Moral Laboratories

Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life

• Author(s): Cheryl Mattingly,
• Publisher: Univ of California Press
• Pages: 280
• ISBN_10: 0520959531
  ISBN_13: 9780520959538
  
• Language: en
• Categories: Social Science / Anthropology / General , Medical / Health Care Delivery , Social Science / Sociology / General ,

Description:... 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.