From the Archives: An anthropologist's search for answers to her own cancer diagnosis raises questions for all of us.
This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons.
But when I told my friends and host family in Haiti, where I’ve been studying social and political life for the past decade, their reactions were different. They asked: Who had done this to me? Was a colleague angry? Was a family member getting revenge? Or was someone simply jealous, especially after the good year I’d had landing a new job, having a baby, buying a house, and having the Cubs win the World Series? Someone must have wished me ill will.
This is not merely because we’re living longer. Cases of younger women with invasive breast cancer have increased 2 percent annually since the mid-1970s. In her book Malignant, anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain equates cancer to a “total social fact.” She says cancer is “a practice whose effects fissure through seemingly distinct areas of life, thus weaving them together.” The rise of cancer as a leading cause of death traces the history of industrialization, the development of social, economic, and political practices that define the “developed” world, from agribusiness to industrial chemicals to Superfund sites.
But then again, if we continue to focus on the trees, we lose the forest. The problem is akin to discussions about climate change. It must be addressed not through piecemeal changes but comprehensive policies that target a way of life on Earth. We need to not only research and regulate specific poisons, like cigarettes or lead, but also to study the simultaneous and cumulative consequences of lifetime exposure to known carcinogens and contaminants in the environment.
And yet, the bulk of funding for medical cancer research has focused on genetic causes, with only 15 percent of the National Cancer Institute budget dedicated to environmental oncology.
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