Cheryl Mattingly
Biographic Data
| ID | 630685 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cheryl Mattingly |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cheryl |
| FAMILY NAME | Mattingly |
| SIGNATURE | MATTINGLY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0009-0004-0182-5319 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Ethos Forum | Responses to Defrosting humanism
Perplexing nearness: Autism, family life, and interspecies relationality
Surprise and the singular plural: A critical phenomenology of disability worlds
Bodymind diversity, disability scholars argue, contributes to community and to ideals of human flourishing. Phenomenologists like Nancy and Arendt, meanwhile, foreground our human pluralism. But what does it mean to inhabit (and invent) a plural “we” across significant bodily difference? And why is the experience of surprise important to it? A phenomenological investigation of Ginsburg and Rapp's cultural imaginary, “disability worlds,” reveals h…
The perplexity of Christmas trees: Ageing, Errantry, and Intersectional Time
What is offered by considering ageing, ethics, and intersectionality from a critical phenomenological perspective that draws upon critical race theory? Based upon an extended ethnography of African Americans raising children with illnesses and disabilities, I consider the Christmas trees that a grandmother lovingly decorated each year. These annual trees are portals into the ethical horizons and poetics that permeated her life, not only as an ind…
Identity perplexity, stigma, and social critique: Critical phenomenology with an errant twist
How do we offer critiques of social marginalization and the politics surrounding it without reducing people to mere victims or, at the least, "tokens of a type"? Phenomenology offers a useful way to address this problem. Focusing on the concept of stigma, this article proposes an errant phenomenology informed by Arendt's concern to "defrost" canonical moral and political concepts and Glissant's errant poetics of opacity. Centering upon an African…
Anthropology Bright and Dark: Relativism, Value Pluralism, and the Comparative Study of the Good
In "Dark Anthropology," Sherry Ortner questions the critical potential of anthropological studies of ethics, and particularly of research focused on studying cultural articulations of the good. She promotes instead the study of people's critiques of the neoliberal darkness that besets their lives. Suggesting that critical, dark anthropology is handicapped by opposing itself to the study of the good, I reconsider the critical potential of the anth…
Anthropology and Philosophy: Dialogues on Trust and Hope
The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of th…
Portrait: Michael Lambek
In an article as relevant now as when it was written, Aleida Assmann (1996: 94) asks: "How in a world of divided creeds is one to find out which is the true belief?" She draws from Gotthold Lessing's character Nathan the Wise to say (ibid.: 95): There are two possible solutions to the problem, that of the fundamentalist and that of the sage. The fundamentalist overcomes the problem of multiplicity by a return to the One. Truth can be restored onl…
Waiting
Waiting is one obvious form of anticipation. This article considers waiting for death. Drea, a mother whose five-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a virulent form of brain cancer, experiences a shifting anticipatory terrain as death looms large. Calling upon phenomenology, I ask two primary kinds of questions that connect time, narrative and relationality in considering Drea's experience of waiting. First, I ask what Drea is waiting for and wh…
Defrosting concepts, destabilizing doxa: Critical phenomenology and the perplexing particular
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, …
Critical Phenomenology and Mental Health: Moral Experience under Extraordinary Conditions
Acted Ethics and the Human Condition
The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality
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 account…
Toward a new humanism: An approach from philosophical anthropology
In this introduction to the special section, we revisit the case of humanism, including some challenges to its outworn and problematic metaphysical assumptions. We suggest that a new kind of humanism is demanded despite the many calls that humanism, of any form, should be jettisoned. The new humanism we propose rests on an ethnographically based philosophical anthropology which keeps in mind its reference to humankind while acknowledging the inde…
Ordinary possibility, transcendent immanence, and responsive ethics: A philosophical anthropology of the small event
Based upon long-term fieldwork among African American families in Los Angeles, this article offers a phenomenological investigation of the indeterminate structures of ethical experience. Drawing upon Waldenfels' responsive phenomenology in the context of one particular family, it explores the way ordinary life serves as a crucial, indeed privileged space in which to investigate ethical possibility. The ethnographic material is not intended to fil…
Prologue
Ethics, Immanent Transcendence and the Experimental Narrative Self
Moral Engines
In the past fifteen years, there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that morality should be considered central to human practice. Out of this explosion new and invigorating conversations have emerged between anthropologists and philosophers. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life includes essays from some of the foremost voices in the anthropology of morality, offering unique interdisciplinary co…
Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life
Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life
The Question of ‘Moral Engines’: Introducing a Philosophical Anthropological Dialogue
Moral (and Other) Laboratories and the Semantic Impertinence of Metaphor: An Afterward
In search of the good old life: Ontological breakdown and responsive hope at the margins of life
What might the good life amount to at the margins of life? Taking our point of departure in Jonathan Lear's notions of ontological breakdown and radical hope as well as the phenomenology of lived time, we explore hope within the institutional aging process in Denmark. Drawing on two ethnographic cases, Vagn and Thea, we propose a phenomenological and responsive hope emerging within complex temporalities. This is a relational hope to be included a…
Autism and The Ethics of Care: A Phenomenological Investigation Into the Contagion of Nothing
This article investigates the social contagion of autism from a phenomenological perspective. It asks: Can a phenomenological approach, rather than merely illustrating the typologies revealed by constructionist and political economic approaches,generate new categoriesbecause it insists on a different unit of analysis rooted in a first-person perspective? To answer this, the article contrasts a third-person account of autism as an epidemic of repr…
Uneasy Experiments in Radical Cultural Comparison: Gang Violence, Ethical Cultivation and Sade's Moral Universe
During a workshop at Aarhus University, participants were asked to carry out an anthropological experiment modelled upon an artistic one. The artistic experiment involved one filmmaker presenting a series of obstructions to another, in effect setting unfamiliar and even abhorrent artistic tasks. My obstruction involved drawing upon Marquis de Sade's writings to consider urban gang violence among the African Americans I have studied. This paper re…
Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life
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, i…
The concept of therapeutic 'emplotment
Two virtue ethics and the anthropology of morality
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…
The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality
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 account…
Oncology and narrative time
Moral Selves and Moral Scenes: Narrative Experiments in Everyday Life
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 labora…
In Search of the Good: Narrative Reasoning in Clinical Practice
Based on ethnographic work among North American occupational therapists, I compare two forms of everyday clinical talk. One, ''chart talk," conforms to normative conceptions of clinical rationality. The second, storytelling, permeates clinical discussions but has no formal status as a vehicle for clinical reasoning. I argue that both modes of discourse provide avenues for reasoning about clinical problems. However, these discourses construct very…
Defrosting concepts, destabilizing doxa: Critical phenomenology and the perplexing particular
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, …
The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland
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 phenomenolo…
Reading Minds and Telling Tales in a Cultural Borderland
In this article I consider "narrative mind reading," the practical capability of inferring the motives that precipitate and underlie the actions of others. Following Jerome Bruner, I argue that this everyday capacity depends on our ability to place action within unfolding narrative contexts. While Bruner has focused on narrative mind reading as a within-culture affair, I look to border situations that cross race and class lines where there is a s…
Autism and The Ethics of Care: A Phenomenological Investigation Into the Contagion of Nothing
This article investigates the social contagion of autism from a phenomenological perspective. It asks: Can a phenomenological approach, rather than merely illustrating the typologies revealed by constructionist and political economic approaches,generate new categoriesbecause it insists on a different unit of analysis rooted in a first-person perspective? To answer this, the article contrasts a third-person account of autism as an epidemic of repr…
The Moral Perils of a Superstrong Black Mother
Investigations into clinical communication and interaction have provided an avenue for a Foucauldian-style analysis of how subject positions are produced in clinical settings through various practices of moral subjugation, often drawing upon such concepts as biopower and biosociality. I take an alternative approach. In exploring the moral vulnerabilities of coming to inhabit a particular subject position, I build upon a first person neo-Aristotel…
Toward a new humanism: An approach from philosophical anthropology
In this introduction to the special section, we revisit the case of humanism, including some challenges to its outworn and problematic metaphysical assumptions. We suggest that a new kind of humanism is demanded despite the many calls that humanism, of any form, should be jettisoned. The new humanism we propose rests on an ethnographically based philosophical anthropology which keeps in mind its reference to humankind while acknowledging the inde…
The Fragility of Healing
This article explores a paradox-the simultaneous cultivation and suppression of "healing dramas" by pediatric rehabilitation therapists. Dramatic moments are defined as ones in which the routine exercises and treatment activities of therapeutic practice are transformed into narrative plots. These improvisational plots involve multiple characters, risks, suspense, and above all, a heightened sense that something is at stake. Experience itself beco…
Introduction: Diverse Rationalities and Multiple Realities in Illness and Healing
Ordinary possibility, transcendent immanence, and responsive ethics: A philosophical anthropology of the small event
Based upon long-term fieldwork among African American families in Los Angeles, this article offers a phenomenological investigation of the indeterminate structures of ethical experience. Drawing upon Waldenfels' responsive phenomenology in the context of one particular family, it explores the way ordinary life serves as a crucial, indeed privileged space in which to investigate ethical possibility. The ethnographic material is not intended to fil…
Bruner's Search for Meaning: A Conversation between Psychology and Anthropology
We introduce a special issue of Ethos devoted to the work of Jerome Bruner and his careerlong attempts to seek innovative ways to foster a dialogue between psychology and anthropology. The articles in this special issue situate Bruner's meaning-centered approach to psychology and his groundbreaking work on narrative in the broader context of the developmental trajectory of both of fields of inquiry. Bruner's work has been enormously influential i…
Pocahontas Goes to the Clinic: Popular Culture as Lingua Franca in a Cultural Borderland
Urban hospitals constitute an example of what is arguably the most visible site in anthropology these days-the border zone. Negotiating health care requires trafficking in tricky spaces where patients and their families must pay vigilant attention about when to submit, when to resist, and how to collaborate. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out over the past nine years among African American families who have children with severe illnes…
Narrating September 11: Race, Gender, and the Play of Cultural Identities
This article considers the September 11 tragedy as an event that has created a powerful experience—an astonishing and unthinkable "breach" from the expected and routine—that has riveted the American public and provoked personal storytelling. September 11 and its aftermath have provided an occasion for rethinking and reworking cultural identity. We explore how September 11 and subsequent events have been experienced, constructed, and narrated by A…
In search of the good old life: Ontological breakdown and responsive hope at the margins of life
What might the good life amount to at the margins of life? Taking our point of departure in Jonathan Lear's notions of ontological breakdown and radical hope as well as the phenomenology of lived time, we explore hope within the institutional aging process in Denmark. Drawing on two ethnographic cases, Vagn and Thea, we propose a phenomenological and responsive hope emerging within complex temporalities. This is a relational hope to be included a…
Toward a vulnerable ethics of research practice
This article considers ethical dilemmas concerning the protection of confidentiality that often arise in carrying out ethnographic research. A number of problematic assumptions are highlighted that generally (implicitly or explicitly) guide the practice of contemporary research ethics review committees: (1) ethical rules are context free; (2) there is always an ethical 'right answer'; (3) there is an objective position from which to judge what on…
Moral deliberation and the agentive self in Laidlaw's ethics
Comment on LAIDLAW, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Anthropology Bright and Dark: Relativism, Value Pluralism, and the Comparative Study of the Good
In "Dark Anthropology," Sherry Ortner questions the critical potential of anthropological studies of ethics, and particularly of research focused on studying cultural articulations of the good. She promotes instead the study of people's critiques of the neoliberal darkness that besets their lives. Suggesting that critical, dark anthropology is handicapped by opposing itself to the study of the good, I reconsider the critical potential of the anth…
Waiting
Waiting is one obvious form of anticipation. This article considers waiting for death. Drea, a mother whose five-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a virulent form of brain cancer, experiences a shifting anticipatory terrain as death looms large. Calling upon phenomenology, I ask two primary kinds of questions that connect time, narrative and relationality in considering Drea's experience of waiting. First, I ask what Drea is waiting for and wh…
Critical Phenomenology and Mental Health: Moral Experience under Extraordinary Conditions
Oncology and narrative time
The concept of therapeutic 'emplotment
Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience
There is a growing interest in 'therapeutic narratives' and the relation between narrative and healing. Cheryl Mattingly's ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital investigates the complex interconnections between narrative and experience in clinical work. Viewing the world of disability as a socially constructed experience, it presents fascinatingly detailed case studies of clinical interactions between oc…
In Search of the Good: Narrative Reasoning in Clinical Practice
Based on ethnographic work among North American occupational therapists, I compare two forms of everyday clinical talk. One, ''chart talk," conforms to normative conceptions of clinical rationality. The second, storytelling, permeates clinical discussions but has no formal status as a vehicle for clinical reasoning. I argue that both modes of discourse provide avenues for reasoning about clinical problems. However, these discourses construct very…
Introduction: Diverse Rationalities and Multiple Realities in Illness and Healing
Time, Narrative, and Cultural Action
Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality. Charles L. Briggs. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 302 pp
Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, 2001
Anthropology Award Winners: Winner Announced for Turner Prize
The Fragility of Healing
This article explores a paradox-the simultaneous cultivation and suppression of "healing dramas" by pediatric rehabilitation therapists. Dramatic moments are defined as ones in which the routine exercises and treatment activities of therapeutic practice are transformed into narrative plots. These improvisational plots involve multiple characters, risks, suspense, and above all, a heightened sense that something is at stake. Experience itself beco…
Narrating September 11: Race, Gender, and the Play of Cultural Identities
This article considers the September 11 tragedy as an event that has created a powerful experience—an astonishing and unthinkable "breach" from the expected and routine—that has riveted the American public and provoked personal storytelling. September 11 and its aftermath have provided an occasion for rethinking and reworking cultural identity. We explore how September 11 and subsequent events have been experienced, constructed, and narrated by A…
Introduction: Toward a Context-Based Ethics for Social Research in Health
The idea for this Special Issue was born over dinner in a Greek restaurant. It was 2001 and each of us had just presented our work at a conference on narrative-based medicine in Cambridge, UK, sponsored by the BMJ. Although different issues were raised from the audience about our respective papers and others at the conference, many seemed to turn on particular questions: Were informed consent procedures followed properly? Were they sufficient to …
Toward a vulnerable ethics of research practice
This article considers ethical dilemmas concerning the protection of confidentiality that often arise in carrying out ethnographic research. A number of problematic assumptions are highlighted that generally (implicitly or explicitly) guide the practice of contemporary research ethics review committees: (1) ethical rules are context free; (2) there is always an ethical 'right answer'; (3) there is an objective position from which to judge what on…
Reading Medicine: Mind, Body, and Meditation in One Interpretive Community
This essay challenges the common conception that biomedicine operates by separating the mind from the body, and by attending to the biological rather than spiritual. In actual practice, there are practical and strategic concerns that bring the spiritual into play. This is because, at least in the case of chronic illnesses, clinicians cannot simply fix bodies; they must create partnerships with patients and family caregivers who also assume respon…
Pocahontas Goes to the Clinic: Popular Culture as Lingua Franca in a Cultural Borderland
Urban hospitals constitute an example of what is arguably the most visible site in anthropology these days-the border zone. Negotiating health care requires trafficking in tricky spaces where patients and their families must pay vigilant attention about when to submit, when to resist, and how to collaborate. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out over the past nine years among African American families who have children with severe illnes…
Reading Minds and Telling Tales in a Cultural Borderland
In this article I consider "narrative mind reading," the practical capability of inferring the motives that precipitate and underlie the actions of others. Following Jerome Bruner, I argue that this everyday capacity depends on our ability to place action within unfolding narrative contexts. While Bruner has focused on narrative mind reading as a within-culture affair, I look to border situations that cross race and class lines where there is a s…
Bruner's Search for Meaning: A Conversation between Psychology and Anthropology
We introduce a special issue of Ethos devoted to the work of Jerome Bruner and his careerlong attempts to seek innovative ways to foster a dialogue between psychology and anthropology. The articles in this special issue situate Bruner's meaning-centered approach to psychology and his groundbreaking work on narrative in the broader context of the developmental trajectory of both of fields of inquiry. Bruner's work has been enormously influential i…
The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland
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 phenomenolo…
I/We Narratives Among African American Families Raising Children with Special Needs
Chronic Homework in Emerging Borderlands of Healthcare
Illness and the Limits of Expression by Kathlyn Conway: Book Reviews
Two virtue ethics and the anthropology of morality
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…
Moral Selves and Moral Scenes: Narrative Experiments in Everyday Life
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 labora…
Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life
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, i…
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 2…
Moral deliberation and the agentive self in Laidlaw's ethics
Comment on LAIDLAW, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Sociology (39 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Political science (17 works) · Anthropology (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Narrative (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 works)