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

By Cheryl Mattingly

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520281209
• ISBN13: 9780520281202
• Release Date: October 2014
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.9" x 6.0"