Moral Selves and Moral Scenes: Narrative Experiments in Everyday Life

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• ethics
• narrative
• care of the self
• moral transformation
• anthropology of suffering

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Health: Boundary Crossing: An Ethnographic & Longitudinal Study (no. 1R01HD38878); Boundary Crossings: Re-Situating Cultural Competence (no. 2RO1 HD38878).

Notes

This is something I have tried to do in my own work, drawing especially upon virtue ethics and phenomenology (e.g. Mattingly 1998a, 2006a, b, 2010a, b, In Press).

My sketch will have to be brief here. However, I elaborate this framework more extensively in Mattingly In Press.

One might reasonably ask for more details about how this inaugural scene with its moral laboratories and journeys is narrative in a different way than, for example, the inaugural scene of a courtroom – which obviously also suggests the need for a narrative account of oneself and, therefore, both presupposes and creates a narrative version of a moral self. In the context of this paper, I can only pose this excellent question but have not the space to address it. It deserves its own paper.

I can only be suggestive here, but I have developed this claim elsewhere in an extended way, offering a ‘narrative phenomenology’ of action and experience (Mattingly 2010a).