The Cancer Within

The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women’s resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians’ reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country’s violent history of reproductive governance under Ceausescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era. Elise Andaya, author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era

Beautifully written and theoretically inspired, this vivid and pathbreaking ethnography shows how history continues to haunt Romanian women’s sexual and reproductive lives, and how post-socialist healthcare provides no panacea for a cervical cancer crisis and accompanying HPV vaccine hesitancy. The Cancer Within is a must-read for those interested in gender, sexuality, and reproductive health, as well as medicine in the post-socialist era. Marcia Inhorn, author of America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins

The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women’s resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians’ reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country’s violent history of reproductive governance under Ceauşescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era. Elise Andaya, author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era

[The Cancer Within] challenges the idea of the ethnographer as an observer of distant realities, and it shows how deep and enlightening it can be to bring an ethnographic gaze to one’s context of origin…This is an important contribution that makes it possible to better understand not only Romania and its history but also the history of Europe, which is too often analyzed as a homogeneous and univocal whole. Cinzia Greco, Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Pop carefully considers how the context of reproductive choice and medical intervention is not unique to this neighborhood in Romania. Rather, The Cancer Within offers a framework to consider the broad and shifting structural factors that shape how patients and doctors interact, how parents and grandparents advise their children and grandchildren, and how power dynamics relating to gender complicate the deceptively simple logic that individuals will make choices based on medically accepted notions of good health. Piper Sledge, Contemporary Sociology

Pop’s exposure of fiscal austerity is an especially noteworthy contribution of the
book… [and her] evidence of the ramifications of health system oversight… alone is astounding. Gerard Weber, American Ethnologist

The central thrust of the theoretical, ethnographic, and practical arguments of The Cancer Within culminate in an urgent call to holistically address Romania’s cervical cancer crisis: the country’s cancerous present cannot be understood – nor improved upon for the future – without confronting the embodied legacy of its communist past. Nina J. Francis-Levin, Anthropology Book Forum