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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
"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." * Contemporary South Asia *
"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." * Anthropological Quarterly *
"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." * Indian Journal of Medical Ethics *



Book Information
ISBN 9780520386532
Author Cecilia Coale Van Hollen
Format Paperback
Page Count 306
Imprint University of California Press
Publisher University of California Press
Weight(grams) 408g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 23mm