Tired of Weeping

"In a context where a full third of children die before their fifth birthday, most of those in infancy, what do mothers feel when they lose a baby? This is the key question animating this ethnography. Einarsdóttir asks, when the calamity looms so large, when the likelihood of loss is so great, is there a numbing effect on the emotions? Do the mothers try less hard to save their babies when they know that so many die in infancy? The thesis had been argued over for decades in the field of history, but in anthropology the question is more recent and probably more fraught. She discusses the thesis of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who argued that in northeast Brazil, where infants frequently die from the consequences of malnutrition and disease, their deaths are felt in a muted sort of way, tempered by the idea that many of them were not fully human at birth, that many lacked the knack to live and that they will become little angels in any case, which wasn’t a bad thing for them or their families. Einarsdóttir slowly builds her case that mothers in the Biombo region of Guinea-Bissau, the West African country, feel the loss of an infant intensely and do everything they can to prevent it. The transatlantic dialogue raises many unsettling questions about our understanding of infant death. Einarsdóttir leaves us with the sense that having lived one tragedy does not prepare us for its reiteration. In the end it is hard to know what is worse, to become habituated to child death or to feel the same excruciating loss each time. What I encountered more frequently in northeast Brazil, since I was working with street children there and not with infants, was parents who had older children or adolescents. I met a mother who had lost each of her nine children, most of them to violence. There was nothing in the pain of those mothers that suggested to me that their loss was less acute by virtue of repetition."