How do humans become moral persons? While we tend to emphasize how parents shape the moral personhood of youngsters, what about children’s active learning, especially learning with and from peers? What can children teach us about the nature of ethnography, and about learning and knowledge-making more broadly? My book examines these questions through a unique re-interpretation of historical fieldnotes from the first-ever anthropological study of ethnic Han children, using an innovative human-machine hybrid approach that combines ethnographic interpretation, behavioral coding, SNA (social-network-analysis), and NLP (natural-language-processing) techniques including large-language-models (LLMs). These unpublished fieldnotes were collected by the late anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in Taiwan from 1958-1960, at the height of the Martial-Law era. Their original research was intended as an improved replication of the Six Cultures Study of Child Socialization, a landmark project in the history of anthropology of childhood.

The title “‘Unruly’ Children” captures the main message of the book: Integrating interviews, naturalistic observations, and psychological tests from this rare archive, I tell stories of disobedient children defying parental commands, negotiating with siblings and peers and creating their own rules through moral dramas and games. These findings challenge the tropes of “obedience” and “innocence” prevalent in scholarly and public discourses about Asian children. Moreover, writing through and about fieldnotes, I connect the book’s two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of children’s social cognition, and urge anthropologists (or perhaps all adults) to take children seriously. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of re-interpreting a rare archive of fieldnotes brought me magical encounters with time and temporality, when “the ethnographic past comes to the ethnographic present via technologies of the future,” to quote a poetic comment I received from a kind colleague.

Find Xu’s book here

Recent podcast/interview with the author

Back to Top of Page