Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life

by Cheryl Mattingly

Overview

Moral Laboratories is an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520281196
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/03/2014
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Cheryl Mattingly is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Division of Occupational Science at the University of Southern California. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the award-winning author of The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland and Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience and coeditor, with Linda Garro, of Narrative and Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing, among other books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  
Prologue  
Part One. First Person Virtue Ethics
1. Experimental Soccer and the Good Life  
2. First Person Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality  
Part Two. Moral Becoming and the Everyday
3. Home Experiments: Scenes from the Moral Ordinary  
4. Luck, Friendship, and the Narrative Self  
5. Moral Tragedy: The Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother  
6. The Flight of the Blue Balloons: Narrative Suspense and the Play of Possible Selves  
Part Three. Moral Pluralism as Cultural Possibility
7. Rival Moral Traditions and the Miracle Baby  
8. Dueling Confessions: Revolution in the First Person  
9. Tragedy, Possibility, and Philosophical Anthropology  
Bibliography  
Index

Editorial Reviews

11/01/2014
Mattingly presents an anthropology of morality based on her research of black families who care for children with serious and chronic medical conditions.

Library Journal

"Mattingly convincingly bolsters her claims . . . An excellent demonstration of ethnographic and theoretical work."

Center for Medical Humanities

"Mattingly convincingly bolsters her claims . . . an excellent demonstration of ethnographic and theoretical work."

Center for Medical Humanities - Ezelle Sanford III