Fighting for Breath: Living Morally and Dying of Cancer in a Chinese Village

Notes

Notes introduction 1 To protect my informants, all personal and place names (except Langzhong) are pseudonyms. 2 Gan haizi may be translated as “dry child.” This is roughly correspondent to godchild in the Christian tradition but without the same religious connotations . I have therefore retained the Chinese term. 3 “Dry father” is roughly equivalent to godfather. 4 For an excellent English-language overview, see Lee Liu (2010). See Mengqin Liu and Chen Fu (2007) for an analysis of some selected cases and Deng (2009) for an influential report in the Hong Kong–based magazine Phoenix Weekly. See Doubleleaf (2009) for a map of cancer villages. 5 Equally infamous are the cancer villages near the Dabao Mountain mine in Guangdong, where the Hengshi River and underground water were polluted by heavy metals following the opening of the mine. On Shangba village , see Chuanmin Yang and Qianhua Fang (2005). On Liangqiao village, see CNN (2007). 6 Nanfang Dushi (2007b). On the “water crisis,” see Nanfang Dushi (2007a). 7 Ganma may be translated as “dry mother.” 8 Some of the material included in the introduction was published in “An Anthropology of Cancer Villages: Villagers’ Perspectives and the Politics of Responsibility,” Journal of Contemporary China (2010) 19(63): 79–99. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “Of Farming Chemicals and Cancer Deaths: The Politics of Health in Contemporary Rural China,” Social Anthropology (2009) 17(1): 56–73. An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared as “If You Can Eat and Walk You Do Not Go to Hospital: Farmers’ Attitudes to Healthcare in Contemporary China,” in Beatriz Carrillo and Jane Duckett (eds.), Social Problems and the Local Welfare Mix in China: Public Policies and Private Initiatives (London: Routledge, 2010). 9 See Sandra Hyde (2007) on the cultural politics of AIDS in China. 10 About us$60. In 2004–2005, 1 U.S. dollar corresponded to 8.28 yuan. In 2007 the value of the yuan increased to 7.50 yuan per dollar, and by 2009 it was as high as 6.83 yuan per dollar (it continued to increase to 6.30 by the end of 2011). 11 This point is elaborated further with a discussion of how food serves to articulate claims to social status in Anna Lora-Wainwright (2007). 274 Notes to Pages 20–47 Chapter 1: Cancer and Contending Forms of Morality 1 Examples include Kleinman (1986); Kleinman, Das, and Lock (1997); and Kleinman and Lee (2003, 2006). 2 For a book-length account of Cassels’ work, see Broomhall (1926). For Cassels’ own account of Christianity in southwest China, see Cassels (1895). See also accounts in the China Inland Mission’s yearly publication, China’s Million. For other missionary accounts of Sichuan, see Graham (1927); see Flower and Leonard (2005) for an account of Graham’s work in western Sichuan. 3 Emily Martin’s study on the immune system (1994) also provides a valuable example of the embeddedness of perceptions of health and illness within the political economy of the time. She shows that the value placed on flexibility in market accumulation and as an asset for workers has seeped into current understandings of the immune system as requiring flexibility. 4 For ethnographies of patients’ agency, see the special issue of Anthropology and Medicine edited by E. Hsu and E. Hog (2002). 5 For studies on the extent to which state legitimacy is challenged through urban protests by workers, laid-off workers, and pensioners, see Blecher (2002), Hurst (2004), C. K. Lee (2007), and Thireau and Hua (2003). 6 Much of the literature concerned with ethnic minorities in rural China shows that they are bracketed as inferior, backward, and marginal both politically and economically (Harrell 2001; Hyde 2007; Litzinger 2000; Mueggler 2001; Schein 2000; White 1993). Although ethnic minorities may be seen as a separate group due to particular policies reserved to them, much of the representation of minorities elides with that of rural dwellers at large. 7 A similar trope is at work in urban China, where laid-off workers and pensioners use comparisons to the Maoist past to protest about unfair treatment (C. K. Lee 2007; Hurst and O’Brien 2002). 8 The volume edited by D. Davis (2000) offers some telling examples of how the “consumer revolution” has affected urban China. 9 This has been noted in many village studies. See, for instance, Chan et al. (1992, 281), Croll (1994, 218–222), Endicott (1988, 7), Flower and Leonard (1998, 274), Gao (1999, 181), Huang (1989, 225...