17 Facts About Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Nancy Scheper-Hughes was born on 1944 and is an anthropologist, educator and author.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is the Chancellor's Professor Emerita of Anthropology and the director and co-founder of the PhD program in Critical Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, motherhood, psychiatry, psychosis, social suffering, violence and genocide, death squads, and human trafficking.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes has testified in several prosecutions of human traffickers.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes was a witness to the organ trade that brought Israeli kidney patients from Israel, Europe and New York City to Durban, South Africa and 'kidney sellers' from impoverished communities in Recife.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes' first book, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, was a study of madness among bachelor farmers, and won the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1980.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes discussed the challenges and ethics of ethnography, issues that are pushed to the fore as anthropologists increasingly work in communities that can read and critique their work.

One of the central themes unifying Nancy Scheper-Hughes' scholarship is how violence comes to mark the bodies of the vulnerable, poor, and disenfranchised with a terrifying intimacy.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil in the 1960s.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes has worked as an activist and with social movements in Brazil in the United States and internationally in defense of the rights of those who sell their kidneys.

In 1999, Nancy Scheper-Hughes joined with three other professors to launch Organs Watch, an organization dedicated to research on the global traffic in human organs, tracking the movements of people and organs around the globe, as well as the global inequities that facilitate this trade.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is opposed to the Iranian government's regulated organ donor program, involving cash rewards, and predicts it will fail.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes's preference is for free voluntary donations from family or friends.

However, in 2010, Nancy Scheper-Hughes already supported legal compensation for organ donations.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes interviewed several hundred third-world organ donors, and reported that they all felt that they had been taken advantage of, and were often left sick, unable to work, and unable to get medical care.

Some transplants took place at major New York City hospitals, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes said that the hospital personnel knew illegal transplants were taking place.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which led to arrests several years later.