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Paper short abstract

This paper follows V., an indigenous Makushi woman, in her travels to access chemotherapy for her husband. I ask how diagnoses reconfigure hunger and im/mobilities, transforming the marital relationship, before considering how V. coped with his eventual death and pressures intensified by inequality.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I attend to the moral strivings of V., an indigenous Makushi woman, to be a ‘good wife.’ In particular, I follow her as she accompanies her husband, who travelled to access chemotherapy treatment in the Guyanese capital city of Georgetown, far in many ways from the North Rupununi village where they then otherwise resided. There is a well-developed literature derived from ethnographic studies in the region that focuses on the largely idealistic ‘good life’ in Amazonian socialities, which emphasises kinship as coresidence. In part, this theme has been explored through the husband-wife relation and the mutual satisfaction of hungers, widely construed (Gow 1989; Overing & Passes 2000). As I turn to the affliction that V.'s husband's disease brought to her life, I ask how biomedical diagnoses trouble this imaginary found in the literature, and demand analytical consideration of reconfigured im/mobilities and hunger, which transform the marital relation itself. In conclusion, I consider how V. coped with her husband's eventual death, which marked a failure of her striving, at least on one level, alongside its related affective pressures in a context of intensified inequalities.