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Afterword

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2024

Jing Xu
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Summary

How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children’s learning morality teach us about ethnographic knowledge or any social knowledge? My book explores such questions via analyzing old fieldnotes collected by Arthur and Margery Wolf in a Taiwan village (1958–60) in Martial Law Era, before rapid economic growth, industrialization and urbanization. Born from the Six Cultures Study, a landmark project in cross-cultural research, the Wolfs’ fieldwork was the first ethnographic study on ethnic Han children. Bringing to light the rich texts of systematic observation, interview and projective tests, I combined ethnographic interpretation with NLP and machine learning techniques, behavioral coding and social network analysis. I explain how children defied parental commands and violated cultural precepts. I trace how they navigated cooperation, conflict and the gray areas in between, with complex moral sensibilities and gendered expressions, and highlight the role of peers and siblings. I connect the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and urge all of us to take children seriously.

Type
Chapter
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‘Unruly’ Children
Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village
, pp. 224 - 230
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Cited Sources

Blumberg, Mark S., Marques, Hugo Gravato, and Iida, Fumiya. 2013. “Twitching in Sensorimotor Development from Sleeping Rats to Robots.Current Biology 23: R532–R537.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroeber, A. L., and Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1952. Papers. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Harvard University 47 (1): viii, 223.Google Scholar
Luhrman, T. M. 2023. “Unravelling a Web: The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz, Fifty Years On.” The Times Literary Supplement, 6284 (September 8): 21. www.the-tls.co.uk/issues/september-8-2023/Google Scholar
Price, D. 2016. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual-Use Anthropology. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whiting, Beatrice B., ed. 1963. Six Cultures Studies of Child Rearing. Laboratory of Human Development, Harvard University. New York and London: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.Google Scholar
Wolf, Arthur, Seligo, Carlos, Gates, Hill, and Shu-juo, Chen, [陳叔倬]. 2017. Interview of Professor Arthur P. Wolf (1932–2015) on Stanford’s Human Biology Program. Minsu Quyi [民俗曲藝] Taipei: September: 11–38.Google Scholar

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  • Afterword
  • Jing Xu, University of Washington
  • Book: ‘Unruly’ Children
  • Online publication: 31 October 2024
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  • Afterword
  • Jing Xu, University of Washington
  • Book: ‘Unruly’ Children
  • Online publication: 31 October 2024
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Afterword
  • Jing Xu, University of Washington
  • Book: ‘Unruly’ Children
  • Online publication: 31 October 2024
Available formats
×