Machine generated contents note: 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
Summary
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 emerge
