Knowra Nancy Scheper-Hughes Nancy Scheper-Hughes Nancy Scheper-Hughes is an American medical anthropologist whose ethnographic work examines political violence, poverty, maternal health, and the global trade in human organs.
Medical anthropology : The study of health, illness, healing, and medicine through anthropological methods and concepts. This field frames her research on health, violence, and organ transplantation.
Death Without Weeping : Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s ethnography of maternal loss, infant mortality, and poverty in Alto do Cruzeiro, Brazil. This book made her account of maternal care and constrained emotion widely known.
Philippe Bourgois : An American anthropologist whose ethnographies examine poverty, violence, addiction, and social inequality. He co-edited The Body of Terror with Scheper-Hughes.
Maternal ambivalence : The coexistence of affectionate and rejecting feelings within a mother’s relationship with a child. Her account challenged ideals that treat maternal attachment as uniform and instinctive.
Ethnography : A research approach based on sustained observation and participation in people’s everyday social worlds. Her influential studies rely on close, long-term engagement with communities.
Alto do Cruzeiro : A poor hillside neighborhood in the Brazilian city of Bom Jesus da Mata, studied by Scheper-Hughes. Her longitudinal fieldwork there linked infant death to poverty and public policy.
Paul Farmer : An American physician and anthropologist who studied health inequality and helped found Partners In Health. His work on structural violence offers a close intellectual comparison.
Ethnographic authority : The credibility and legitimacy claimed by an ethnographer when representing other people’s lives. Her interpretations of mothers’ feelings prompted debate about representation and evidence.
Structural violence : Social arrangements that systematically expose some groups to harm, illness, and premature death. She uses this framework to connect poverty and political institutions with bodily suffering.
The Body of Terror : A collection of essays by Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois on violence, suffering, and human rights. Its framework connects her ethnography with comparative studies of political violence.
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