Death Without Weeping

Chapter 8 provides an in-depth examination on how situations of poverty, scarcity, and high infant mortality affect conventional practices of motherhood. The chapter begins in describing patterns of "neglect" among the mothers of Bom Jesus. The author describes situations in which mothers will come to believe that their young children cannot or will not survive; a host of reasons is invoked in these determinations, usually revolving around the child's demonstrated ability to combat diseases and accept nutrition.

The author has extreme difficulty with this situation―both as a volunteer worker and as an anthropologist―yet it is indicative of the gulf between the author's beliefs, and those of her subjects. The author however, makes the connection between attitudes and practices of women in this community, and those of 19th-century Western Europeans; the argument is that when infant mortality is generally higher, the acceptance of death is more prevalent. Furthermore, the author surmises, when looking at materials one or two generations removed from these higher-mortality periods, the attitude of women in these situations is similarly likened to a form of "neglect."Interviews with women in Bom Jesus confirm yet complicate this hypothesis, as the women in these communities report an ethic of scarcity, wherein poor women are deprived of intensive medical care and nutrition for newborns, as well as being pressed for their own time and energy from raising children and working.