Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes University of California Press, $29, 614 pp.

This is a shocking book that will profoundly unsettle most readers. It is an important book because it plumbs one of the darkest recesses of the human condition. It is a disappointing book because its length and academic bent will keep it from the large audience it deserves.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes's first exposure to Northeast Brazil came during a tour as a Peace Corps volunteer during the late 1960s in a town in the sugar-growing zone. She returned as an anthropologist during the 1980s, to explore the phenomenon of mother love and child death. What she found was sheer horror, the "horror of the routinization of human suffering in so much of impoverished Northeast Brazil and the |normal' violence of everyday life."

Death without Weeping is an extended description of and meditation upon the harrowing reality that afflicts poor, mostly black or brown women who have the misfortune to be born into a part of Brazil where economic exploitation has for centuries condemned peasants and rural workers to a marginal existence defined by hunger, disease, and ignorance. One of the salient marks of life in the Northeast is the infant-mortality rate. The core of Scheper-Hughes's book explores how women cope with this constant in their lives. What she reveals, in gut-wrenching fashion, is that in order to maintain equilibrium in the face of recurring death, mothers not only refuse to mourn the passing of their sickly babies, but they adopt behavioral patterns that hasten the death of those children who experience teaches are unlikely to survive.

Chronic hunger has long scourged the poor people of Northeast Brazil. As Scheper-Hughes points out, the caloric intake of inmates at the concentration camp in Buchenwald exceeded that of the Northeastern sugar cane cutter today. Hunger has stunted the growth of the rural population ("pygmitization" is a term that has been used to describe this phenomenon). One study found that two-thirds of all children showed signs of stunting, and of these 40 percent were nutritionally dwarfed.

The legacy of hunger that Death without Weeping unsparingly scrutinizes is infant mortality and its impact upon the women who must regularly give birth to infants who soon become "little angels," the euphemism for dead children.

Scheper-Hughes describes her initial stunned reaction to mothers who make apparently coldblooded judgments about their offsprings' chances of outlasting the rigors of early life in a slum environment, their refusal to take extra measures to help weak or infirm babies survive ("passive euthanasia" is an expression the author uses), and their capacity to shut themselves off from grief when the inevitable occurs.

Folk wisdom informs a mother's reaction to her newborn infant. A baby showing resilience and spirit will attract nurture and affection from its mother. A weak, undersized, lethargic infant is thought to have been born wanting to die, or to be like a bird, ready to fly off at any moment. "And so a good part of learning how to mother ... includes knowing when to let go of a child who shows that he wants to die."

This is not an irrational response. The hazards a slum child must face-infections from insects and snails, contagion from siblings and neighbors, unwholesome food and water, to cite a few--mean that only the fittest will survive. Mothers know this all too well, and as a means of emotional self-protection, they refrain from forming attachments to their offspring until survival seems a decent bet. A tragic aspect of this scenario is that most babies given up as too sickly are in fact "simply tiny famine victims whose hunger is often complicated by severe diarrhea and dehydration."

The detachment assumed by mothers takes various forms. They will not go to the civil registry office to register the death of their children, for example, nor will they attend their children's funerals. (The funeral procession is formed spontaneously by other children who happen to be in the vicinity. They bury the body without ceremony.)

The Catholic church traditionally encouraged poor Brazilians to think of infant death as a blessing, to be treated almost joyfully, since the baby was a "little angel" whose salvation was assured. Scheper-Hughes explains how the new liberation theology discourages the celebration of the passing of child-angels (and thus reinforces the sense of detachment toward infant death), but offers nothing in its place. Its adherents tell mothers that God wants their babies to live, yet there is no way that poor women can raise all the children they conceive. Since progressive priests and nuns generally accept the teachings of the church about female sexuality and reproduction, they leave poor women in a state of what Scheper-Hughes calls "moral and theological confusion."

Death without Weeping has too many abrupt transitions, its history of social unrest in the Northeast countryside is debatable, and the chapter on carnival could well have been eliminated. The filmmaker of Black Orpheus was French, not Brazilian; the military coup of 1964 was in the fall, not the spring; and the Rio de Janeiro samba schools parade in a "Sambadrome," not under a "giant carnival dome."

The subtitle of Death without Weeping is somewhat overbroad as well, since the book deals mainly with but one form of everyday violence, and in only one region that is culturally distinct from the rest of Brazil. But Scheper-Hughes digs deeply into the context of the violence, and thereby provides the reader with a historical, social, and economic prism with which to view her anthropological findings and interpretations. She also brings her subjects to life in vivid, if occasionally excessive detail.

Minor flaws aside, this is a searing treatment of how social and economic injustice has created forces that deprive mothers of what would seem to be the most basic of human rights, the right to grieve for their dead babies.