Long abstract:

Examining cancer inequalities poses epistemological challenges, and many disciplines provide hypothesis to explain them. In the last decades, anthropology, and other social sciences address that more than fragmented “variables”, social inequalities operate through overlapping and complex routes spanning multiple levels. This study shed light on socioeconomic and cultural pathways that shape conditions for the emergence of inequalities in the cancer care and control continuum. We include some of the diverse multiethnic, unequal and heterogeneous subpopulations of Argentina. The research is based on a collaborative ethnography in combination with audiovisual methods. Three communities were selected: 1) rural workers; 2) artisanal fishermen and 3) waste-pickers. The results show routes shaped by historical systematic patterns, crossing multiple levels and contexts. They include the accumulation of ecological hazards and environmental exposures across the lifecourse, infrastructure of segregated neighborhoods, ways of lives shaped by cumulative experiences of material and symbolic deprivations and suffering in contexts of traditional rigid gender roles (e.g., men rejecting prevention and early detection programs, such as colorectal screenings). Also, systemic barriers and deterrents of the public healthcare institutions, including staff stereotyping and racism. Communitarian forces ameliorate them, such as deep social connections . The study concludes that underserved communities are less likely to benefit from cancer advances and are at higher risk of risks, through pathways of social inequalities expressed in systematic disadvantages. Reducing them needs of conceptually-driven frameworks that connect levels and data. Anthropological theories are essential in this vein, moving causation debates upstream, and expanding cancer control incumbencies.