[1] She 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.
[4] Scheper-Hughes' first book, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1979), was a study of madness among bachelor farmers, and won the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1980.
[citation needed] In addition to her full-length monographs, Scheper-Hughes has published on AIDS/HIV in Brazil and Cuba, human rights, death squads, apartheid and shanty town violence in South Africa, and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, coining or popularizing such terms as the "mindful body" (1987, with Margaret Lock), "political economy of the emotions" (1993a), "life boat ethics" (1993b), "neo-cannibalism" (2001), "sexual citizenship" (1994b), the "genocidal continuum", "militant anthropology" and anthropology "with its feet on the ground" (1995).
One of the central themes unifying Scheper-Hughes’ scholarship is how violence comes to mark the bodies of the vulnerable, poor, and disenfranchised with a terrifying intimacy.
Her work in Latin America, South Africa, Ireland, and Eastern Europe traces the insidious invisibility of everyday violence, which often makes the vulnerable and exploited into their own wardens and executioners.
[citation needed] Critical medical anthropology, violence, genocide, inequality, marginality, childhood, family, psychiatry, deinstitutionalization, medical ethics, fieldwork ethics, globalization medicine, social/ political illness, disease, AIDS, Ireland, Brazil, Cuba [5] Scheper-Hughes served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil in the 1960s.
[7][8] In October 2008, she appeared on the BBC program HARDtalk[9] expressing her strong opposition to the open free buying and selling of organs, even if there were Government oversight through regulation.
Her reason for this position is that she feels it will eventually corrupt the entire field because of the inevitability of brokers engaging in satisfying the demands of wealthy buyers for higher quality donors.
[12][2] Scheper-Hughes' first book, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1979), a study of madness among bachelor farmers, won the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1980.