Love’s Imperfection: Moral becoming, friendship and family life

This paper concerns friendship as an aspect of family love and its fragilities. I explore love as an on-going ethical demand and problem in family life, one that can present continual obstacles to the ability to continue as a family. I also look at intra-family friendship as a means for addressing such threats. Drawing upon long-term fieldwork among African American families caring for children with chronic illnesses and disabilities (Mattingly 2010a), I explore a situation faced by one of these families when a household accident badly injures one of the children. Although I examine a family rupture, I part company with the widely held view in anthropology that the properly moral (or ethical) needs to be radically contrasted with the ordinary. Rather, I argue that the ordinary can  provide resources for what Stanley Cavell calls ‘moral transcendence’. Keywords: ethics, anthropology of morality, Cavell, kinship, love, friendship,moral psycholog

Den narrative udvikling i nyere medicinsk antropologi

I  midten  af  1980erne  begyndte  antropologer  at  undersøge  det  narrative  og  dets  relation  til lidelse  og  helbredelse i biomedicinsk  behandlings  kontekst.  Denne  narrative  udvikling giver antropologer mulighed for at udforske lidelse fra forskellige perpektiver, for at kriti-sere vestlig  biomedicin  og  for  at  undersøge  de  skjulte  kræfter  i  biomedicinens  praksis.  Denne  artikel skitserer fem vigtige områder,  hvor det narrative er blevet sat i forbindelse med helbredelse i vestlig  biomedicin.  Ud  fra  analyse  af  en  konkret  klinisk  interaktion  argu-menteres  for,  at  en  undersøgelse af narrativ handling giver  antro-pologer et godt udgangspunkt for at deltage i det bredere tvær-faglige anliggende at gøre biomedicinsk diskurs og praksis mere men-neskelig

Kronisk hjemmearbejde. Sociale håb, dilemmaer og konflikter i hjemmearbejdsnarrativer i Uganda, Danmark og USA

Med udgangspunkt i tre cases fra henholdsvis Uganda, Danmark og USA diskuterer vi i denne artikel patienters og pårørendes hjemmearbejde i forhold til kroniske tilstande. De tre cases omhandler en aidspatient i et ”Home Based Aids Care” program, der modtager medicinsk behandling og rådgivning i hjemmet, en diabetes patient der prøver at gennemføre livsstilsforandringer i sin hverdag og en far med et kronisk sygt barn, der forventes at udføre genoptræningsøvelser derhjemme. Vi undersøger disse tre eksempler på kronisk hjemmearbejde med narrative begreber for at fremhæve aspekter omkring tid – især fremtid og håb. Hjemmearbejdsnarrativer vedrører de forventninger behandlere, patienter og familier har til den behandling, der er iværksat i en klinisk kontekst, og som skal udfolde sig, når den bringes hjem. I artiklen diskuterer vi hvordan patienter oplever og håndterer dilemmaer i arbejdsog ansvarsfordelingen mellem hospital og hjem. Vi foreslår, at hjemmearbejde indebærer komplekse problemstillinger for både patienter og professionelle. Vi peger specifikt på de tidslige og sociale dimensioner af hjemmearbejde og på de dilemmaer, som patienter og familier oplever når de forsøger at udføre deres hjemmearbejde. Vi belyser også, hvordan der kan opstå konflikter mellem patienters og professionelles hjemmearbejdsnarrativer. Hjemmearbejde foregår i det, Kleinman kaldte den folkelige sektor, og afslutningsvis stiller vi spørgsmålet om, hvorvidt hjemmearbejde peger på en ’ekspertdrevet’ kolonisering af den folkelige sektor

“A Massive Long Way”: Interconnecting Histories, a “Special Child,” ADHD, and Everyday Family Life

Focusing on one family from a study of dual-earner middle-class families carried out in Los Angeles, California, this article draws on interview and video-recorded data of everyday interactions to explore illness and healing as embedded in the microcultural context of the Morris family. For this family, an important aspect of what is at stake for them in their daily lives is best understood by focusing on 9-year-old Mark, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In this article, we grapple with the complexity of conveying some sense of how Mark’s condition is experienced and relationally enacted in everyday contexts. Through illuminating connections between lives as lived and lives as told, we explore the narrative structuring of healing in relation to Mark’s local moral world with the family at its center. We examine how his parents understand the moral consequences of the child’s past for his present and future, and work to encourage others to give due weight to his troubled beginnings before this child joined the Morris family. At the same time, we see how the Morris parents act to structure Mark’s moral experience and orient to a desired future in which Mark’s “success” includes an appreciation of how he is accountable to others for his actions. Through our analyses, we also seek to contribute to discussions on what is at stake in everyday life contexts for children with ADHD and their families, through illuminating aspects of the cultural, moral and relational terrain that U.S. families navigate in contending with a child’s diagnosis of ADHD. Further, given that ADHD is often construed as a “disorder of volition,” we seek to advance anthropological theorizing about the will in situations where volitional control over behavior is seen to be disordered

Giving an Account of One’s Pain in the Anthropological Interview

In this paper, I analyze the illness stories narrated by a mother and her 13-year-old son as part of an ethnographic study of child chronic pain sufferers and their families. In examining some of the moral, relational and communicative challenges of giving an account of one’s pain, I focus on what is left out of some accounts of illness and suffering and explore some possible reasons for these elisions. Drawing on recent work by Judith Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself, 2005), I investigate how the pragmatic context of interviews can introduce a form of symbolic violence to narrative accounts. Specifically, I use the term “genre of complaint” to highlight how anthropological research interviews in biomedical settings invoke certain typified forms of suffering that call for the rectification of perceived injustices. Interview narratives articulated in the genre of complaint privilege specific types of pain and suffering and cast others into the background. Giving an account of one’s pain is thus a strategic and selective process, creating interruptions and silences as much as moments of clarity. Therefore, I argue that medical anthropologists ought to attend more closely to the institutional structures and relations that shape the production of illness narratives in interview encounters

Accounting for oneself and other ethical acts: Big picture ethics with a small picture focus

Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.