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Mother Love in the Context of High Poverty and High Child Mortality?
When life is dominated by hunger, what kind of face will love to become? How will trust evolve when it comes to daily violence and premature death? Based in northeastern Brazil, this is a narrative of everyday experiences of want, disease and death that revolve around the lives of women and children in mountain slums. Nancy Scheper-Hughes took the reader to the impoverished area on the modern plantation hill in Bom Jesus de Mata. She worked as a field base for twenty-five years, tracking the three generations of shantytown women working hard, fraudulent and Differentiate the experience of trying to survive. This is a story about class relations through the bottom of the body, emotions, desires and needs. The most disturbing and controversial thing is her discovery: maternal love, understood in the traditional sense, is actually a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect their children to survive. And these women can't even have such expectations.
According to Scheper-Hughes, motherlove in modern context is the bonding among mother and their infant child. It is biologically determined process that occurs naturally and starts with the life of infant. It is also shaped due to cultural or demographic transaction that permit any female give the birth to her child or children till they grow to adulthood. Hughes believes that the bond among mother and child is by no means inborn. “In more cases, the mother-child association can be formed several years after the baby's death” (Hudges2). This seemingly lagging parent-child binding pattern is closely related to the high infant mortality rate of the poor in Brazil. If the mother has a strong bondage when the child falls to the ground, then she is entirely likely to be saddened by her early death.
In other words, only in a social environment with low fertility and low mortality, people do not have to worry about the baby's living conditions and will be convinced of the mother-child "binding" and adhesion theory. The idea of Hughes sparked a debate in the anthropological world about the universal value of maternal love.
Work cited
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. Univ
of California Press, 1993.
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