Will Covid-19 South Africa be another case of 'death without weeping'?

Abstract

In the 1990s, the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes produced an unsettling ethnography of death, violence and hope in a shantytown in north-eastern Brazil. Her book, Death Without Weeping, was centrally concerned with how shockingly high levels of infant mortality were hidden from public view by the ways in which women and families coped with this reality in the community.