9781800080744
9781800080751
Distributed for UCL Press
Cancer and the Politics of Care
Inequalities and Interventions in Global Perspective
An ethnographic examination of the effects of structural inequalities on cancer treatment around the world.
Taking an ethnographic approach, the contributors to this book offer new examinations of cancer and its treatment to show how social, economic, race, gender, and other structural inequalities intersect, compound, and complicate health inequalities. Cancer experiences and impacts are explored across eleven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The volume engages with specific cancers from the point of primary prevention to screening, diagnosis, treatment (or its absence), and end-of-life care. Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terrain by explicitly critiquing cancer interventions, their limitations and success, the politics that drive them, and their embeddedness in local cultures and value systems. Its diversity and innovation ensure its wide utility among those working in and studying medical anthropology, social anthropology, and other fields at the intersections of social science, medicine, and health equity.
Taking an ethnographic approach, the contributors to this book offer new examinations of cancer and its treatment to show how social, economic, race, gender, and other structural inequalities intersect, compound, and complicate health inequalities. Cancer experiences and impacts are explored across eleven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The volume engages with specific cancers from the point of primary prevention to screening, diagnosis, treatment (or its absence), and end-of-life care. Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terrain by explicitly critiquing cancer interventions, their limitations and success, the politics that drive them, and their embeddedness in local cultures and value systems. Its diversity and innovation ensure its wide utility among those working in and studying medical anthropology, social anthropology, and other fields at the intersections of social science, medicine, and health equity.
272 pages | 15 halftones | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2023
Embodying Inequalities: Perspectives from Medical Anthropology
Anthropology: Physical Anthropology
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
1 Introduction: cancer ethnographies and the politics of care
Linda Rae Bennett and Lenore Manderson
2 Biomedical innovations, cancer care and health inequities: stratified patienthood in Brazil Jorge Alberto Bernstein Iriart and Sahra Gibbon
3 ’It just keeps hurting’: continuums of violence and their impact on cervical cancer mortality in Argentina
Natalia Luxardo and Linda Rae Bennett
4 Laughing in the face of cancer: intersubjectivity and patient navigation in the US safety-net Nancy J. Burke
5 Morality tales of reproductive cancer screening camps in South India Cecilia Coale Van Hollen
6 Intersections of stigma, morality and care: Indonesian women’s negotiations of cervical cancer
Linda Rae Bennett and Hanum Atikasari
7 Untimely liver cancer and the temporalities of care in rural Senegal Noémi Tousignant
8 Rehumanising illness: Practices of care in a cancer ward in Athens, Greece Falia Varelaki
9 Practices of containment in the ‘south-within-the-north’: women with breast cancer in southern Italy
Cinzia Greco
10 Noisy bodies and cancer diagnostics in Denmark: exploring the social life of medical semiotics
Rikke Sand Andersen, Sara Marie Hebsgaard Offersen and Camilla Hoffman Merrild
11 ‘Hard-to-reach’? Meanings at the margins of care and risk in cancer research Kelly Fagan Robinson and Ignacia Arteaga Pérez
12 Precarity and cancer among low-income populations in France: intractable inequalities Laurence Kotobi and Carolyn Sargent
Index
List of contributors
1 Introduction: cancer ethnographies and the politics of care
Linda Rae Bennett and Lenore Manderson
2 Biomedical innovations, cancer care and health inequities: stratified patienthood in Brazil Jorge Alberto Bernstein Iriart and Sahra Gibbon
3 ’It just keeps hurting’: continuums of violence and their impact on cervical cancer mortality in Argentina
Natalia Luxardo and Linda Rae Bennett
4 Laughing in the face of cancer: intersubjectivity and patient navigation in the US safety-net Nancy J. Burke
5 Morality tales of reproductive cancer screening camps in South India Cecilia Coale Van Hollen
6 Intersections of stigma, morality and care: Indonesian women’s negotiations of cervical cancer
Linda Rae Bennett and Hanum Atikasari
7 Untimely liver cancer and the temporalities of care in rural Senegal Noémi Tousignant
8 Rehumanising illness: Practices of care in a cancer ward in Athens, Greece Falia Varelaki
9 Practices of containment in the ‘south-within-the-north’: women with breast cancer in southern Italy
Cinzia Greco
10 Noisy bodies and cancer diagnostics in Denmark: exploring the social life of medical semiotics
Rikke Sand Andersen, Sara Marie Hebsgaard Offersen and Camilla Hoffman Merrild
11 ‘Hard-to-reach’? Meanings at the margins of care and risk in cancer research Kelly Fagan Robinson and Ignacia Arteaga Pérez
12 Precarity and cancer among low-income populations in France: intractable inequalities Laurence Kotobi and Carolyn Sargent
Index