Tejiendo tramas para explicar el cáncer.

LUXARDO NATALIA

Mitológicas

CAEA - CONICET

Lugar: BUENOS AIRES; Año: 2006 vol. XXI p. 9 - 18

0326-5676

 The purpose of this article is to explore the ideas about how the cancer constitutes itself, trough an interpretative approach. The analysis is based in two types of sources (direct and indirect). It includes both 32 in depth interviews and autobiographical narrations of cancer sufferers. The first ones were made in two oncology services at public hospitals of Buenos Aires city (Argentina), during 2002-2005. Concerning the second material, I consider 4 life stories of women who fight with cancer. I constructed a typology in order to classify the origin of illness from the patient point of view, including four main focuses: the emotional, the environmental, religious-mythical and traditional (or folk) taxa. In the first ones cancer derives from an excess of feelings (love, hatred, suffering). The second ones were related to in its reverse form, through discourses in which emphasis were put in the “paradise lost”. That means that patients referred to previous moments in deep connection with a “natural way of life” that had been lost due to the effects of “modernity”. In the religious-mythical there are two main options, either to understand the cancer as the result of a “random fatality” or to view it as the consequence of a divine plan in which the illness means the opportunity to learn something morally correct (e.g. to be a better person). The traditional taxonomies include the cancer as the result of sorcery or witchcraft. To sum up, I conclude that the vision of responsibilities is much more than an etiological preoccupation it also is the way of discourses, through a certain plot, put into order diverse elements in the personal biography