idem Baar (M)Other Love Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking  Maternal beliefs, sentiments, practices child survival

l on the Alto do Cruzerio  Shared understanding of sentiments and practices (a set of practices driven by an alternative womanly morality) Mother love & Child Death It is about the meanings and effects of deprivation, loss, and abandonment on the ability to love, nurture, trust, and have and keep faith in the broadest senses of these terms. It treats the individual and the personal as well as the collective and cultural dimensions of maternal practices in an environment hostile to the survival and well-being of mothers and infants. A high expectancy of child death is a powerful shaper of maternal thinking and practice as evidenced, in particular, in delayed attachment to infants. This delayed detachment can be mortal at times, contributing to the severe neglect of certain infants and to a failure to mourn the death of very young babies. The history of mother love and its course is determined by economic and cultural constraints.  An examination of the cultural construction of emotions and it attempts to overcome the distinctions between natural and socialized affects, btw. deep private feelings and superficial public sentiments, btw. conscious and unconscious emotional expressions.  To show how emotion is shaped by political and economic context as well as by culture (a political economy of emotions).  To open a discussion as to the competing views of maternal thinking and practice. - Psychological infant attachment and maternal bonding theorists (ethic of care) The developmental and clinical literature on the maternal bonding understood as a universal maternal script. - Cultural feminists (To recover the muted and marginalized voices of women, can paradoxically do violence to the different experiences and sensibilities of poor and Third World women marginalization of poor women) (arguing for a singular conception of womens goals, interests and moral visions) Mother love, is anything other than natural and represents a matrix of images, meanings, sentiments and practices that are socially and culturally produced everywhere (in shantytown women create their own culture not just as they please or under circumstances chosen by themselves). In the Alto do Cruzeiro, it was easy to rescue infants and toddlers from dying of diarrhae and dehydration simply with sugar, salt, and water solution; however, it was difficult to get support from their mothers once they believe in they are ill-fated for life and as better die. It was also dif. for them to take back the baby into the bosom of the family as it is not a permanent family member. Those babies are thought to be the ones already wanting to die and the stoicism (metanet) and equanimity (arballk) produced patterns of nurturing that differentiating thought of as thrivers (gelime gsteren) from them and nurtured (mortal neglect). Throughout history mothers are portrayed as all-powerful, all-destructive, angelic and the infants life depends to a great extent on mother. The control of the lives of infants is in control of

idem Baar the mothers and the lives of women are under dominion of men. Are the mother primary agents or the primary victims of various domestic tragedies? The persistent idea that all mothers must feel a grief and a depth of sorrow is not the case of indifference, not numbing shock or trauma experienced in Alto. Cultural norms of normal and the ethical are challenged. Attribution of sameness across vast social, economic, cultural divides, universalizing discourses in the biomedical, psychological sciences or in philosophical or cultural feminism are serious errors for the anthropologist. Thus, it is essential to direct the gazes to the ways of seeing, thinking and feeling that represent these womens experiences. Though the maternal indifference (whether intentionally or not) exaggerates the risks and exposes vulnerable infants to premature death, one must be careful not to isolate it from the origins in pernicious social and economic relations in identifying the role of neglect in the etiology (sebepler bilimi (?)) of infant mortality. The deaths of children actually cause from the mortal neglect. Stigma is discourse, a language of human relationships that relates self to other, normal to abnormal, healthy to sick, strong to weak. It involves all those exclusionary, dichotomous contradictions that allow us to draw safe boundaries around the acceptable, the permissible, the desirable, so as to contain our own fears and phobias about sickness, death and decay, madness and violence, sexuality and chaos. The tactics of separation allow us to say that this person is one of us, and that person is other. The moral economy that governs social relations is unmasked and the society reveals itself in the very phenomena that is disowns, excludes and rejects. The rejection of failed babies is the prototype of all stigmatization. Whereas stigma may consign the spurned adult to a life of exclusion and marginality, the stigmatization of a hopeless dependent neonate or infant is inevitably a death sentence. The sickly, wasted, deformed infant challenges the tentative and fragile symbolic boundaries btw. human and nonhuman, natural and supernatural, normal and abominable.