 Infant mortality and infant care: Cultural and economic constraints on nurturing in Northeast BrazilNancy Scheper-Hughes Social Science & Medicine, 1984, vol. 19, issue 5, 535-546 Abstract: The Brazilian 'Economic Miracle' has had an adverse effect on infant and childhood mortalily which has been steadily rising throughout Brazil since the late 1960s. An analysis of the reproductive histories of 72 marginally employed residents of a Northeast Brazilian rural shantytown explores the economic and cultural context that inhibits these mother's abilities to rear healthy, living children and which forces them to devise 'ethnoeugenic' childrearing strategies that prejudice the life chances of those offspring judged 'less fit' for survival under the pernicious conditions of life on the Alto. it is suggested that the selective neglect of children is a direct consequence of the selective neglect of their mothers who have been excluded from participating in the national economy. The links between economic exploitation and maternal deprivation are further discussed with reference to the social causes of the 'insufficient breastmilk syndrome' and the commercial powdered milk dependency of these women. Date: 1984 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:19:y:1984:i:5:p:535-546 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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