Moral Laboratories
Douban
Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life
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.
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