Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is an American medical anthropologist known for her ethnographic studies of suffering, death, and the body, and for founding the concept of militant anthropology, the argument that anthropologists have an ethical obligation to bear witness to and act against the suffering they document rather than remaining neutral observers. In Death Without Weeping (1992), based on long-term fieldwork in an impoverished Brazilian shantytown, she examined how routine infant mortality under conditions of extreme poverty had produced a culturally patterned emotional detachment from infant death among mothers, a controversial argument about the social shaping of grief itself. She later founded Organs Watch, an investigative research project documenting the global black market in human organs, applying ethnographic method to expose organ trafficking networks operating across national borders.