Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

At the centre of this extraordinargy book is an acutely observed account of life in a shanty town in a small urban centre close to Recife in north-eastern Brazil. The author first lived in this settlement, Alto do Cruzeiro, from 1964 until the end of 1966, as a public health/ community worker with the Peace Corps. She then returned to the United States, trained as an anthropologist and undertook other anthropological research before returning four times for fieldwork in the Alto between 1982 and 1989. Her particular interest was mothers' love for their children in a context where a high proportion of children died and where chronic hunger, sickness and violence were daily realities. But this account of daily life in the Alto also includes detailed descriptions of its inhabitants' relationships with the rest of the town's inhabitants, including its politicians, officials and middle-class patrons, and of the broader social, economic and political context that produced and continues to reproduce the deprivation. The reader also comes to learn much about the lives, joys and fears of many of the Alto's inhabitants through the life histories and stories included in the book.

The first chapter provides the broad context – the history from colonial times to the present sugar plantation economy within which the Alto and the town of which it is part developed. The Alto was largely formed by sugarcane workers forced out of the tiny plots on which they had previously lived. The Brazilian north-east, with some 40 million inhabitants, contains a quarter of all Latin American child mortality. Chapter 2 describes how the social world of the town is dominated by three realms: the “big house” in the rural areas in which the plantation owners live; the street in the new urban world of the town and its factories; and the pre-capitalist rural world of the squatters who had come to live in the Alto. It begins with a description of a public ceremony to celebrate the town's 100th anniversary, at which many of the town's wealthiest families and its officials were present, and which was disrupted when two people unfurled a banner saying “Bom Jesus da Mata: One Hundred Years Without Water”, much to the delight of most of the people gathered there. Chapter 3 describes the dual ethic of the Alto people. The first is egalitarian and collectivist, which guides behaviour towards family, kin, co-workers and friends – and is illustrated by various practices, including the rescue of sick, neglected or abandoned children by poor women. The second is one of servility and loyalty to their patrons, bosses and superiors, who oppress and exploit them and yet whose favours they so often need.

Chapters 4 and 5 consider the physical and emotional impacts of constant hunger and unmet needs. This includes the frustration felt by the author when, as a health worker, she recognized how health care systems could only prescribe medicines, not food – yet it was the lack of food that underpinned so much ill-health and child death. Chapter 5 discusses how and why the people of the Alto tend to describe their deprivation in terms of nervousness rather than hunger, in part because the hospitals, clinics and pharmacies cannot treat hunger, and medicine has transformed the diagnosis to something the medical establishment can appear to treat (for instance tranquillizers for those whose real problem is undernutrition). It would also be political suicide for the leaders whose power comes from the plantation economies that produced the hunger to acknowledge that hunger is not a disease.

Chapter 6 describes how terror remains ever present for the people of the Alto, as the institutions of the state fear the poor and use violence or the threat of violence as a means of control – and also how the death squad disappearances that began during the military dictatorship (which came to power in 1964) continue to this day, despite the return to democracy. Chapter 7 is entitled Two Fe