Winner of the 2005 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Between Camelotsis about the struggle to forge relationships and the spaces that are left when that effort falls short. In the title story, a man at a ...backyard barbecue waits for a blind date who never shows up. He meets a stranger who advises him to give up the fight; to walk away from intimacy altogether and stop getting hurt. The wisdom-or foolhardiness-of that approach is at the heart of each of these stories. In "I'll Be Home," a young man who has converted to Judaism goes home for Christmas in Miami, and finds that his desire to connect to his parents conflicts with his need to move on. "The Movements of the Body" introduces us to a woman who believes that she can control the disintegration of her life through a carefully measured balance of whiskey and mouthwash. These are stories about loss and fear, but also about the courage that drives us all to continue to reach out to the people around us.
Past research on morality has emphasized a single justice-based moral ethic. Expanding this conception of morality, Shweder has proposed a universal taxonomy of three moral rhetorics related to ...justice, interdependence, and purity. Five studies tested the hypothesis that American morality emphasizes the justice-based rhetoric, whereas Filipino morality is represented by all three rhetorics. In the first three studies, American examples were modally justice based, whereas Filipinos generated examples in approximately equal proportions from each rhetoric. In Study 4, Americans rated justice-based rules higher on criteria of morality than rules from other rhetorics; Filipinos rated rules from all three rhetorics as moral. In Study 5, the association between anger and moral violations was stronger for Americans than for Filipinos, consistent with American emphasis on the moral stature of justice. Discussion focused on the origins and consequences of the American emphasis on rights and the balanced representation of morality observed in Filipinos.
