ISBN:
0-520-07537-4
,
978-0-520-07537-5
Language:
English
Pages:
XIII, 614 S.
,
Ill., graph. Darst.
Keywords:
Brasilien Armut
;
Frau
;
Kind
;
Tod
;
Sterblichkeit
;
Gewalt
;
Angst
;
Krankheit
;
Soziale Bedingungen
;
Soziales Leben
Abstract:
When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, the author follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.
Description / Table of Contents:
O Nordeste: sweetness and death -- Bom Jesus: one hundred years without water -- Reciprocity and dependency: the double ethic of Bom Jesus -- Deli´rio de Fome: the madness of hunger -- Nervoso: medicine, sickness, and human needs -- Everyday violence: bodies, death, and silence -- Two feet under and a cardboard coffin: the social production of indifference to child death -- (M)other love: culture, scarcity, and maternal thinking -- Our lady of sorrows: a political economy of the emotions -- A knack for life: the everyday tactics of survival -- Carnaval: the dance against death -- De profundis: our of the depths
Permalink
