Anthropology in Action

This article explores how healthcare-seeking practices and the transformation of bodily sensations into symptoms are embedded in what we term a ‘moral sensescape’ of everyday life. Based on fieldwork in a suburban middle-class neighbourhood in Denmark, we discuss how a moral relation between the Danish welfare state and the middle-class population is embodied in a responsibility for individual health. Overall, we identify a striving to be a ‘good citizen’; this entails conflicting moral possibilities in relation to experiencing, interpreting and acting on bodily sensations. We examine how people meet the conflicting moral possibilities of complying with current public health rhetoric on proper healthcare seeking, including timely presentation of symptoms, and simultaneously try to avoid misusing the healthcare system and be characterised as overly worried or even as a hypochondriac; this challenge constitutes complex navigational routes through the moral sensescape of the Danish middle class.

Social inequality in cancer survival is well known, and within public health promotion enhancing awareness of cancer symptoms is often promoted as a way to reduce social differences in stage of cancer at the time of diagnosis. In order to add to our knowledge of what may lie behind social inequalities in cancer survival encountered in many high-income countries, this article explores the situatedness of bodily sensations. Based on comparative ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that the socially and biologically informed body influences how people from lower social classes experience sensations. Overall, we point out how the sensorial is tied to the embodiment of the social situation in the sense that some bodies make more ‘noise’ than others. It follows that standardised approaches to improving early care seeking by increasing knowledge and awareness may overlook essential explanations of social differences in symptom appraisal.

The interpretation of sensations and the recognition of symptoms of a sickness, as well as the movement to seek treatment, have long been recognised in medical anthropology as inherently social processes. Based on cases of HIV and trauma (PTSD) in Uganda, we show that even the first signs and sensations of sickness can be radically social. The sensing body can be a ‘social body’ – a family, a couple, a network – a unit that transcends the individual body. In this article, we focus on four aspects of the sociality of sensations and symptoms: mode of transmission, the shared experience of sensations/symptoms, differential recognition of symptoms, and the embodied sociality of treatment.

Chronic cancer patients (CCPs) pay attention and act in response to diverse bodily sensations they experience in everyday life after a cancer episode. Here, we analyse how North Norwegian CCPs use their familiar surroundings in an effort to counter bad mood, anxiety and symptoms of relapse and to strengthen their health. The core participants of the anthropological fieldwork over the course of one year were 10 CCPs from a small coastal village in northern Norway. By drawing on Tim Ingold’s understanding of taskscape, it is suggested that the participants after cancer treatment dwell in and engage with the surroundings of the village, including the core task of staying healthy. The participants are part of and embody the landscape through the temporality of taskscape, related to their ways of dealing with pain, worries and bodily sensations in everyday life.

This article explores the process of interpreting bodily sensations after completed cancer treatment. We base our analysis on repeated interviews over a period of 12 months with eight participants who had different cancer diagnoses. By using the concepts of ‘sensation schemas’ and ‘sensation scripts’, we explore how sensation schemas of cancer dominated in the first period, while schemas of late effects and reduced tolerance for daily life activities gradually became more important as time went by. Scripts, or actions taken to reduce unpleasant sensations, gradually turned from seeking medical advice and check-ups to ignoring and waiting for it to go away. Later, adapting daily life to the new health situation became prominent, such as balancing rest and activity to avoid becoming exhausted.

Patient-related diagnostic delay has been established as an analytical category in cancer research. This category has come under critique because it postulates linear cause-and-effect explanations of delayed care-seeking. These explanations are based on a one-dimensional idea of causality that neglects the processual character and the contextual situatedness of bodily experiences and care-seeking decisions. Using a notion of causality that is both process-oriented and context-sensitive, this article aims to understand ovarian cancer patients’ stories on delayed healthcare seeking. It uses data from a qualitative interview study that investigated ovarian cancer patients’ illness and healthcare-seeking experiences. We suggest that the interviewees’ retrospective perspective generated a multilayered notion of diagnostic delay that differs from the definition of patient-related delay commonly used in the literature. Our analysis shows how interviewees negotiate current social discourses on health and (social) responsibility, and thereby situate themselves and their healthcare seeking within a broader socio-economic and political context.