Cancer and the Kali Yuga - by Cecilia Coale Van Hollen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"Cancer and the Kali Yuga is a groundbreaking ethnography of how low-income and Dalit women navigate cancer in contemporary India. It overturns global health portrayals of the underprivileged as ignorant of cancer's etiologies and in need of didactic uplift. Instead, carefully attuned to her interlocutors' voices, Cecilia Coale Van Hollen reveals an incisive folk critique of the disease's disproportionate impact on the already disempowered. Essential reading for anyone interested in cancer and global health in the twenty-first century."--Dwaipayan Banerjee, Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT

"Van Hollen's sensitive ethnography enchants and educates. She guides the reader through the everyday theodicies of Dalit women and their valiant battle with demonic cancer in the iniquitous age of darkness, the Kali Yuga. Both metaphor and parable for our times plagued by climate change and a global pandemic, Van Hollen's magnificent ethnography is at once a moving account, an expert diagnosis, and a moral compass offering navigational steer to our collective struggles. This book is a timely reorientation for a rudderless humanity muddling along in these dark and diseased times."--Aditya Bharadwaj, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, the Graduate Institute, Geneva

"Cancer and the Kali Yuga is an intimate and powerful account of experiences of cancer in South India. Van Hollen's illuminating ethnography draws our attention to people medical anthropology too often ignores--rural Dalit women, whose insightful, angry, and resilient reflections demand we take seriously the ways marginalized women at once understand the body as holding the injustices of the world and turn that reckoning into critical summons for change."--Sarah Pinto, Professor of Anthropology, Tufts University

"Cancer and the Kali Yuga is a fabulous feminist ethnography that engages with the voices and narratives of cancer-afflicted Dalit and lower-caste women in South India with remarkable sensitivity to multiple forms of oppressions and inequality suffered by them. This pathbreaking book brings out the hitherto marginalized Dalit women's critique of caste, class, and religion and offers refreshingly new insights into the gendered experiences of illness and health in the age of 'Kali Yuga'--the age of darkness or the age of anarchy as Dalit women would prefer to call it."--S. Anandhi, Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai and coeditor of Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics in India

"In this powerful and evocative book, Van Hollen writes of the experiences of Dalit women in South India. Here, breast and cervical cancers highlight the capriciousness of disease, the suffering of individuals and families, and the contingencies of inequality and marginality that test women's resilience and creativity. Cancer and the Kali Yuga is a compelling and disturbing portrait of cancer's uneven impacts."--Lenore Manderson, Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Review Quotes

"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"

"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"

"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"

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.