Paper short abstract:

By drawing on an Anthropology of care, my aim in this paper is to illuminate the unfolding of relationships, knowledges and moral worlds in which cancer care practices are enmeshed within kin networks.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology has approached cancer either as individual experiences with an emphasis in the narratives and subjectivities of patients, or as institutional arrangements that frame how the knowledge about treatments and prognosis eventually shapes individuals' experiences. It has left at the side the familial implications and repercussions of cancer, or in other words, the ways in which both families as primary care collectives and experiences of cancer treatments are co-constituted in the everyday life.

My argument is that co-constitutive process is made up through care practices. That is what I will try to show by putting together two sorts of arguments: The first refers to the family work as a clinical reality that give form to the illness experience of the patients through care practices, while the second is the symmetrical reflect of the first; namely, that illness experiences may be read in the repercussions it has for the members involved in that clinical reality.

By drawing on an Anthropology of care, my aim in this paper is to illuminate the unfolding of relationships, knowledges and moral worlds in which cancer care practices are enmeshed within kin networks. Specifically, by unpacking the generative creativity of care collectives in negotiating compromises, temporalities and collective identities in cancer care, I will show how relatedness in the family is made and re-made through the performance of care practices.