Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan

In Brazil's shantytowns, poverty has transformed the meaning of mother love. The routineness with which young children die, argues University of California anthropologist Scheper-Hughes, causes many women to affect indifference to their offspring, even to neglect those infants presumed to be doomed or ``wanting to die.'' Maternal love is delayed and attenuated, with dire consequences for infant survival, according to the author's two decades of fieldwork. Scheper-Hughes also maintains that the Catholic Church contributes to the indifference toward children's deaths by teaching fatalistic resignation and upholding its strictures against birth control and abortion. This important, shocking study resonates with the emotion of Oscar Lewis's ethnographic classics as it follows three generations of women in a plantation town. The compelling narrative investigates the everyday tactics of survival that people use to stay alive in a culture of institutionalized dependency ravaged by sickness, scarcity, feudal working conditions and death-squad ``disappearances.'' (May)