The introduction explains the setting of the ethnography at the intersections of law, NGOs, the Indian state, and the global anti-trafficking regime. It explains the sequence of interventions the book will follow, from rescues to courts to shelters, prescribed by Indian law and implemented by legal actors and NGOs. It lays out the sites and processes the book will explore through encounters between those implementing these interventions, and those experiencing them. It outlines the book’s central aims: how it uses the intersections of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions as points of entry to foreground how sex workers navigate them, critique the prevalent assumptions and preferred solutions of the global anti-trafficking regime, and explore the complex relationship between law and NGOs in India. It discusses the broader concerns and approaches these interventions bring to the governance of prostitution – global humanitarianism, policing and criminal justice, the paternalism of the Indian state and NGOs, neoliberal women’s empowerment programs, and an anti-immigrant sociopolitical climate. The introduction also explains the author’s methods, research design, and positionality, and the organization of the book.

This multisited ethnography is not about sex work or sex trafficking, or even about anti-trafficking campaigns alone. Instead, as an anthropologist of law, NGOs, and the Indian state, the author situates the governance of prostitution in the broader Indian sociolegal and global humanitarian contexts. The book illuminates how Indian law and global anti-trafficking campaigns come together to govern prostitution, combining humanitarianism, paternalism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality. It explores the consequences of US-funded anti-trafficking campaigns operating alongside India’s existing legal framework against prostitution, and highlights the significant role NGOs play in suturing and implementing both kinds of interventions. At the same time, the book tracks how women removed from the sex trade – some of whom were trafficked and others voluntary sex workers – navigate these overlapping interventions. The title Immoral Traffic comes from India’s anti-prostitution law, which donor-driven NGOs draw upon to implement their anti-trafficking agenda. This law’s provisions and procedures to “manage” prostitution, and NGOs’ efforts to deploy and extend them, feature centrally throughout the book. Immoral Traffic takes the reader along the sequence of interventions this law prescribes and sex workers experience, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters.

This autobiographical fragment begins in a working-class high school and traces a career trajectory shaped by the world I grew up in and the world I entered. As a White woman from an American working-class background, I was an uneasy fit for the academy, circa 1979. I experienced obstacles and intellectual pleasures. I found many fascinating topics to study (e.g., class and cultural variation in early narrative) and many fascinating colleagues and students to work with. The outsider/insider position I occupied offered novel vantage points on the what, who, and how of developmental inquiry and on its telling omissions. My story of marginalization intersected with a historical moment when developmental psychology began to reckon with its narrowness and ethnocentrism. Thanks to the efforts of many developmental scholars, the field is now headed in a more context-sensitive and pluralistic direction while still contending with entrenched deficit discourses and other blind spots.

Ann Cunliffe proposes some key considerations and a stimulating reflection on the connection between ethnography and the study of practice. She argues that ethnography is particularly suited forstrategy as practice research because of its focus on the rich description of the micro-practices of organizational life. Based on relevant ethnographic studies that are illustrative and may be of interest for strategy as practice researchers, she explains how it is possible to better understand new or unanticipated processes and practices that are at the core of strategy-making. Nevertheless, she urges strategy as practice researchers to embrace more deeply a subjectivist or intersubjective view when adopting an ethnographic methodology in order to offer new insights into the relational and reflexive nature of strategizing as an emergent and lived experience. Yet, doing so raises a number of important questions: What philosophical assumptions underpin the ethnographer’s work? How do these influence the methods used, the form of analysis and the theorizing? How does the researcher position her/himself in the research? How does an ethnographer write a convincing research account?

Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

The authors have used video diaries extensively in corporate ethnography and have found them to be an essential tool in the collection of observational data in health care and consumer research. Drawing on their experience, the chapter explores video diaries’ practical uses in ethnographic research, detailing their strengths and weaknesses in the types of research questions they can help answer and the kinds of data they produce. The chapter also serves as a guide to incorporating video diaries into ethnographic and qualitative research, offering practical advice on topics including video diary guides, communication strategies with participants, and the advantages and disadvantages of mobile phone diaries versus free-standing camcorder diaries.

This chapter seeks to advance the debate on digital research methods beyond the opposition between ‘face to face’ or online ethnography. Our focus will be on the practical experience of doing online ethnography, alongside how traditional and online ethnography can be integrated through the ideal of ‘being there’ i.e., direct observation. Christine Hine (2016: 257) notes that “the study of Internet interactions became popular in the 1990s.” We explore what is understood as authentic ethnography between the online and the offline through critically observing what is comfortable and uncomfortable in both worlds to argue that as a method and theory ethnography adapts.

This chapter introduces my research questions, framework, and main findings. It begins with two striking vignettes to engage the readers and outline the significance of the two basic questions that motivate this book and intersect at children's social cognition: How do humans learn morality? How do we make sense of fieldnotes? The chapter situates the book in intellectual history, including the Wolfs’ original research, its connections to the Six Cultures Study, and its legacies. It then presents a new framework of cognitive anthropology distinctive from the behaviorist paradigm that motivated the original research. I situate the book in three broad streams of discussions: (1) theoretical conversations between anthropology and psychology on morality; (2) cross-cultural research on childhood learning; (3) studies of Chinese kinship, families, and childhood. I explain why it is important to study children to understand morality, human relatedness, and cultural transmission. I also make the case for reanalyzing historical fieldnotes. I then lay out a methodology that incorporates computational approaches into ethnography, summarize my main arguments, and outline the book structure.

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.