Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Born	1944 New York, New York
Nationality	American
Fields	Cultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Critical Theory
Institutions	University of California - Berkeley
Alma mater	University of California - Berkeley
Notable awards	Rudolf Virchow Award (2003), Margaret Mead Award (1980)

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (born 1944, New York City) 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, mental illness, 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.

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 Mead 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.

In her subsequent book Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday life in Brazil (1993), she discusses the violence between mothers refusing to care for their sickly children. 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 (gosto) for life. Death without Weeping has become something of a classic within the field of medical anthropology.

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