Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the body experience and self-construction of the women with breast cancer during their illness period. The author considered the body as an actively subject filled with experiences which can perceive and interpret its own life world, and constructing of self-concept and identity.Although the breast is the most important origin of the self-identity for woman, above 90% of breast cancer women need to suffer from the modified radical mastectomy or the breast conserving surgery. Moreover, the body experiences and the perceptions of lost their breast after the surgeries are influenced by the social cultural factors. Accordingly, this study focused on analyzing the narrative data of twenty women informants being suffered from the above mentioned surgeries, and their cancer stage were categorized from 0 to 3, in order to explore and interpret their experience of self understanding and identity, which gained through the sustained interactions with families, multi-medical systems, supporting group of cancer patients, and significant others during the year-long treatment process.In this text, the body theories were taken as the thought path of data analysis. The author focused on the special meaning of its experience in the daily life (these body experiences were interpreted), especially the cultural meanings, which affected its thought and action, of the interaction relationship between individuals and society. Trying to consider such particular life transition as the foundation and the medium of self-reconstruction, the author explored how the female breast cancer patients inspect their inner life experience through the major disease experience and the body changes, consequently unfolded the opportunity of subjectivity and initiative. Discussing the concept of self the anthropologists put it in the context of relationship which focus that the self is a changing social relation hence the body is the best way to understand it. As a result, the body becomes the medium between society and self-identity. Differing from the biological medical model focusing on the diet, environment, heredity, and other biological carcinogenic, the anthropologists argue that the body experiences of illness are the overall social suffering experiences of the patients. The physical symptoms, which are the symbolic expression of the repression and conflicts in the daily life, reflecting the disharmony of social relationship: some kinds of social suffering and repression. Therefore, the author tended to clarify the problem consciousness of the research by these informants: in the context of social culture in Taiwan, what are the cultural characters of the self- reconstruction of the women with breast cancer after their surgery.Consequently, in social and culture contexts, this research found that the self, which were reconstructed by the informants through the body changes, contained four important cultural factors: first, the multiple explanations of etiology; second, the stress and dependence co-relationship in Han’s patrilineal and matriarchal families; third, the obedience and flee in the medical power relationship; the last, Breast cancer created the opportunities of the women self-subjectivity and agencies. The author argued that these four cultural factors are not only the consequences of long term interactions between individuals, families, and society, but also the reflection of personhood and cosmology of traditional Han society in Taiwan.