Original empirical essays from across the globe demonstrate how the study of cancer promotes theoretical understandings of the politics and pragmatics of suffering, and offers insights into the meanings of survivorship, risk, charity and care in transnational contexts.

Cancer is a transnational condition involving the unprecedented flow of health information, technologies, and people across national borders. Such movement raises questions about the nature of therapeutic citizenship, how and where structurally vulnerable populations obtain care, and the political geography of blame associated with this disease. This volume brings together cutting-edge anthropological research carried out across North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia, representing low-, middle- and high-resource countries with a diversity of national health care systems. Contributors ethnographically map the varied nature of cancer experiences and articulate the multiplicity of meanings that survivorship, risk, charity and care entail. They explore institutional frameworks shaping local responses to cancer and underlying political forces and structural variables. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138776937_oachapter3.pdf