1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910458703203321

Autore

Mattingly Cheryl <1951->

Titolo

Moral laboratories : family peril and the struggle for a good life / / Cheryl Mattingly

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Oakland, California : , : University of California Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-520-28120-9

0-520-95953-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (280 p.)

Disciplina

362.19892009794/93

Soggetti

Chronically ill children - Medical care - Moral and ethical aspects - California - Los Angeles County

Children with disabilities - Medical care - Moral and ethical aspects - California - Los Angeles County

African American families - California - Los Angeles County

Medical anthropology - California - Los Angeles County

Medical ethics - California - Los Angeles County

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- Chapter 1. Experimental Soccer and the Good Life -- Chapter 2. First Person Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality -- Chapter 3. Home Experiments -- Chapter 4. Luck, Friendship, and the Narrative Self -- Chapter 5. Moral Tragedy -- Chapter 6. The Flight of the Blue Balloons -- Chapter 7. Rival Moral Traditions and the Miracle Baby -- Chapter 8. Dueling Confessions -- Chapter 9. Tragedy, Possibility, and Philosophical Anthropology -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.