Temporal curation: curating life in the anticipation of cancer

Abstract

This paper explores cancer as a ‘total social fact’, considering it both a specific material entity and an immaterial phenomenon with social, political, and legal implications. Based on long-term ethnographic field studies on cancer as anticipation in the Danish welfare state, specifically within lung cancer diagnostics and the surveillance for ‘tissue changes’, the paper explores how cancer is constituted and experienced. Analyzing this new and rising cancer phenomenon, the paper attends to scale by focusing analytically on three levels (national, institutional, and intersubjective) and conceptualizes how cancer manifests at these different levels through practices of temporal curation. Temporal curation is conceptually directed at understanding both how past, present, and future exist concurrently in the diagnostic space, and how cancer is produced, preserved, and brought into the future. Hence, this paper contributes to understandings of the modern in healthcare systems, specifically arguing for a shift in discussions on diagnostics beyond a narrow focus on classificatory processes to comprise how a diagnostic phenomenon becomes temporal and sociopolitical.