Nancy Scheper-Hughes
The 2001 Surjit Singh Lecture in Comparative Religious Thought and Culture

Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes is professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and director of the doctoral program in Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the Body. She is the author of Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, and other books and articles.

As a medical anthropologist Scheper-Hughes has researched in and written extensively on Ireland, Brazil and South Africa. She is concerned with the violence and "madness" of everyday life from the existential, feminist, and politically engaged perspective. Her work includes studies of:

• mental illness among bachelor farmers in rural Ireland
• de-institutionalization of those with severe mental ill health in Boston
• infant mortality in northeastern Brazil
• the role of violence during the transition to democracy in South Africa
• global traffic in human organs.

Scheper-Hughes' passion for human rights and the struggle against the political and economic forces that reproduce human misery means that her work goes beyond traditional frontiers in anthropology. Her examination of chronic political violence has encouraged her to develop a unique style of critical theory and reflexive ethnography, which she applies to medicine, psychiatry and the practice of anthropology.

Among her many book awards are:

• for Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, the 1981 Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association
• for Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, the J.I. Stanley Prize for "imaginative works that have gone beyond traditional frontiers in anthropology and given new dimensions to our understanding of humanity"; the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology Applied to Medical Problems; and the Bryce Wood Book Award, among others.

Scheper-Hughes delivered the Surjit Singh Lecture at the GTU on November 7, 2001.

I am deeply honored to be delivering this year's Singh Lecture in comparative religious thought, especially since I come to you from the sisterly-or, perhaps I should say, step-sisterly-discipline of cultural anthropology, known more for its comparative perspective and for its deep, abiding, cultural and moral relativisms than for its religious or theological preoccupations. So I want to thank you-in particular Dean Margaret Miles, Dean Eldon Ernst, and President James Donahue-for your trust, and to ask that my remarks be taken in the spirit of "inter-faith" dialogue of a different kind. Despite our differences in method, anthropology is also a spiritual vocation, and a rather ascetic and monastic one at that, for it demands of us a surrender of ordinary life, of native habits, familiar habitats and natural attachments to engage in long and intense periods of living among strangers and witnessing human lives and events experienced in less "well-lit," certainly less visible, often marginalized spaces of the world.

Anthropology's constituting interest in otherness demands a close attention to people often over-looked, to peoples "without history," as Eric Wolf famously and ironically put it, and attention to ethnographic detail-to small things often forgotten (as the late Jim Deetz would say), and to events and things generally seen as inconsequential. Perhaps anthropology and ethnography could be compared to Saint Teresa's " Little Way," her dedication and determination to find God and spiritual meaning in the clatter of pots and pans in the convent kitchen, and even (a real struggle for Teresa) to find God in the annoying nun in the pew next to her who continued to clear her throat during meditation. For anthropologists it is a question of finding humanity in small details of lived social life, and through these an experience of transcendence, as close as we ever get to approaching the divine, in the Durkheimian sense.

Top of Page ^

The View from the Barrio
We are still in a state of shock and raw grief over recent events that were to a certain extent over-determined, even predictable (we like to think, at least, for who wants to face the possibility of an utterly random and chaotic world?) had "we" been more alert and attentive to the way that we-all the passive beneficiaries of global affluence-are perceived from below. Not in the hierarchical sense, but in the " the view from the barrio," from the refugee camp, from the favela, the inner city, and from the shantytowns and squatter camps where most of the world's populations live (see Fanon 1963; Scheper-Hughes 1992).

In the days and weeks following the attack of September 11th that has so challenged our sense of rootedness, our basic ontological security in the world, I found myself returning to a few key texts-to Gabriel Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, (how could we not have read the signs?) to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its thesis on the utter banality of evil (Eichmann seems so ordinary, so perfectly normal, a hard-working bureaucrat doing his best to rise up in the ranks of his institution), and to W.B. Yeats's poem The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…The best lack all convictions, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." Vincent Crapanzano's anthropological monograph, Waiting, had particular salience with its portrait of ostrich-like South African Whites buried in the inane "ridiculosa" of everyday bourgeois life, hoping, wishing, waiting for the future which (and not only in South Africa) is a Black and Brown future, to go away and pass them by.

Top of Page ^

Finally, I returned to René Girard's (1987) writings on sacrificial violence and the uses of the surrogate victim, the one whose death helps to resolve terrible, unbearable conflicts, difficulties, and collective anxieties. In the most recent instance, the sacrificial violence and victimhood were shared not only by the five thousand victims of the World Trade disaster but equally by the young terrorists (and their family members) whose lives were held hostage by their religious convictions and who were readily, eagerly offered up, given up- sacrificed, that is, by their own religious and political leaders.

Given the cloud of recent events under which we are struggling, I vacillated between two talks for this evening. The one, a genealogy of genocide exploring links between extraordinary mass violence and everyday violence, between war crimes and peace-time crimes; and the second on "making sense" of violence and suffering as a morally fraught first step in an effort to "un-do" evil and to re-make a shattered world. While deciding on the first, I will try to bring in a few thoughts on the second.

Anthropology and Violence
Violence is not a natural topic for the anthropologist. Everything in our training and disposition trains us, like so many inverse bloodhounds, on the scent of the good in human life and society. A basic premise guiding 20th century ethnographic research was, quite simply, to see, hear, and report no evil (and very little violence) in reporting back from the field. Indeed, the work of anthropology demands an explicit ethical orientation to "the other." In times past this was interpreted as a respectful distance, a hesitancy, and a reluctance to name wrongs, to judge, to intervene, or to prescribe change, even in the face of considerable human misery. In existential philosophical terms, anthropology, like theology, implied a leap of faith to an unknown, opaque other-than-myself, before whom a kind of reverence, distance, and awe was required.

We knew, of course, how often well-meaning but uninvited interventions were used against traditionalist, non-secular and communal people who stood in the way of the Western civilizing project and its notions of freedom and "the good." Therefore, it was understood that anthropological work, if it was to be in the nature of an ethical project, had to be transformative of the self, while putting few demands on the cultural "other." Hence, cultural (and moral) relativism evolved as the anthropologist's sacred oath. Like the physician's injunction to "above all, do no harm," the anthropologists' injunction was to "see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil" in reporting back from the field. But the moral blinders that we wore in the one instance, to protect the marginalized and often stigmatized people we studied, spilled over into a kind of moral blindness in other and less appropriate instances, such as at times of genocide and mass violence.

Top of Page ^

In his professional memoir, After the Fact, Clifford Geertz (1995) notes wryly that he always had the uncomfortable feeling of arriving too early or too late to observe the really large and significant political events and violent upheavals that descended on his respective field sites in Morocco and Java. Later he admitted to cautiously avoiding the conflicts by moving back and forth between his respective field sites during periods of relative calm, always managing thereby to "miss the genocide," as it were.

Consequently, nothing in Geertz's ethnographic writings hinted at the "killing fields" that were beginning to engulf Indonesia soon after he had departed from the field, a massacre of suspected Communists by Islamic fundamentalists in 1965 that rivaled recent events in Rwanda. The only mention of that extraordinary blood-bath-a political massacre of some 60,000 Balinese following an unsuccessful Marxist inspired coup-is buried in a footnote in which Geertz draws a tentative parallel between the highly stylized Balinese cock fight and the religious massacres. He wrote, "This is not to suggest that the killings were caused by the cock fight or that they could have been predicted on the basis of it, or that the massacre was some sort of enlarged version of the [cock fight]… But it is to say that if one looks at Bali not just through the medium of its dances, its shadow-plays, its sculpture, but-as the Balinese themselves do-through the medium of the cock fight, then the massacres that occurred seem if not less appalling at least less like a contradiction to the laws of nature"(Geertz, 452).

In my own case, it took me more than two decades to confront the question of political violence which, given my choice of early field sites-Ireland in the mid 1970s, Brazil during the military dictatorship years, and South Africa on the cusp of the first democratic elections-must have required a massive dose of denial. While studying the madness of everyday life in a small, quiet peasant community in western Ireland, I was largely concerned then with interior spaces, with the small dark psychodramas of scapegoating and labeling within traditional farm households that was driving so many young bachelors to drink and to bouts of depression and schizophrenia. I paid scant attention then to the political activities of little Matty Dowd, from whom we rented our cottage in the mountain hamlet of Ballynalacken, who used our attic to store a small arsenal of guns and explosives that he and a few of his Sinn Fein buddies were running to Northern Ireland. Consequently, I left unexamined until recently the links between political violence in Northern Ireland, and the tortured family dramas in West Kerry that certainly had a violence of their own.

Top of Page ^

Since then, I continued to study other forms of "everyday" violence: the abuses of medicine practiced in bad faith against the weak, the mad, and the hungry, and the social indifference to child death in northeast Brazil that allowed political leaders, priests, coffin makers, and shantytown mothers to dispatch nonchalantly a multitude of hungry "angel-babies" to the afterlife. In Brazil I did not begin to study state violence until in the late l980s when the half-grown sons of some of my friends and neighbors in the shantytown of Alto do Cruzeiro began to "disappear," their mutilated bodies turning up later, the handiwork of police-infiltrated local death squads.

Today, the world, the objects of our study, and the uses of anthropology have changed considerably. And those privileged to observe human events close up and over time and who are privy to local, community, and state secrets that are generally hidden from view until later, much later, after the collective graves have been discovered and the body counts made, are beginning to recognize an obligation to identify the sources, structures, and institutions of mass violence. This new mood of political and ethical engagement has resulted in considerable soul-searching.

I have suggested, for example, that a more complex and a more "womanly" anthropology might be concerned not only with how humans think, but with how they behave toward each other and toward those seen as decidedly other than themselves. But given our insistence on appreciating difference and divergent ethical principles, what form(s) could this possibly take?

Making Sense of Violence
The problem with interpretive anthropology (like theodicy) is that it is about making sense of a world that has become increasingly absurd. In the context of mass violence, death, and extreme social suffering, sense-and meaning making-is often fraught with moral ambiguities.

Top of Page ^

I recall, for example, an ANC Women's League march into Guguletu township in South Africa the day after an American student, Amy Biehl, was killed by angry militant youth in August 1994, just months before Nelson Mandela would assume power. The theme of the well-intentioned march was to "take back the township" from violent youth. At the bridge leading into the beleaguered township, posters were distributed: "Comrades Come in All Colors" was favored over "Farewell Amy" in Zulu. Guguletu is a Xhosa speaking township, and it was not the time for ecumenical sentiments. I picked up a seemingly innocuous poster: "STOP THE SENSELESS VIOLENCE" as we toiy-toiyed from the SHOPRITE supermarket, over the bridge, and through the squatter camp, across the highway leading into "Gugs." But immediately confronted there by silent lines of scowling, hostile young men, I tried to hide, holding the now offending poster in front of my white "settler" face, all the while second-guessing local reactions to the thoughtless, sense-less words for which I was a poster girl. Did "senseless violence" imply that the apartheid police were sensible in their continuous violent assaults on the township? Was senseless violence a racist code for "irrational" Black violence opposed to sensible, everyday, institutionalized White South African violence? Peace-time crimes.

At times of crisis and at moments of intense suffering people everywhere demand an answer to the existential question: "Why me, oh God? Why me? Why me of all people? Why now?" The quest for meaning may be posed to vindicate an indifferent God, to quell self-doubt, or to shore up a fragile faith in an orderly and just world. Following a terrorist attack by young Black militants on a large evangelical church in a white suburb of Cape Town during this same dangerous, liminal period just before the South African elections, the victims and survivors of the attack looked to their clergy for an explanation. The church massacre was evil and barbaric, Bishop Reteif intoned from the pulpit of St. James church the following Sunday. It had come from the devil, not from God. The young militants were demonized, referred to as "savages" and "barbarians." The congregation, which had long passively supported the apartheid regime, called upon the South African police's special security forces-terrorists in their own right-for help.

Following a national emergency, an epidemic, a natural disaster or a political attack, whenever tragedy hits an entire collectivity, the "Why me?" question often becomes the "Why not me?," the "Why was I (of all people) spared?," as survivors try to find some logic, some coherence, some purpose even behind their exemption, their saving grace. The one thing humans seem unable to accept is the idea that the world may be utterly deficient in meaning.

Top of Page ^

Although the members of the St. James congregation are extremely faithful in their attendance, some regular worshippers did, of course, miss the Sunday service on that rainy evening in late July. A clerical worker in the medical school had car trouble; a secretary was down with the flu; a student grew impatient waiting in the rain for her best friend to arrive, and she went home rather than disrupt the service after it had begun. Each one shared with me their thoughts about why God had chosen to spare them on that night, and their doubts about whether it was a good or a bad thing to have been spared the massacre.

"God was speaking to us very directly at the moment of the blast," said Marlene Sidric , expressing her chagrin at having missed the massacre. "But what was he saying?" I asked. Marlene shook her head: "It hasn't yet been revealed to us." But Minnie Petterson thought she knew: " He was telling us that life is given, life is taken away. Live it fully day to day. Be kind to those you love, cherish them now. For you never know if your loved ones will be wiped away tomorrow."

Top of Page ^

It would take several years and the help of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings for victims and survivors of the St. James massacre to begin to understand (which is not, of course, to exculpate) the seething rage, resentment and desperation of the young Black township men who exploded into their quiet, a-political, suburban White Cape Town-ian lives. And, years, too, for the young militants convicted of the attack to even begin to see the worshippers as flesh and blood humans, like themselves, and as unfortunate and tragic targets of their political struggle (see Scheper-Hughes 1995a, 1997).

A Genealogy of Genocide
It seems appropriate to begin by looking closely at moments of recognition, or mis-recognition, at which anthropological and political engagement begin. I will argue that mis-recognized everyday violence ("peace-time crimes") is what makes mass violence and genocide possible. My sole contribution lies in weaving together disparate threads of daily practice that allow genocidal-like behaviors toward certain classes of "dispensable" people to continue. I will end with a personal vignette to demonstrate the extent to which we are all bystanders and complicit with structural violence, even when it is directed unconsciously against those we most love. Here we can reach the most deeply protected of all public secrets-the violence of everyday life.

With the shocking reappearance of genocides and other forms of state and terrorist mass killing in the late 20th century (in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America) anthropologists have witnessed what a great many people had believed-following the Holocaust-could never happen again.

Top of Page ^

While the political/legal concept of genocide is new, the "eliminationist" impulse can be found in pre-modern societies as well as in modern and late modern civilizations. A spiritual charter, if you will, for genocide can be found in Genesis when the God of the desert Hebrews, in a kind of genocidal rage, wills a flood to destroy all human life (save Noah and his family). Genocides and mass killings have been attributed to "weak, anarchic states" as well as to strong, authoritarian, and bureaucratically efficient states.

A great many theorists of the Holocaust emphasize the "modernity of genocide," its link to a specific level of state formation, technological efficiency, rationality and subjectivity. The European sociologist Zygmut Bauman (1989) views the Holocaust as a kind of mad triumph of rational efficiency, a distorted byproduct of the increasing rationalization of social life. Recently, Georgio Agamben (1999) identified the concentration camp as the prototype of late modern bio-politics with its production of a population of "living dead," those whose bodies could be taken by the state at will, neither for the purpose of sacrifice nor as a punishment for crimes, but merely because of their "availability" for execution. Here, the Holocaust is something of a misnomer. For it is not about religion or about bodies "sacrificed" as " burnt offerings." If Agambem is correct, late modern genocide is about actualizing a capacity to exterminate, cleanly and absolutely.

But what kinds of modernity do the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Brundi represent? Characteristic of all of them is the obsessive focus on the body-on blood and genealogy to be sure, but also on defining phenotypes and body types-the particular shape and length of heads, arms, legs, buttocks, hair, and lips, the race-mad "corporeal imaginary" of the late modern world.

Top of Page ^

Meanwhile, the "dirty wars" and "social hygiene" projects of military governments of Brazil, Argentina and apartheid South Africa, relied on techniques of torture and mass killing that could hardly be described as "modern." The apartheid government's security forces "re-invented" primitive witch burnings and discarded some of their political enemies by burning them-sometimes while still alive-over bar-b-que pits. The Brazilian and Argentinean military's tool kit of tortures resembled nothing so much as the techniques of the Inquisition. And the modern invention of political "disappearances" awakened in terrorized populations ancient rumors and fears of "body snatching," "blood libel," and ritual killings.

So we are once again forced to revisit the question that so vexed a generation of post-Holocaust social theorists: What makes genocide and mass violence possible? What are the limits and capacities of anthropos? How do we explain the complicity of ordinary people to outbreaks of genocidal violence?

Adorno and the post-World War II Frankfurt School suggested that participation in genocide requires a strong childhood conditioning that produces almost mindless obedience to authority figures. More recently Daniel Goldhagen (1996) argued to the contrary that thousands of ordinary Germans participated willingly, even eagerly, in the Holocaust, not for fear of punishment by authority figures but goaded on by primitive race hatred alone.

Top of Page ^

Indeed, genocides and mass killings rarely appear on the scene unbidden. They evolve. There are identifiable starting points or instigating circumstances. They are often preceded by social upheavals, by a precipitous decline in economic conditions, political disorganization, or by radical social change leading to a state of normlessness or anomie. Conflict over scarce material resources-land, and water-can escalate into desperate mass killings when combined with social sentiments that question the humanity of the opposing group. Extreme forms of oppositional thinking-us vs. them-can result in a social self identity predicated on a notion of "the other" as enemy.

The Holocaust alerted a generation of post World War II scholars to the danger of social conformity and the absence of dissent. Hence the slogan "question authority." More recently, the conflict in the Middle East, in the former Yugoslavia, and in sub-Saharan Africa, suggests that a past history of social suffering and of woundedness, especially a history of racial victimization, can lead to a pre-disposition to mass violence. A continuous traumatic stress disorder can lead to a hyper-reactivity that can readily ignite another cycle of "self defensive" mass killings.

Ritual sacrifice and the search for a generative scapegoat-a social class or ethnic group on which to pin the blame for social and economic problems is also a common pre-condition for genocide. As is a shared ideology, a blueprint for living, and a vision of the world that defines obstacles to the good life or the holy life in the form of certain people who must be removed, eliminated, wiped out. There is often the belief that everyone will benefit from the social cleansing, even the dead themselves.

Top of Page ^

Finally, and to my mind, most importantly, there must be a broad constituency of bystanders who either (as in White South Africa) "allow" race hostile policies to continue without massive civil disobedience or (as in Nazi Germany and in Rwanda) who can be recruited to participate, when needed, in genocidal acts. Less recognized is the supporting role of global "bystanders," powerful nation states, like the United States, whose population are the passive beneficiaries of global political and economic forces and who can seem arrogantly indifferent to the misery of the world's squatter camps and refugee camps. But international and non-governmental agencies, can also play the role of global bystanders, like the delays or refusals of the United Nations to intervene in genocides at a time when the tide could still be reversed, as in the case of Rwanda when UN peacekeepers were instructed to do nothing. The origins and evolution of genocide and mass violence are complex and multifaceted, but they are not inscrutable or unpredictable.

Peace-Time Crimes—The Genocide Continuum
I have suggested a genocidal continuum comprised of a multitude of "small wars and invisible genocides" conducted in the normative spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, court rooms, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The continuum refers to the human capacity to reduce others to non-persons, to monsters, or to things that give license to individual, collective and institutionalized forms of mass violence.

I know that in referring to a genocide continuum I am walking on thin ice. The concept flies directly in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to a careful and restricted use of the term genocide itself (see Fackenheim 1970). But if there is a moral risk in over-extending the concept of "genocide" into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it, an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitizing ourselves, in mis-recognizing, proto-genocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by "ordinary" good enough people.

Here, Pierre Bourdieu's (1977, 1996) partial and unfinished theory of violence is useful. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutia of "normal" social practices-in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth-Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror.

Top of Page ^

Similarly, Franco Basaglia's (1987) notion of "peace-time crimes"-crimini di pace-imagines a direct relationship between war-time and peace-time, between war-crimes and peace-crimes. Here, war-crimes might be seen as the ordinary violence, crimes of public consent, when they are applied systematically and dramatically in times of war and overt genocide. Peace-time crimes force us to consider the parallel uses and meanings of rape during peace-time and war-time as well as the family resemblances between border raids and physical assaults by official INS agents on Mexican and Central American refugees and earlier state-sponsored genocides such as the Cherokee Indians' forced exile, their "Trail of Tears."

Everyday forms of state violence-peace-time crimes-make a certain kind of domestic "peace" possible. In the U.S. (and especially in California) the phenomenal growth of a new military, post-industrial, prison complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition. How many public executions of mentally deficient murderers are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? How many new maximum security prisons are needed to contain an expanding population of young Black and Latino men cast as "public enemies?" Ordinary peace-time crimes such as the steady evolution of American prisons into alternative black concentration camps constitute the "small wars and invisible genocides" to which I refer. So do the youth mortality rates in Oakland, California and in New York City.

Another instance of what I am referring to here as "peace-time crimes" or invisible genocides was a quickly dismissed, mis-recognized event that occurred in downtown Chicago between July 13th and 20th, 1995 - one that produced carnage on the scale of a double jumbo jet crash at O'Hare airport. An estimated 733 Chicago residents, a disproportionate number of them Black, elderly, and poor, many of them alone and barricaded behind locked doors and sealed windows perished in the brick ovens of their tiny rented rooms and dilapidated Southside tenements during an atrocious heat wave. Eric Kleinenberg (2001) is completing a major social anatomy of the so-called Chicago heat wave. At the height of the heat wave's destructiveness when the bodies of 300 heat victims were delivered to the city morgue on Saturday and 240 on Sunday, they formed "a parade of death so enormous, so surreal," Kleinenberg writes, "that it seemed impossible that this was happening in the center of the city."

Top of Page ^

The response of public officials was appalling. They monotonously invoked the hand of God (who turned the city's thermostat up to 106 degrees in the shade on July 13th) and minimized the damage. Mayor Richard Daley responded with the unforgettable words: "It's hot, it's very hot. We have our little problems but let's not blow it all out of proportion. We go to extremes in Chicago. And that's why people like Chicago. We go to extremes." Later he added, "The city cannot be held responsible for the heat." And, to ward off any criticisms, the Mayor's Commission added that when it came to protecting residents, "Government alone cannot do it all." Instead, city officials predictably blamed the victims themselves. "We're talking about people who die because they neglect themselves," the Chicago Commission of Health and Human Services said at the time. The city's official report on the disaster, entitled the "Mayor's Commission on Extreme Weather Conditions," naturalized the disaster and emphasized that "those most at risk may be least likely to want or accept help from government." In other words, God helps those who help themselves.

The inability of aged poor to bootstrap themselves out of their dangerous neighborhoods and sub-standard housing and the city's failure to rescue them was, Kleinenberg argues, a sign and symptom of new forms of marginality and neglect that are endemic to American big cities. What really happened in July 1995, he suggests, might be better understood as "social murder."

Events like these constitute invisible genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and taken for granted.

Top of Page ^

We would do well to reconsider the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman and Jules Henry (as well as Franco Basaglia) to perceive the logical relations between concentration camps and mental hospitals, nursing homes and other "total" institutions, and between prisoners and mental patients. It allows us to see the capacity and the willingness of ordinary people-society's "practical technicians"-to enforce, at other times, "genocidal-like" crimes against classes and types of people thought of as waste, as rubbish , as "deficient" in humanity, as "better off dead" or even as better off never having been born. The mad, the disabled, the mentally deficient have often fallen into this category, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and despised racial, religious, and ethnic groups. Erik Erikson referred to "psuedo-speciation" as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human-a necessary pre-requisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremarkable peace-times that can precede the sudden, and only seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of genocide.

Sacrificial Violence and Invisible Suffering
Denial is a pre-requisite of mass violence and genocide. In my book, Death Without Weeping, based on more than 25 years of intermittent field research in the sugar plantation zone of impoverished northeast Brazil, I explored the social indifference to staggering infant and child mortality in the shantytown favelas. Local political leaders, Catholic priests and nuns, coffin makers, and shantytown mothers themselves casually dispatched a multitude of hungry "angel-babies" to the afterlife each year saying, "Well, they themselves wanted to die." The babies were described as having no "taste," no "knack," and no "talent" for life.

Medical practices such as prescribing powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, Catholic ritual celebrations of the death of "angel-babies," and the bureaucratic indifference in political leaders' dispensing free baby coffins but no food to hungry families and children, interacted with maternal practices such as radically reducing food and liquids to severely malnourished and dehydrated babies so as to help them, their mothers said, to die quickly and well. Perceived as already "doomed," sickly infants were described as less than human creatures, as ghostly angel-babies, inhabiting a terrain midway between life and death. "Really and truly," mothers said, "it is better that these spirit-children return to where they came from."

I gradually came to think of the shantytown angel-babies in terms of René Girard's (1987) idea of sacrificial violence. The given-up, offered-up angel babies of Bom Jesus seemed prototypical generative scapegoats, sacrificed in the face of terrible domestic conflicts about scarcity and survival. And that is, in fact, just how their mothers sometimes spoke of them.

Top of Page ^

"What does it mean," I asked several women of the Alto during a local Mothers Club meeting on the top of the Alto do Cruzeiro, "to say that a baby 'has' to die, or that it dies because it 'wants' to die?"

Terezinha was the first to speak. " It means that God takes them to save us from suffering." "What she means," broke in Zephinha, "is that God knows the future better than you or I. It could be that if the baby were to live he would cause much suffering in the mother. He could turn out a thief, or a murderer or a good for nothing. And so they die as babies to save us from pain and suffering, not to give us pain."

Luiza added, "I kept giving birth and mine kept on dying. Perhaps the first nine had to die so that the last five could live."

"I myself," said Fatima (referring to a sickly and listless year old baby in her lap), "don't have too much hope for this one. She has no blood. If God wants her, then I would be happy for her and happy for me! I would be happy to have a little angel in heaven."

"But why would God want little babies to suffer so much in dying as they do?" I asked.

" Don't ask me," answered Edite Cosmos. "But perhaps these ugly diseases are sent by God to punish us for the sins of the world. It is strange because we ourselves are the sinners, but the punishment falls heavily on them."

Top of Page ^

"Be quiet, Edite," said Severina Ramos. "They die, just like Jesus died, to save us from pain and suffering. Isn't that right, Sister Juliana?"

But Sister Juliana, a native of the dry sertão where babies did not die (she said) like flies as they did in the sugar zone, was not so sure that the women were right in their theological thinking. "I don't think Jesus wants all your babies," she said. "I think He wants them to live." But Sister Juliana was a nun and the Alto women didn't pay her too much attention. What could she possibly know about babies?

The ability of desperately poor women to help those infants who (they said) "needed to die" required an existential "letting go" (contrasted to the maternal work of holding on, holding close, and holding dear). Letting go required a leap of faith that was not easy to achieve. And these largely Catholic women often said that their infants died just as Jesus died so that others-especially themselves-could live. The question that lingered, unresolved, in my mind was whether this Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" entailed a certain Marxist "bad faith" as well.

Top of Page ^

I certainly did not want to blame shantytown mothers for putting their own survival over and above that of their infants and small babies, for these were moral choices that no person should be forced to make. But in denying authorship of their acts and in blaming the deaths of their "angel babies" on the willingness and "readiness" of their doomed infants to die, the mothers seem to be reproducing a climate similar to Agamben's description of life in the death camps.

The sacrificial baby theme appeared in many other guises, as for example in the belief that infants named after powerful patron saints often become "the first fruits" offered to them. An oft repeated folk motif tells of a poor peasant who lost his favorite donkey, his wife and then his newborn son, in close succession. He is grief-stricken until a man appears, who turns out later to be an apparition of St. Anthony, who lets the man know that if they had lived, each one of those who died would have betrayed him had they lived. Few moradores of the Alto lose a cherished animal, and only some experience the loss of a young spouse, but virtually all have lost a baby, and many have lost several of them. And the words of consolation from the folktale were often repeated on the Alto. "Better the child should die," women say to each other, "than either you or I."

Top of Page ^

While the breath of fresh air from the open window of liberation theology has blown away some of the old cobwebs of baroque religious traditions affecting mothers and infants, in particular those concerning the celebration of angel-babies, it has left a vacuum in its place. Liberation theology trained priests now view the death of infants and small babies as a human tragedy, and they discourage mothers from falling into the old, comfortable religious consolations. These are spurned as the archaic survivals of a "primitive" folk Catholicism. "Jesus never intended that the innocent should suffer and die for our sins," Sister Juliana now tells the bereaved mothers of the Alto do Cruzeiro. He wants your babies to live." But they continue to die all the same. Padre Agostino tells mothers the "new" church is a church of hope and of joy. He says that it is wrong to celebrate the death of child angels, that Jesus "doesn't want all the babies that are sent to Him." But if Jesus doesn't want them, nor can Alto mothers possibly raise all the babies which Jesus sends to them. It is an odd sort of kula ring, played with a valuable token of exchange that the players try to pass along rather quickly so as not to be the one left holding the baby.

Maternal Thinking and Military Thinking
The given-up, given-up-on babies of the Alto do Cruzeiro had been sacrificed in the face of terrible conflicts about scarcity and survival. And it was here, for example, that peace-time and war-time, maternal thinking and military thinking, converged. When angels (or martyrs) are fashioned from the dead bodies of those who die young "maternal thinking" most resembles military, especially wartime, thinking. On the battlefield as in the shantytown, triage, thinking in sets, and a belief in the magical replaceability of the dead, predominate.

Top of Page ^

Above all, ideas of "acceptable death" and of "meaningful" (rather than useless) suffering extinguish rage and grief for those whose lives are taken and allow for the recruitment of new lives and new bodies into the struggle. Just as shantytown mothers in Brazil consoled each other that their hungry babies died because they were "meant" to die or because they "had" to die, Northern Irish mothers and South African township mothers console each other at political wakes and funerals during war time and in times of political struggle with the belief that their "sacrificed" and "martyred" children died purposefully and died well. This kind of thinking is not exclusive to any particular class of people. Whenever humans attribute some meaning-whether political or spiritual-to the useless suffering of others we all behave, I have argued, a bit like public executioners.

Children as Vermin
Similarly, the existence of two childhoods in Brazil-"my" child (middle class, beloved, a child of family and home) versus the hated "street child" (the child of the other, unwanted and unwashed) has given rise in the late 20th century to police and death squad attacks that are genocidal in their social and political sentiments. "Street children" are often described as "dirty vermin" so that unofficial policies of "street cleaning," "trash removal," "fly swatting," and "pest removal" are invoked in garnering broad-based public support for their extermination.

The term, "street child," reflects the preoccupations of one class and segment of Brazilian society with the proper place of another. The term represents a kind of symbolic apartheid as urban space has become increasingly "privatized." As long as poor, "dirty" street children are contained to the slum or the favela, "where they belong," they are not viewed as an urgent social problem about which something must be done.

Top of Page ^

The real issue is the preoccupation of one social class with the "proper place" of another social class. Like dirt that is "clean" when it is in the yard and "dirty" when it is found under the nails, "dirty" street children are simply children "out of place." In Brazil the street is an unbounded and dangerous realm, the space of the "masses" (o povo) where one can be treated anonymously. Rights belong to the realm of the "home." "Street children," barefoot, shirtless, and unattached to a home, represent the extreme of social marginality. They occupy a particularly degraded social position within the Brazilian hierarchy of place and power. As denizens of the street these semi-autonomous kids are separated from all that can confer relationship and propriety, without which rights and citizenship are impossible.

In the cohort of forty semi-autonomous, largely homeless street children in the interior market town of Bom Jesus in Pernambuco that I have been following since the mid 1980s, twenty-six of the original group are dead. Some were killed unapologetically by police in acts that were recorded as "legitimate homicides." At least 16 were killed by members of a notorious death squad, hired killers, paid for by the small businessmen of Bom Jesus da Mata. Others simply "disappeared," their bodies turning up later in hospital and police mortuaries in the nearby capital city of Recife, the cause of their deaths unknown and unaccounted for. Among the survivors a third were, at the time of my last survey, in jail, recently released from jail, or involved in activities that would soon put them in jail. A few had already become killers themselves, recruited by police, leaders of the death squad, and even by a corrupt judge to help "clean the streets" of their own social class. And so, until very recently, the cycle of violence turned, with children killing children, urged on by the local forces of law and dis-order itself.

Rubbish People—Happy Valley Nursing Home
But we need go no further than our own medical clinics, emergency rooms, public hospitals and old age homes to encounter other classes of "rubbish people" treated with as much indifference and malevolence as Brazilian "street kids" or angel babies on the Alto do Cruzeiro. The following (and painfully rendered vignette) should suffice.

Top of Page ^

About two years ago (1997) I stepped outside "Happy Valley" Nursing Care Center near Baltimore, Maryland to take several deep breaths before returning inside to face what was left of (and left to) my impossibly dear and now impossibly frail parents, both in their nineties. A "late in life" child, I can only remember my father with gray and then later with white hair. No other five year old I knew cried themselves to sleep after reciting bedtime prayers, certain that their parents would surely die before they woke. But my parents fooled everyone and outlived their much younger siblings, joining that small cohort that sociologists refer to as the "oldest old." With me living 3,000 miles away from my parents in New York City and an older brother living in Baltimore who spent a good part of each year traveling, the once unthinkable idea of a nursing home crept up on us after all else failed. My parents refused to move when moving close to one of us was still an option. As my mother's strength and independent spirit was sapped by Alzheimer's, and as my father's mobility was hampered by a broken hip and by Parkinson's disease, we tried to hire home care workers. Eventually, they sold their house and moved to upstate New York to join my mother's older sister in a retirement community for elderly nuns and a few ancient couples who appreciated the beauty of the mountains and the Hudson River and found solace in the presence of a small contemplative-based chapel that was part of the grounds.

As my parents' condition deteriorated, they were asked to leave St. Joseph's Villa, a rejection that my mother, in her frail mental state, took personally as a sign of her own failure. In the small, pleasant-looking nursing home in Baltimore to which they were "temporarily" transferred, both parents soon became almost completely physically dependent, immobile, and incontinent, but only Dad, at 95, was painfully conscious of his reduced condition and circumstances. Mom was maintained in the end (against her and my wishes) by a plastic sack of brown liquid, suspended from a moveable pole, and dripped by tubing into her abdomen. By this time she had lost language and she communicated by gentle and lady-like howls. When not thrashing about, she seemed resigned but with the hopeless, open-eyed, and desperate stare of a hooked rainbow trout. Whenever Mom saw me and when-ignoring the nurse's rules-I would release her from her final hook and line and wheel her into the sunny courtyard, she would smile and she was attentive to the birds overhead and to the bright pink azaleas that were always one of her favorite flowers. She would hold the blossoms in her hand and try to speak.

Top of Page ^

Around the corner, virtually trapped in his semi-private room, which he shared with a more robust but ill-mannered bully who would steal his socks and shirts, my Dad was maintained by three or four tins of milky liquid protein-calorie Ensure®. At every given opportunity, he would spill the sticky stuff into his wastepaper basket into which he also occasionally urinated because he could not, he complained, get to his bedside porta-potty on time. And so, the wise man who taught me courage under fire (Nil Desperandum!-never despair-was his lifelong motto), the organic intellectual who introduced me to multiple ways of seeing and knowing the world now disparagingly called himself "Little Jack Horner" (that is, stuck in his corner at Happy Valley ).

Just as I steeled myself to return inside the nursing home, high-pitched sirens announced the arrival of emergency ambulance and fire engines. The engines stopped in front of the entrance and several young men, dressed in white and in blue, jumped from their trucks carrying a stretcher, oxygen tank, and other heavy duty medical equipment. I was frozen with fear, but not so much of my dear parents' timely deaths. Rather, it was for fear of their untimely medical rescue. But it was another fragile, bird-like creature who was carted away under an oxygen tent as she clawed at the plastic tent flaps like a startled tabby cat. Her body was handled efficiently, even gracefully, by the boys in white who, nonetheless, eased their work by making sport of the absurd drama of rescue into which a resistant Ms. Kelly had been recruited.

As ever increasing numbers of the aged are both sick and poor due to the astronomical cost of late life medical care, they are at risk of spending their remaining years in public or less expensive private institutions for the aged like "Happy Valley." In private, "for profit" nursing homes the care for residents is delegated to grossly underpaid and under-trained care-takers who understandably protect themselves by turning the persons and bodies under their protection into things, bulky objects that can-once a new staffer gets the hang of it-be dealt with in shorter and shorter intervals. Economic pressures bear down on the "staffers" by their supervisors to minimize the personal care and attention given to the residents, especially those like my parents, whose limited life savings had been quickly used up by the institution and who were now supported by the state on Medicare.

Top of Page ^

Today in the U.S. nursing facilities care for nearly 2 million elderly and disabled residents. They are part of a lucrative private industry that produces some $87 billion of business each year, of which more than 75 cents of every dollar comes from public funds through Medicare and Medicaid. To insure profits, most nursing homes are grossly under-staffed, and to compensate for that, somewhat active or rebellious residents are over-sedated. A federal study in 1998 found that nearly one-third of all nursing homes in California had been cited for violations that caused death or grave harm to residents (Bates 199: 12). My Dad saw through the sham of benevolence that was announced by a nursing home poster welcoming new residents to Happy Valley's "circle of care" and informing patients of their rights. He often made sport of the poster to show that he was still on top of things, but it was with a prisoner's double-edged humor.

The underpaid staff needed, no less than myself, to duck away out of sight as often as possible, for a smoke, a snack, or a breath of air. But other work survival tactics at Happy Valley Home are less defensible. The personal names of residents are dropped and they are often addressed as "you" instead of Mr. Scheper. Little or no account is taken of expressed wishes so that sooner or later any requests based on personal preferences-to turn the heat up or down, to open or close the window, to bring a cold drink, to lower the TV or change a channel-are extinguished. Passivity sets in. When the body is rolled from one side or the other for cleaning or to clean the sheets (body and sheets are equated), or when the resident is wheeled conveniently into a corner so that the floor can be more easily mopped, when cleaning staff do little to suppress expressions of disgust at urine, feces, or phlegm out of place-on clothing, under the nails, on wheelchairs, or in waste paper baskets-the person trapped inside the failing body may also come to see themselves as "dirty," "vile," "disgusting," as an object or non-person. An essay by Jules Henry (1966) on "Hospitals for the Aged Poor" documenting the attack on the elderly individual's dwindling stock of personal and psychological "capital" by nursing home administrators and staff rings as true today as when it was first written.

Top of Page ^

The institutional destruction of personhood is aided by the material circumstances of the home. Although individualized laundry baskets are supplied for each resident, the nursing aides refuse responsibility for lost or mismatched clothing, even when each piece is carefully labeled. Several times I arrived as late as 11:00 in the morning to find my father in bed and under his sheets and completely undressed because, he explained, he had "no clothing" to wear. Arguments with staff were counter-productive and if anything could increase their passive hostility toward the complainant. When all personal objects-toothbrush, comb, glasses, towels, pens and pencils-continue to disappear no matter how many times they have been replaced, the resident (if he or she knows what is good for him or her) finally accepts the situation and adapts in other ways.

Eventually, residents are compelled to use other objects, which are more available, for purposes for which they were never intended. The plastic wastepaper basket becomes the urinal, the urinal the washbasin, the water glass turns into a spittoon, the hated adult diaper is used defiantly for a table napkin, and so forth. Meanwhile, the institutional violence and indifference are masked as the resident's own state of mental confusion and incompetence. And everything in the nature of the institution invites the resident to further regression, to give up, to lose, to accept his or her inevitable and less than human, depersonalized status. But where are the forces of liberation or a "human rights watch" in hidden spaces of dehumanization and "invisible genocide" in such normative institutions (of caring) as these?

How can I write this so personal reflection without screaming? I am screaming. But I found myself unable to do the only thing that could have reversed this mad system: to run down the halls of Happy Valley Nursing Home, pull out the tubes, detach the liquid bags, knock over the porta-potties, and pick up my ancient and still beloved old ones and take them home to live with me. But God help me, this I was unable to do.

Top of Page ^

My point in revisiting this painful experience is neither to indict a business which indicts itself by its own "for profit" motives ("caveat emptor!") nor less to blame the nursing home aides who are paid less than fry chefs at the local McDonalds to care for our old ones. My point is to ask what kind of civilization and people we have become when we-social critics and "militant anthropologists" among us-can fall prey to a lethal passivity toward institutional practices which compromise and erode the humanity and personhood of our own parents.

A postscript. On September 17, 1997 my father passed away in a hospital, but without too much labor. His final moments were peaceful. And at least in death his bodily dignity was restored. The young working class funeral director, Vinnie, who attended to my father's remains and supervised their removal from Baltimore to "home" in Queens, New York for a simple funeral executed his tasks with extraordinary care and concern for my late father's dignity. In his dark blue suit with jaunty rosebud in its lapel, his handsome white beard trimmed, my father's charisma and personhood were ultimately returned to him. A simple gift. But it is a deadly commentary on postmodern life (and on all of us) when the body we love is given greater honor and value in death than in the very last years of a long, gentle, and beautifully ordinary life.

Concluding Observations: Un-Doing
Peace-time crimes are so deeply inscribed in our ordinary, unexamined lifeways that no one is exempt, least of all the "critical" and "militant" anthropologist. Obviously, social and political critique must extend to self-critique, to illuminating how ordinary, everyday ways of thinking, loving, and being in the world are implicated in the violence that we are trying to understand and to combat. The demons have not fled. We have faced the terrorist…and she is also ourselves.

Top of Page ^

All forms of violence are sustained by the passively averted gaze. The critical lens moves in and out, intentionally juxtaposing the different levels of violence-macro and micro, economic, epistemic-and the deeply personal and subjective. I have tried to show a way of reading across the scales of power and of violence to allow a recognition of their connections and continuities. Genocide is part of a continuum; it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, by-standers-and even by victims themselves-as ordinary, routine, even justified.

The preparation for mass killing is found in social sentiments and in institutions ranging from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. The early "warning signs" include an evolving social consensus toward 1) the devaluing of certain forms of human life, including pseudo-speciation, dehumanization, reification, and depersonalization; 2) a refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable and stigmatized social groups seen as social parasites, whether "illegal aliens," "welfare queens," or hospitalized "gomers" and "nursing home elderly; 3) the militarization of everyday life, e.g., the growth of prisons, the acceptance of capital punishment; heightened technologies of personal security, including the household gun and gated communities; 4) increasing social polarization , fear and moral panics, meaning the perceptions of the underclass, street children, or certain racial or ethnic groups as dangerous and socially polluting public enemies; and finally, 5) reversed feelings of victimization as dominant social groups and social classes demand strong policing to put despised subordinate or marginal groups in their proper place.

Once recognized, how can these negative social forces be transformed? I have found useful Immanuel Levinas's notion of the "primacy of the ethical" which suggests certain culturally transcendent, transparent, and essential, first principles. Traditionally, anthropologists have understood morality as contingent on, and embedded within, specific cultural assumptions about human life. But there is another philosophical and theological position that posits "the ethical" as existing prior to culture. Some events, like genocide and mass violence, are not amenable to a relativizing discourse. As Levinas writes: "Morality does not belong to culture: [it] enables one to judge it."

Top of Page ^

The demand for mutual responsibility, accountability, answerability to "the other"-the ethical, as I define it-is pre-cultural to the extent that our existence as uniquely social beings presupposes the presence of the other. Anthropological relativism assumes that thought, emotion, and reflexivity come into existence with words, and words come into being with and within culture. But the generative, pre-structure of language (that is, our uniquely human readiness for speech) assumes a given relationship with another subject, one that exists prior to words in the silent, pre-verbal "taking stock" of each other's existence. I cannot escape the following observation: that we are thrown into existence at all, presupposes a given moral relationship to an original other/mother and she to me.

"Basic strangeness"-the profound shock of mis-recognition reported by some mothers in their first encounters with a newborn-is perhaps the prototype of all dangerously alienated "self-other" relations, including those leading to genocide. Ultimately, as every new mother knows, for fragile life to grow and prosper, "basic strangeness" must eventually be overcome by "basic love." The primacy of the ethical demands a radical de-estrangement, and de-racialization, a surrender of one's attachments and loyalties to old nations, old religions, old races, old social classes, and old entitlements. Martin Buber's I-Thou over I-it relations, certainly comes to mind.

Above all, it is essential that we exercise a defensive hyper-vigilance and hyper-sensitivity to all the mundane, normative, and permitted acts of violence that are directed against certain "classes" of disqualified and despised humans. Perhaps a collective self-mobilization for constant shock and hyper-arousal about the little violences of everyday life is one ethical response to Walter Benjamin's view of late modern history as a chronic "state of emergency."

Top of Page ^

References

• Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• ______. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem:A Reporton the Banality of Evil. New York: Vintage.
• _____. 1969. On Violence. New York: Hartcourt, Brace & World
• Basglia, Franco. 1987. "Peace-Time Crimes,"in Psychiatry Inside Out: Selected Writings of Franco Basaglia (Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Anne M. Lovell, eds.) New York: Columbia University Press.
• Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. New York: Cornell University Press.
• Benjamin, Walter. 1969. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (H. Arendt, ed.) pp. 83-109. New York: Schocken.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• _____. 1996. In Other Words. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Chorbajian, Levon and George Shirinian, eds. 1999. Studies in Comparative Genocide. New York: St. Martin's Press.
• Das, Veena. 1996. Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain. Daedalus 125(1):67-92. Special Issue on Social Suffering.
• Dimenstein, Gilberto. 1991. Brazil: War on Children. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Erikson, Erik. 1950. Childhood and Society. New York: Norton.
• Fackenheim, Emil. 1970. God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections after Auschwitz. New York: New York University
• Fanon, Frantz, 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove.
• Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage.
• Geertz, Clifford. 1995. After the Fact.
• Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University
• Girard, René. 1987. "Generative Scapegoating," in Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (R. Hamerton-Kelly, ed.), pp. 73-105. Stanford University. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. 1996. Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York: Alfred Knopf.
• Gramsci, Antonio. 1957. The Formation of Intellectuals. In The Modern Prince and Other Writings. New York: International Publishers.
• Henry, Jules. 1996. Sham, Vulnerability and Other Forms of Self Destruction. New York: Vintage.
• Klinenberg, Eric. 2001. Bodies That Don't Matter. Body & Society 7 (2,3). Special Issue on Commodifying Bodies, (edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Waquant ).
• Kleinman, Arthur and Joan Kleinman. 1996. "The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times," in Daedalus 125(1): 1-24. Special Issue on Social Suffering.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. 1986. Useless Suffering. In Face to Face with Levinas (Richard Cohn, ed.). State University of New York Press.
• Marquez, Gabriel. 1982. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. New York: Alfred Knopf.
• Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2000 (1979). Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• _____. 1992. Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• _____. 1995. "The Primacy of the Ethical." Current Anthropology 36(3) (June) 409-420
• _____.1995a. "Who's the Killer? Who's the Killer? Popular Justice and Human Rights in a South African Squatter Camp. Social Justice 22(3): 143-164.
• _____. 1996. "Small Wars and Invisible Genocides" . Social Science & Medicine 43(5):88.
• _____. 1996b. "Maternal Thinking and the Politics of War."Peace Review 8:3:353- 358.
• _____. 1997. "Demography without Numbers". In Anthropological Demography (David Kertzer and Tom Fricke, eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• _____.1998. Un-Doing: Social Suffering & the Politics of Remorse in the New South Africa. Social Justice 25(4): 114-142.
• Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Anne Lovell. 1987. Psychiatry Inside Out: Selected Writings of Franco Basaglia. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Daniel Hoffman. 1998. Brazilian Apartheid: Street Kids and the Struggle for Survival in Urban Brazil. In Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (N. Scheper-Hughes and C. Sargent, eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Taussig, Michael. 1989. Terror as Usual. Social Text (Fall-Winter):3-20. Weschler, Lawrence. 1990. A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers. New York: Viking.

Top of Page ^