Commentary: Questions from the Ground in Severe Mental Illness

Experimental Engagements with Ethnography, Moral Agency and Care

“…We found that exploring everyday 'moral laboratories'-the 'vantage points on familiar or prior ways of seeing, acting, believing that are actively brought into question' in terms of both 'moral tragedy' and 'hope and possibility' (Mattingly 2014, 150)-helped us explore the ways in which ethnographers can both uncover the ethical stakes of clinical encounters, as well as become moral agents themselves while in the field. The conceptual and practical labour of the individual ethnographer, we argue, constitutes efforts to describe, and also produces essential forms of personhood, relation, and moral obligation, making the ethical grounds of clinical and therapeutic encounters visible from the position of practitioners, patients, and social scientists alike (Bromley 2019). These claims unfold in a series of pieces, which includes work from clinician-anthropologists as well as medical and psychological anthropologists, in the form of two original research articles and four shorter ethnographic pieces centred around shared themes.…”