Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the interplay between cancer risk and care and notions of shortage, need and rights that are associated with economic crisis in Greece. It draws on this ethnographic case to consider attributions of locale and the global in the moral complexes that frame responses to cancer.

Paper long abstract:

Taking a lead from a recent edited volume on the anthropologies of cancer (Mathews, Burke and Kampriani, 2015), this paper considers responses to cancer and cancer risk through a lens of how inequality, socio-political ideologies and their ethical undercurrents are linked to conceptions of bodily disorder and other risks in life. Starting with insights from ethnographic research at the dawn of the Greek crisis, I go on to reflect on different moments and responses to cancer and cancer risk over the past decade. Even though Greece has retained its status as high-income economy in the World Bank country classification index, public health accounts have alerted to the implications of austerity for the health status of the population and the shortcomings of health structures, including cancer care. The parallel reading of emerging narratives that speak of a physical, embodied crisis and the national crisis, pinpoints to the ways in which the uncertainties associated with the sovereign debt crisis and the uncertainties that pervade cancer come to provide contexts for each other. In this way, the specific ethnographic domain serves for tracing the interplay between shortage, need and rights and considering the various attributions of locale and the global in the moral complexes that frame responses to cancer in situated cultural environments.