Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Name	Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Birth date	1944
Birth place	Bronx, New York City, New York
Nationality	United States
Fields	Anthropology, Medical anthropology
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Francisco, University of California, Santa Cruz
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Francisco

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Nancy Scheper-Hughes Nancy Scheper-Hughes is an American anthropologist known for ethnographic work on violence, social suffering, organ trafficking, and the anthropology of the body. Her scholarship bridges fieldwork in Brazil, Northern Ireland, and South Africa with public interventions in debates involving WHO, United Nations bodies, and human rights advocacy. She has been associated with prominent institutions including University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Francisco, and collaborations with scholars from Harvard University, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.

Early life and education

Born in the Bronx, Scheper-Hughes pursued undergraduate and graduate training at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco. Her education placed her in contact with figures from Franz Boas' intellectual lineage, debates influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Margaret Mead, and contemporary interlocutors connected to Paul Farmer, Arthur Kleinman, and Clifford Geertz. During her formative years she was exposed to activist currents linked to the Civil Rights Movement and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, shaping an orientation toward engaged ethnography and collaboration with non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International.

Scheper-Hughes held faculty appointments at University of California, Berkeley and directed programs involving researchers from University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Santa Cruz. She founded and coordinated research initiatives tying scholars from Columbia University, Yale University, and Princeton University to community-based projects in Brazil and Ireland. Her collaborations have intersected with projects funded by foundations such as the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, and scholarly exchanges with institutions like The New School for Social Research and London School of Economics. She has supervised doctoral students who later joined faculties at Rutgers University, University of Chicago, and University of Pennsylvania.

Scheper-Hughes is author and editor of influential monographs and articles exploring bodies and politics, including landmark texts that engage with themes resonant for scholars at Harvard Medical School, King's College London, and University College London. Her ethnographies of Brazil examine rural and urban life in conversation with scholarship by Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, and Michel Foucault, while comparative projects in Northern Ireland and South Africa link to debates addressed by Saskia Sassen and Zygmunt Bauman. She produced empirically rich studies on infant mortality, structural violence, and the moral economy of blood and organs that have been cited alongside works by Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and James Scott. Her publications have appeared in venues read by audiences at The Lancet, American Anthropologist, and Social Science & Medicine, informing policy discussions at WHO and panels convened by the United Nations.

A prominent public intellectual, Scheper-Hughes has testified before parliamentary committees in Brazil and advisory panels convened by UNICEF and UNESCO. She has collaborated with Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and grassroots movements in Rio de Janeiro and Belfast, bringing ethnographic evidence into litigation and advocacy similar to interventions by Paul Farmer and Amartya Sen. Her activism includes organizing conferences with participants from Columbia University, Stanford University, and Yale University to confront organ trafficking and to promote ethical practices in transplantation overseen by bodies such as the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation.

Scheper-Hughes's work has been recognized by awards and fellowships from organizations including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and honors from the American Anthropological Association. She has been invited as a visiting scholar to institutions such as Harvard University, University of Oxford, and University of Cambridge, and received lifetime achievement acknowledgments from professional societies like the Society for Medical Anthropology and the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Category:American anthropologists