In examining the secrecy around cancer in India, I develop recent anthropological work on how practices of medical non-disclosure grow out of contextually rooted notions of care. I extend the insights of this work in rejecting the framing of non-disclosure as a sign of cultural lack. But while much of this recent literature on biomedical non-disclosure is framed as a critique of bioethics, I am concerned here with describing the complexity of the lived experience in between disclosure and non-disclosure. Paying attention to this processual nature of non-disclosure reveals how it does not operate as a binary choice between concealing and revealing, and consequently, knowing or not knowing. Instead, I argue that weaving between disclosure and non-disclosure allowed my interlocutors to inhabit the space of the ‘as-if’—of living in a subjunctive tense. Living in the subjunctive made possible brief respites from the real, even as such respite often turned out to be temporary, and the as-if never really escaped the grasp of the actual. Finally, I suggest finally that what one tells, to whom, and when reveal how the burden of cancer is distributed across social networks, vitally shaping possibilities and trajectories for cancer treatment and care.

中文翻译：

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当代印度的癌症和保密

在研究印度癌症的秘密时，我开发了最近的人类学工作，研究医学保密实践如何从基于上下文的护理概念中发展出来。我扩展了这项工作的见解，拒绝将不公开视为文化缺失的标志。但是，虽然最近关于生物医学保密的许多文献都被认为是对生物伦理​​学的批判，但我在这里关注的是描述披露和保密之间的生活经验的复杂性。关注不披露的这种过程性质揭示了它是如何不作为隐藏和披露之间的二元选择运作的，因此，知道或不知道。相反，我认为在披露和不披露之间交织，让我的对话者能够居住在“好像”的空间中——生活在虚拟语气中。生活在虚拟语气中使得短暂的喘息成为可能，即使这种喘息往往被证明是暂时的，而且好像从来没有真正逃脱过现实的掌握。最后，我最后建议，人们告诉谁，告诉谁，以及何时揭示癌症负担如何在社交网络中分布，这将极大地塑造癌症治疗和护理的可能性和轨迹。