Cancer and Care in Cambodia Hospitals Family, Money, and Power

This book offers a vivid ethnography of cancer care in Cambodia, tracing "onco-life": the everyday experience of illness, treatment, and survival among patients, families, and health professionals in a resource-limited setting where the state invests little in health and families bear the weight of care. Drawing on four years of fieldwork in two Phnom Penh hospitals and with a palliative-care NGO, the book examines how family, money, and power intertwine to shape therapeutic possibilities through intimate patient stories and close observation of hospital life. It explores the authority of leading doctors, the struggles of impoverished patients, the domestication of hospital wards, the financial logics of treatment choice, the improvisation of medical protocols, and the tensions surrounding pain management and palliative care. Arguing that the Cambodian patient is better understood as a "body-family" rather than an isolated individual, the book challenges assumptions about autonomy, the body, and biomedicine. This work engages anthropologists and sociologists of medicine, global health scholars, clinicians and palliative-care practitioners in low-resource settings, and anyone interested in the social life of cancer and medicine in the Global South. It offers both a grounded portrait of Cambodian oncology and a theoretical reflection on care, inequality, and the politics of healing.