Cervical Screening in Swaziland: an Ethnographic Case Study

This thesis examines and contextualizes women’s fears about cervical screening in Swaziland. I begin with a critique of the historical and epidemiological trend to blame screening avoidance among African women on cultural fears. Then, drawing on data from semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I find that fear of cervical screening is a product of the clinical, social and political contexts of screening, thus challenging assumptions about culture-based fear. The clinical encounter between women and nurses is laborious; complicated by fears of gossip, the pejorative judgment of women’s bodies and hospital politics. The complexities of this encounter collide with politically produced realities of cancer treatment scarcity, therapeutic failure and HIV’s dominance of local clinical space to further create and sustain fear. Ultimately, women’s fears of cervical screening are logical, and must be understood relative to the complex backdrop of clinical sociality, politics and scarcity that situates cervical cancer in Swaziland.