‘Unruly’ Children

Explore childhood morality in martial law era Taiwan. Discover how children's active learning shapes morality and parental dynamics.

Integrating humanistic interpretation with computational approaches, this book examines the 1958-1960 Taiwan fieldnotes of two renowned anthropologists. As the world's first ethnographic study on Han children, it sheds light on children's moral development amid historical upheaval. Ideal for anthropology and educational studies graduate courses.How do we become moral persons? What about children's active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? Answer these questions by delving into the groundbreaking ethnographic fieldwork conducted by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in a martial law era Taiwanese village (1958-60), marking the first-ever study of ethnic Han children. Jing Xu skillfully reinterprets the Wolfs' extensive fieldnotes, employing a unique blend of humanistic interpretation, natural language processing, and machine-learning techniques. Through a lens of social cognition, this book unravels the complexities of children's moral growth, exposing instances of disobedience, negotiation, and peer dynamics. Writing through and about fieldnotes, the author connects the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and invites all of us to take children seriously. This book is ideal for graduate and undergraduate students of anthropology and educational studies.