Offers an ethnography and a foray into the anthropology of morality. This book 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.
There is growing interest 'therapeutic narratives', stories which help to explain why people need to create stories with a specific narrative form. This ethnography of a hospital practice of occupational therapy describes how participants transform ordinary clinical interchange into a standardized story-line.
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.