“Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan

How do humans become moral persons? What about children's active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? My book explores these questions through re-discovering the late anthropologist Arthur Wolf’s unpublished fieldnotes collected in Taiwan (1958-1960). Designed as an improved replication of the Six Cultures Study of Socialization (SCS), a landmark project in the history of anthropology of childhood, Wolf’s project was the first systematic, ethnographic research on ethnic Han children. I analyzed this rare archive of fieldnotes, including interviews, natural observations and psychological tests, from a cognitive anthropology approach distinguished from SCS’ behaviorist paradigm. I used an innovative human-machine hybrid methodology combining ethnographic interpretation, behavioral coding, NLP (natural-language-processing) techniques, and SNA (social-network-analysis). My book unravels the complexities of children's moral development, exposing instances of disobedience, negotiation, and peer dynamics, in contrast to popular tropes in scholarly and public discourses about “the traditional Chinese family.” Writing through and about fieldnotes, I connect the two themes of the book, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and invites all of us to take children seriously.

About the speaker:

Jing Xu is an anthropologist based at the University of Washington, Seattle. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from Tsinghua University, China and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis (2014). She received postdoctoral training in developmental psychology at the University of Washington. She is the author of two monographs: (Stanford University Press, 2017) and (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She has published peer-reviewed articles, in English and Chinese, in venues spanning multiple disciplines, for example, American Anthropologist, Scientific Reports, Ethos, Feminist Anthropologist, Journal of Chinese History, Cross-Currents, Developmental Psychology, Child Development Perspectives, and Sociological Review of China. She is an Associate Editor of American Anthropologist.

Host or Publisher School of Social and Political Science