Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Anthropology at Berkeley

Anthropology Faculty
Research Interests

Social Cultural Anthropology, Critical Medical and Psychiatric Anthropology, Violence, Disorder and Popular Justice, Global Trafficking for Organs, Human Rights, Medical and Anthropological Ethics, Public Anthropology.

Interviews on Line:
Conversations with History, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Militant Anthropologist : http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Scheper-Hughes/sh-con0.html
"On Civil Disobedience and 'Freedom from Unreal Loyalties' "(William Sloane Coffin Award comments) http://www.fccb.org/programs/mp3s/ScheperHughes.mp3
Dispelling the Myth – the Reality of Organs Trafficking http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_article_organ_trafficking_interview_nancy_schepper-Hughes.htm
Berkeley Writers at Work: http://writing.berkeley.edu/bwaw/1998.htm#
My research, writings, and teaching focus on violence, suffering, and premature death as these are experienced on the margins and peripheries of the late modern world. My first decade of research was concerned with madness, culture, and power ( see Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, California Press, new expanded edition, 2000) and with dilemmas in the deinstitutionalization of mental patients ( see Psychiatry Inside Out, edited with Anne M Lovell, Columbia University Press,1978).
My second decade as an anthropologist was taken up with the question of the survival of infants, street kids, and 'dangerous' youths see (Child Survival, 1987, Kluwer and Small Wars : the Cultural Politics of Childhood, edited with C.Sargent,1998,California Press).

Between 1982-1990 I conducted research on mother love and child death in Northeast Brazil that resulted in the publication of Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (UC Press, 1992,1993). Death without Weeping was the recipient of many book prizes and awards, including the J. I. Staley Prize, (School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico) for "imaginative works that have gone beyond traditional frontiers in anthropology and given new dimensions to our understanding of humanity"; Wellcome Medal for Anthropology Applied to Medical Problems; (Wellcome Trust and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland); the Bryce Wood Book Award, (Latin American Studies Association); Premio Internazionale di Studi Etnoantropologici (the Pitre Prize) for ethnography (Centro Internazionale di Etnostoria, Palermo, Sicily); Eileen Basker Memorial Prize in Gender and Reproduction (Society for Medical Anthropology). Death without Weeping was also a finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award.

I value, perhaps even more, the many ethnographic and critical deconstructions of my thesis on the social construction of motherhood, maternal affects, and the biological basis of maternal attachment. An updated edition of DWW is in preparation.

For the last decade I have been involved in a multi-sited, ethnographic, and medical human rights oriented study of the global traffic in humans (living and dead) for their organs to serve the needs and desires of international transplant patients. A concern with the role of new markets and their impact on the transfer of transplant technologies resulted in the book, Commodifying Bodies which I edited with my colleague, Loic Wacquant (2002, Sage). With Lawrence Cohen I co- founded the Organs Watch Project ( originally funded by the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation). My research has taken me to the sites and scenes of transplant trafficking in a dozen countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Asia in an attempt to identify the criminal networks that bring together desperate buyers and equally desperate kidney sellers, surgeons, and local organs brokers. As a work of public anthropology, I have collaborated with Ministries of Health, international transplant societies, the WHO, the Council of Europe, US Congresshttp://www.publicanthropology.org/TimesPast/Scheper-Hughes.htm the UN Trafficking Office (Vienna) See Article, and with human rights workers, journalists, and federal police in an effort to effort to interrupt the most egregious criminal networks involved in organs trafficking. To reach a broad and international audience I have published small books and pamphlets in English, Italian, Spanish and a broadsheet for UNESCO that was published in 27 languages.

As a senior fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2006-2007) I wrote the first draft of a book manuscript A World Cut in Two: Global Justice and the Traffic in Organs (to be published by University of California Press). The book describes the emergence and spread of organs trafficking as an uncivil practice, a form of sacrificial violence, and as a lens on late modern conceptions of life, death, frailty, futility, kinship, reciprocity, scarcity and need. I argue that global transplant practices, especially illicit ones, offers a unique view of who we (humans) are at the present time, how we imagine ourselves and our bodies in relation to others, intimate family members and to strangers. It applies to a different field the arguments I developed in ‘The Primacy of the Ethical” (Current Anthropology 1995) calling for a new ‘ethics of the craft’, an engaged and ‘militant anthropology’ based on ethical obligations to the body and survival of our informants through an activist and engaged form of ‘witnessing’.

Finally, I continue to conduct research on transitional violence, justice, and reconciliation in the slums , shantytowns, and squatter camps of Brazil and South Africa, in particular the rise of police-supported death squads in neo-liberal democracies in the 'developing world'. Some of these concerns are reflected in the volume Violence in War and Peace, which I co-edited with Philippe Bourgois (Basil Blackwell, 2004). The research on death squads has evolved into a human rights project and contributed to the formation of a popular social movement in Timbauba, Brazil contesting the activities of the extermination groups and gaining the support of local judges and prosecutors. Today eleven members, including the head of the death squad described in chapter 6 of Death without Weeping are in prison.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
In addition to the books and edited volumes cited above, I have written a great many articles that have provoked criticism and controversy as well as some praise for their clarity of thought and their mapping out new domains for anthropological thinking and practice. Among these:
"A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human Vulnerability and Resilience". ETHNOS 2008 73:1: 25-56. "The Tyranny of the Gift: Sacrificial Violence in Living Donor Transplants". American Journal of Transplant 2007, 7: 1-5)
"Alistair Cooke’s Bones: a Morality Tale. Anthropology Today 2006 (December): 22(6):3-8;
"Violence and the Politics of Remorse: Lessons from South Africa." Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, 2006, edited by Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman. California Press
"Death Squads and Democracy in Northeast Brazil". In Jean and John Comaroff,eds, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, 2006, pp. 150-187. Chicago: Chicago University Press'
"Katrina: The disaster and its doubles" Anthropology Today, 2005, 21 ( 6): 2-4. (December)
"Disease or Deception: Munchausen by Proxy as a Weapon of the Weak" In Lying and Illness: Power and Performance, 2005, Els van Dongen and Sylvie Fainzang,eds. 113-138. Amsterdam: Het Spinhaus.
"Between Global Bystander and Global Intervener", Journal of Human Rights 4(2): 165-169.
"The Politics of Remorse" in A Companion to Psychological Anthropology", edited by Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton, 2005, 469-494.. London: Basil Blackwell.
"Dangerous and Endangered Youth: Social Structures and Determinants of Violence" Annals of the New York Academy of Science , 2005 1036: 13-46.
"Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography of the Organs-Trafficking Underworld". Ethnography 2004 5(1): 29-73.
"The Last White Christmas: The Heidelberg Pub Massacre (South Africa)." American Anthropologist 1994, 96 (4) (December): 1-28.
"A Genealogy of Genocide". Modern Psychoanalysis 2003 28(2): 167-197.
"Priestly Celibacy and Child Sexual Abuse." With John Devine. Forum: The Catholic Church, Pedophiles and Child Sexual Abuse. Sexualities 2003 6 (1): 15-39.
"Keeping an Eye on the Global Traffic in Human Organs." The Lancet 2003, 361 (May 10): 1645-
"Coming to Our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide." In The Anthropology of Genocide, 2002. Alex Hinton, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
"Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes." Anthropology Today, 2001, 17 (1) (February): 12-18.
"Peace-Time Crimes." Social Identities 1997, 3 (3):1-26.
"The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology." Current Anthropology 1995 36 (3) (June): 409-20.
"Who’s the Killer? Popular Justice and Human Rights in a South African Squatter Camp." Social Justice 1995, 22 (3): 143-64.
"AIDS and the Social Body." Social Science & Medicine 1994 39 (7): 991-1003.
"Three Propositions for a Critically Applied Medical Anthropology." Social Science & Medicine 1990, 30 (2): 189-97.
"The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology."( With Margaret Lock). Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1987 1 (1): 6-41.


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