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Five - Care and Rivalry

An Untold Tale of a Sibling Dyad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2024

Jing Xu
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Summary

Abstract: Chapter 5 presents an untold tale of an older brother and his younger sister. While their mother was the protagonist in Wolf’s classic ethnography, "A Thrice-told-Tale," the story of these children was obscured. Childhood sibling relation in “the Chinese family” was rarely studied by anthropologists, yet it is an important relation that shapes children’s moral development and family dynamics. I present systematic patterns of this sibling dyad’s social network positioning, uncover their distinct personalities, and trace their nuanced dynamics of care, rivalry and coalitional maneuvers. I closely examine projective tests data to reveal children's own emotional experience in and perspectives about their family life. This chapter is a unique narrative: in addition to illuminating childhood sibling relation, it simultaneously rediscovers the voices of these two children from ethnographic omissions and silences. Therefore, this case study echoes the dual themes of the entire book, children learning morality and anthropologists reconstructing an ethnography.

Type
Chapter
Information
‘Unruly’ Children
Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village
, pp. 176 - 211
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Care and Rivalry
  • Jing Xu, University of Washington
  • Book: ‘Unruly’ Children
  • Online publication: 31 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009416269.008
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  • Care and Rivalry
  • Jing Xu, University of Washington
  • Book: ‘Unruly’ Children
  • Online publication: 31 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009416269.008
Available formats
×

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.

  • Care and Rivalry
  • Jing Xu, University of Washington
  • Book: ‘Unruly’ Children
  • Online publication: 31 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009416269.008
Available formats
×