Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality and Health in South India
Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Series
Tuesday, November 28, 2023 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM EST
Horizon Hall, 6325 or Zoom
As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early 21st century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Tamil Nadu, South India from 2015-2016, Cecilia Van Hollen’s 2022 book, Cancer and the Kali Yuga, reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. In this talk Van Hollen will present work from this critical feminist ethnography that 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. Their stories demonstrate women’s creative strategies to navigate constraints in their search for health and dignity and to endure in the face of rising fears and realities of cancer in their bodies, in their families, and in their communities. This research from India holds larger lessons for global and public health planners and medical practitioners involved in cancer prevention and treatment around the world.
Cecilia Coale Van Hollen is a professor in the Asian Studies Program of the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of three monographs: Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality and Health in South India (2022); and Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India (2013), and Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (2003). She is the lead co-editor of the forthcoming (2023) Wiley Black handbook, A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology. Her research has appeared in appeared in journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly; Medical Anthropology; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Reproductive Health Matters; BioSocieties; and Economic and Political Weekly, as well as in international edited volumes. Van Hollen received the Association for Asian Studies’ 2005 prize for the best book in South Asia Studies and the Polgar prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association for the Best Paper Published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly in 2011-12. She has received research fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Van Hollen has taught undergraduate and graduate students at U.C.-Berkeley, the University of Notre Dame, Syracuse University, Yale-NUS College and Georgetown University.
