Djordjevic, Darja (Author)
Kleinman, Arthur (Advisor)
Comaroff, Jean (Advisor)
Comaroff, John L. (Advisor)
Farmer, Paul (Advisor)
Harvard University
Kleinman, Arthur
Comaroff, Jean
Comaroff, John L.
Farmer, Paul
Physical Details: 169 pp.
Language: English
In Africa, the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, rapidly expanding industrial and extractive economies, uncontrolled economic growth, environmental and lifestyle changes, and the rising age of populations with better access to medicine have occasioned rising rates of cancer. Rwanda’s national cancer program has been hailed as a unique example of how to build clinical oncology into a public healthcare infrastructure. Using ethnographic data, interviews, and historical archives, I address three sets of questions: 1. What historical, economic, social, and political factors have shaped the development of the country’s cancer program? 2. How do local clinicians and patients experience cancer as a treatable chronic disease? And how is that experience affected by the development of a national oncology infrastructure and new biomedical technologies? 3. As an instance of the transnational private-public partnerships characteristic of global health interventions in postcolonial Africa, what successes, limitations, and challenges does this cancer program present for envisioning oncology programs elsewhere in the global south? What are the ethical, political, and epistemological stakes involved in different models of cancer care? This project contributes to a new chapter in medical anthropology, one focused on rising rates of cancer in contemporary Africa. I argue that Rwanda’s cancer project is an exercise in the construction of a new sense of sovereignty, rendered through the politics of life as onco-nationhood; that it is an effort to create a postcolonial polity whose citizen body is gifted care of a international caliber provided by a paternal state. In a critical moment of post-traumatic social reconstruction, national biomedicine is becoming the entity through which government seeks to fuse sovereign statehood and nationhood in the cause of a healthy Rwandan future. Theorizing this relationship holds at least one key to developing an anthropology of cancer in contemporary Africa.
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