Nancy Scheper-Hughes (born 1944) is an American anthropologist. She is the Chancellor's Professor Emerita of Anthropology and the director and co-founder (with Margaret Lock) of the PhD program in Critical Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, motherhood, psychiatry, psychosis, social suffering, violence and genocide, death squads, and human trafficking. Scheper-Hughes is the author of several books, including Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (UC Press)[1]; Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Ireland (UC Press, in three editions); Commodifying Bodies (UK Sage) with Loic Wacquant; Violence in War and Peace (Wiley-Blackwell) with Philippe Bourgois; and, most recently, Violence in the Urban Margins (Oxford University Press), with P. Bourgois and J. Auyero. Scheper-Hughes conducted anthropological fieldwork in Northeast Brazil, Argentina, Israel, South Africa, Moldova, the Philippines and the US. As founding director of Organs Watch, she is a consultant on human organ trafficking for the European Union, Interpol, United Nations, and the Vatican. She has testified in several prosecutions of human traffickers. She was a witness to the organ trade that brought Israeli kidney patients from Israel, Europe and New York City to Durban, South Africa and "kidney sellers" from impoverished communities in Recife. Her investigations of an international ring of brokers and their living organ sellers led to a number of arrests by the FBI.
Early life, family and education Scheper-Hughes was born in New York City. She was educated at Queens College, and then University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her B.A. in Social Sciences in 1970 and her doctorate in anthropology in 1976. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow for National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) at Harvard University's Laboratory of Human Development, 1979–1980.
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 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. In addition to her full-length monographs, 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’ 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 American audience.
International activism Scheper-Hughes served as a Peace Corps 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.
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