Waiting for Care and Community Organizing for Serious Health-Related Suffering in Kerala, India

• DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2351066
• Publication Date: 2024-05-16T16:48:10Z
• Authors: Devi Vijay; Gitte H Koksvik
• Keywords: Male; Adult; Anthropology, Medical; Palliative Care; Chronic Disease; Humans; India; Female; Community Health Services; Middle Aged

We explore the temporalities that shape and alleviate serious health-related suffering among those with chronic and terminal conditions in Kerala, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2019, we examine the entanglements between waiting for care within dominant institutions and the community organizing that palliates this waiting. Specifically, people navigate multiple medical institutions, experience loneliness and abandonment, loss of autonomy, and delays and denials of recognition as they wait for care. Community palliative care organizations offering free, routine, home-based care provide samadhanam (peace of mind) and swatantrayam (self-determination) in lifeworlds mired with chronic waiting. We document how community care sustains an alternative politics of shared time, untethered from marketized notions of efficiency and productivity toward profits. In so doing, we cast in high relief community healthcare imaginaries that alleviate serious health-related suffering and reconfigure Global North-centric perspectives.