world; to advocate for fair and just public policy based upon sound...
in 1980.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes was awarded the first Berkeley William Sloane Coffin Jr. Award in April 2007. The award recognizes moral leadership among members of the community at University of California, Berkeley. The award is named for William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. was an American liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist. He was ordained in the Presbyterian church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ....
, a chaplain at Yale University, and an activist in the civil rights and peace movement
Peace movement
A peace movement is a social movement that seeks to achieve ideals such as the ending of a particular war , minimize inter-human violence in a particular place or type of situation, often linked to the goal of achieving world peace...
s.
Books
- 2003a Commodifying Bodies. Co-edited with Loïc WacquantLoïc WacquantLoïc Wacquant is a sociologist, specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body, social theory and ethnography....
. London: Sage Publications. Series in Theory, Culture, and Society. - 2001b Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics. Berkeley: University of California Press. 20th Anniversary edition. Expanded and updated with new preface and epilogue
- 1999 Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood. Co-edited with Carolyn Sargent. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- 1993b Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Second edition, paperback).
- 1979 Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Articles
- 2007a “On Civil Disobedience and ‘ Freedom from Unreal Loyalties’ ” (William Sloane Coffin Award comments)
- 2007b “Violence and the Politics of Remorse: Lessons from South Africa.” In Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, pp. 179–233. João BiehlJoão BiehlJoão Guilherme Biehl is a Brazilian anthropologist and theologian currently based at Princeton University. He specializes in medical anthropology and is the winner of the Rudolph Virchow Award given by the Society for Medical Anthropology. He was also awarded the Margaret Mead Award in 2007...
, Byron Good, and Arthur KleinmanArthur KleinmanArthur Kleinman is a prominent American psychiatrist and is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University, USA. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture, was the chair of the Harvard Department of...
, editors. Berkeley: University of California Press. - 2006a “The Tyranny of the Gift: Sacrificial Violence in Living Donor Transplants,” American Journal of Transplant (Ethics Corner), 7: 1-5
- 2006b “Alistair Cooke’s Bones: a Morality Tale. Anthropology Today (December): 22(6):3-8
- 2006c “Death Squads and Democracy in Northeast Brazil”. In Jean and John ComaroffJohn ComaroffJohn L. Comaroff is a Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. He is also Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation....
, Eds, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, pp. 150–187. Chicago: Chicago University Press - 2005a “Katrina: The disaster and its doubles,” Anthropology Today 21(6): 2.
- 2005b “Disease or Deception: Munchausen by Proxy as a Weapon of the Weak” In Lying and Illness: Power and Performance, edited by Els van Dongen and Sylvie Fainzang, pp. 113–138. Het Spinhuis, Amsterdam.
- 2004a Violence in War and Peace: an Anthology. Edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe BourgoisPhilippe BourgoisPhilippe Bourgois is a Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology & Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as founding Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco from 1998...
. London: Basil Blackwell. - 2004b “The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in ‘Fresh’ Organs,” in Global Assemblages, Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, eds. London: Basil Blackwell.
- 2004c “Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography of the Organs-Trafficking Underworld”. Ethnography 5(1): 29-73
- 2003b “Priestly Celibacy and Child Sexual Abuse,” with John Devine. Forum: The Catholic Church, Pedophiles and Child Sexual Abuse. Sexualities 6 (1): 15-39.
- 2003c “A Genealogy of Genocide”. Modern Psychoanalysis 28(2): 167-197.
- 2001a “Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes.” Anthropology Today 17 (1) (February): 12-18.
- 2000 "The Global Traffic in Human Organs." Current Anthropology." 41(2): 191-211.
- 1998 “Bodies of Apartheid: Witchcraft, Rumor and Racism Confound South Africa’s Organ [incomplete reference]
- 1995 “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36 (3) (June): 409-20.
- 1994a “Embodied Knowledge: Thinking with the Body in Critical Medical AnthropologyCritical Medical AnthropologyCritical medical anthropology is a branch of medical anthropology that applies critical theory in the consideration of the political economy of health, and the effect of social inequality on people's health...
,” in Assessing Cultural Anthropology, Rob Borofsky, ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 229–42. - 1994b “AIDS and the Social Body.” Social Science & Medicine 39 (7): 991-1003.
- 1993a “Life Boat Ethics.” Republished in Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, pp. 31–37. Caroline Brettell and Carolyn Sargent, eds. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
- 1991a “The Message in the Bottle: Illness and the Micropolitics of Resistance,” with Margaret Lock. Journal of Psychohistory 18 (4): 409-32.
- 1991b “Virgin Territory: The Male Discovery of the Clitoris.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 5 (1) (March): 25-28.
- 1990 “Three Propositions for a Critically Applied Medical Anthropology.” Social Science & Medicine 30 (2): 189-97.
- 1987a *Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology with Margaret Lock. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. (1): 6-41. pp.
- 1987b Psychiatry Inside Out: Selected Writings of Franco Basaglia. Edited with introductions and essays by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Anne M. Lovell. New York: Columbia University Press.
- 1987c “A Children’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term: Managing Culture-Shocked Children in Brazil.” Human Organization 46 (l): 78-83. Reprinted in Children in the Field: Anthropological Experiences, ed. Joan Cassell, 1987. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 443–54.
- 1986 “Breaking the Circuit of Social Control: Lessons in Public Psychiatry from Italy and Franco Basaglia,” with Anne M. Lovell. Social Science & Medicine 23 (2): 159-78.
- 1984 “The Margaret Mead Controversy: Culture, Biology, and Anthropological Inquiry.” Human Organization 43 (1): 85-93.
Interviews
- 2011a "Being radical critical without being leftist", antropologi.info
- 2011b "The global trade with poor people's kidneys", antropologi.info
- 2011c "Writing an anthropological detective story, antropologi.info
- 2004a “Dispelling the Myth. The Realities of Organ Trafficking" Three Monkeys Online
- 2004b “Un Marche Noir Planetaire. Interview with Nancy Scheper-Hughes by Larry Rohter (New York Times), Lillu (Swiss News Magazine), 9 June 2004, No. 24. Pp. 102-105.
- 2004c “The Kidney is Not a Spare Part”, Christian Science Monitor, Wednesday, June 9, 2004, p. 16
- 2002 “Una Especialista de Olho no Brasil: A Frente da Organs Watch.” Carta Capital, January 16, pp. 33–34.
- 2001 “I Broker Globali del Corpo parcellizzato, interview with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Director, Organs Watch.” Il Manifesto (Rome, Italy), October 30, p. 1.
- 1999 Conversations with History: Conversations with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Militant Anthropologist