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Cancer and the Kali Yuga

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As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to ...
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  • 11 October 2022
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As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen's critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women's narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.
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Price: $29.95
Pages: 306
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 11 October 2022
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520386532
Format: Paperback
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"An exemplary ethnography. . . . Van Hollen’s work is extremely significant in the realm of medical anthropology as it vividly delineates the experience of these specific cancer patients whilst also offering a multidimensional understanding. It is empirically grounded and brings out the nuances of everyday lived experiences."

"Cancer and the Kali Yuga is a timely and revelatory text that vividly represents the possibilities of public health focussed ethnographic research carried out in the contexts of structural casteism in contemporary south India. It is a meaningful resource not only for global health researchers but equally for students of gender studies, critical medical anthropology, health equity studies and feminist studies of wellbeing and care in the Global South."

"The book provides several prescient insights and has the potential to inform nuanced and sensitive policies for public health interventions and awareness campaigns, while exposing the underlying assumptions and inadequacies of the ones that exist, and is honest in its call for inclusive policies that take these factors into account."
Cecilia Coale Van Hollen is a medical anthropologist and Teaching Professor in the Asian Studies Program of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India and Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India.
Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations 
Note on Time of Writing and Transliteration

Introduction 
1. History and Hospitals
2. Poverty and Chemicals
3. Women and Work
4. Screening and Morality
5. Disclosure and Care
6. Biomedicine and Bodies
7. Sorcery and Religion 
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography 
Index