Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Professor, Department of Anthropology
Director, Organs Watch
University of California, Berkeley
CSTMS Research Unit: Berkeley Program in Science and Technology Studies
Website
nsh@berkeley.edu

Nancy Scheper-Hughes works in critical medical anthropology, the anthropology of violence, madness and culture, inequality and marginality, and childhood and the family. She has conducted research, written on, and been politically engaged in topics ranging from mother love and child death (Death Without Weeping, 1993), schizophrenia as a projection of cultural political themes in rural Ireland (Saints, Schlars and Schizophrenics, 2000 ), AIDS and human rights in Cuba and Brazil, death squads and the extermination of street kids in Brazil, popular justice and human rights in South Africa, clerical celibacy and child sex abuse, to the repatriation of the brain of a famous Yahi Indian, Ishi (kept as a specimen in the Smithsonian Institution) to the Pit River people of Northern California. Her most recent research is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the global traffic in humans for their organs which she interprets as a form of invisible and sacrificial violence. Her next book, Parts Unknown: the Global Traffic in Organs, is to be published by the University of California Press. She is co-founder and Director of Organs Watch, a medical human rights project, and she is currently an advisor to the World Health Organization (Geneva) on issues related to global transplantation. In the Anthropology Department at UC Berkeley she directs the doctoral program in Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body.

last updated: March 26th, 2018