A key problem for critical theory is how to problematize the very concepts that undergird its own frameworks once they have become canonical. The more that certain constructs come to dominate an ...intellectual landscape and train our critical gaze, the more important this task becomes. To address this challenge, I offer a phenomenological approach to concept critique. I propose to consider critical phenomenology, at least in its most radical form, as an experience-near process of concept destabilization. I build upon Arendt’s intriguing formulation: thinking is a form of experience that disquiets concepts. She calls this ‘defrosting.’ I further suggest that perplexing particulars hold this kind of disruptive defrosting potential, helping us awaken our own critical gaze.
Moral laboratories Mattingly, Cheryl
2014., 20141003, 2014, 2014-10-03
eBook
Moral Laboratoriesis 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.
The paradox of hope Mattingly, Cheryl
2010., 20101102, 2010, 2010-12-02
eBook
Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, this book explores the hope that inspires us to try to create lives worth living, even when no cure is in sight. The Paradox of ...Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them poor and all of them with children who have been diagnosed with serious chronic medical conditions. Cheryl Mattingly proposes a narrative phenomenology of practice as she explores case stories in this highly readable study. Depicting the multicultural urban hospital as a border zone where race, class, and chronic disease intersect, this theoretically innovative study illuminates communities of care that span both clinic and family and shows how hope is created as an everyday reality amid trying circumstances.
Anthropologists have sustained a varied and active engagement with ethics throughout the field's history. In light of this long-standing engagement, what marks the distinctiveness of the current ...ethical turn? To think in Foucauldian terms, ethics morality now looms large precisely because it has been problematized. Although there has been a recent outpouring of work on ethics, and a widely shared concern to move beyond overly collectivist accounts, much is nascent. Debates and schools of thought are still emerging. In this review article, we explore several resonate streams of disquiet or inspiration within the discipline that have generated new lines of inquiry. These include (
a
) emerging debates and confusion around the use of basic terms such as "ethics" and "morality" and their role in debates over ordinary ethics, (
b
) articulations of an anthropological virtue ethics (and the Foucault effect), (
c
) increasingly sophisticated treatments of moral experience informed by philosophical phenomenology, and (
d
) reinvigorated considerations of the political as connected to ethical life.
Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images
function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our
lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an
artist, the ...volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us
understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence
and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad
aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can
imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique? Cutting between
ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful
contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created
in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify
the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and
of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and
uncertainty. Contributors : Rasmus Dyring,
Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Grøn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly,
Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds
Whyte
There has been a recent call for an anthropology of morality and a challenge to anthropologists that they have been insufficiently attentive to moral aspects of social life. The new anthropology of ...morality involves an attempt to modify the legacy associated with Durkheim and the idea of the moral as confined to unreflective norm following. Out of this has emerged a new interest in virtue ethics. In this paper, I examine points of convergence and crucial differences between a ‘first-person’ or ‘humanist’ virtue ethics and a postructural one inspired largely by Foucault. Despite their many convergences, poststructural and first-person versions of virtue ethics make not only distinct but in some cases irreconcilable claims. Instead of rushing to merge these positions, I would urge that we pause to look at how they differ and see why this debate might matter to our own ethnographic enterprises.
Through what kind of inaugural scenes is the moral self born? And what are the practices, within that scene, through which one tries to become a moral person, or a different sort of moral self, a ...person one is not but wishes to be? These questions are at the heart of the recent ethical turn in anthropology and sociocultural studies more broadly. In this paper, I explore three moral imaginaries: the trial, the artisan workshop and the moral laboratory. Turning to ethnographic material, I compare how these social imaginaries illuminate the moral work of people engaged in trying to create good lives for themselves and those they care about. Drawing upon a long-term study of a group of African-American families caring for children with significant illnesses and disabilities, I examine people's attempts to transform not only themselves but also the social and material spaces in which they live.
Moral engines Mattingly, Cheryl; Dyring, Rasmus; Louw, Maria ...
2017., 2017, 2017-10-31, Letnik:
5
eBook
Moral Engines includes some of the foremost voices in the anthropology of morality, representing a unique interdisciplinary conversation between anthropologists and philosophers about the moral ...engines of ethical life.
Is there a better way to frame the task of offering health care to culturally diverse populations? One suggestion is to rethink what we mean by culture.
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