Métamorphoses de la chair : anthropologie du cancer au Cambodge
Author: M’zoughi, Meriem
Under the direction of: Patrick Deshayes and Anne Yvonne Guillou
Université Lumière Lyon 2
Texte français
Keywords: Anthropology, Cambodia, Cancer, Care, Medicine, Illness, Body, Food, Hospital, Oncology, Palliative care, Relationship-Doctor-Family-Patient.
Abstract
Thesis seeks to understand the experiences of cancer - of patients and their families - by looking at health practices, treatments and care (produced by those who are present, momentarily or permanently, within the therapeutic environment of a patient). The aim is to study the logics of care that prevail in Cambodia, by also describing the ways in which oncology and palliative care are provided. To do this, an ethnological survey took place between 2013 and 2016 in and around Phnom Penh. I investigated for nearly eighteen months in the two national hospitals that have an oncology department, as well as with an NGO that provides home-based palliative care for patients living near the capital. This allowed me to follow the daily lives of families in and out of the hospital setting. Cancer experiences intertwine social, political and medical issues where ordinary violence and health inequalities mark the development of biomedicine in Cambodia. The specific issues related to cancer in the country are part of a context that combines humanitarian aid, patronage relations and neoliberalism. The daily experience of the disease and its care reveals the contours of a shared disease in which the dialectic of the biological and social bodies is at play. Knowledge about cancer interweaves plural and complex conceptions of the body and the living, which highlight the influences of Buddhism, Hinduism and animism. Professionals, faced with local constraints and inadequate medical standards, do what they can with the means at their disposal. They practice a multiple-choice medicine, subject to clientelism, which is subject to specific prior appropriation work. The term cancer in Khmer (mahārīk) refers to “harmful flesh that grows” or “metamorphosis of the flesh”, and the experience of the disease shows that it is a question of a metamorphosis that affects the individual, social, and political body.
