What kind of book might you write if you were offered access to the archive of fieldnotes serving as the basis for a book by an advisor or senior colleague? Many anthropologists of education have encountered related examples such as students' reconstruction of lectures for Ferdinand de Saussure's foundational text, Course in General Linguistics, or the much more recent posthumous Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber. Jing Xu's “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village is based on a different source: thousands of pages of systematic observations, interviews, projective tests, and demographic information collected by Arthur and Margery Wolf and three research assistants in the village of Xia Xizhou over two years from 1958 to 1960. In the summer of 2018, following Arthur Wolf's death, a colleague known by Wolf's second wife, who also knew Xu's work on moral development in a Shanghai preschool, approached Xu about reviewing the archive for potential scholarly use. “Unruly” Children is an innovative, meticulously analyzed and compellingly crafted form of salvage ethnography that pushes anthropologists of education to think about the use of tools from the digital humanities alongside our direct “lived” experiences from participant observation and fieldwork. It calls for the field of anthropology as a whole to take more seriously the perspective of children in how we become moral persons. The book itself consists of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. It opens with a foreword by a former student of Arthur Wolf's, Stevan Harrell, and closes with an afterword by anthropologist Hill Gates, Wolf's widow. The introduction opens with a pair of ethnographic vignettes reproduced in impressive detail about two girls, and then two boys, negotiating how to divide an orange. The author lingers to consider interpretations of these scenes from adult versus child perspectives before she introduces two main themes of the book. The first concerns how “children acquire moral motivations and sensibilities” (3). Xu argues that Han Chinese societies are “particularly interesting places to study how children become moral persons” (4) because of a long concern with moral cultivation in Chinese philosophy and a long tradition of scholarship on Han Chinese family structure that has privileged vertical relations over horizontal. The second main theme explores the nature of fieldnotes from two different sides: “from the making of fieldnotes through ethnographic encounters with children to reconstructing an ethnography of children through making sense of historical fieldnotes” (4). Xu situates the Wolf Archive in the Wolfs' original objective of contributing a Chinese case to the Six Cultures of Socialization study launched earlier in the 1950s by a pair of anthropologists and a pair of psychologists. Here and elsewhere Xu notes her previous training in cognitive anthropology and developmental psychology, as well as previous scholarship on moral development in a Chinese preschool, that she brings to the task of breathing new life into old notes. Further into the introduction the author outlines what types of data from the archive form the core of the book, particularly the timed observations of children's interactions. Xu notes how limitations on earlier processing capacity were one significant reason that Arthur and Margery Wolf each ended up limiting their use of the data. Xu and research assistants digitized notes to facilitate larger scale data analysis. That analysis included computational and machine-learning approaches to textual data, particularly topic modeling, as well as social network analysis. Xu comments on how she used insights from these tools to compare findings from a range of other more traditional ethnographic sources of data analysis. Chapter 1 is a carefully crafted introduction to the village and the ethnographer(s)’ positionalities in this milieu. Chapter two introduces us in more detail to themes of parenting, disobedience, and punishment that emerge from the notes. Chapter three takes the reader into different scenes of play to explore how morality is learned through peer interactions, and chapter four follows with a closer look at the role of gender. Chapter five offers a more detailed portrait of a sibling dyad. The Epilogue recapitulates different themes and key moments in the book, offering a plea that children be taken more seriously in anthropological research. Figures including photos and drawings, as well as tables, appear regularly as useful forms or representations of data. This “polyvocal” (221) monograph reads remarkably as if it were written from the author's own fieldwork. Xu's constant interrogation of the notes from the different angles of digital analysis, comparison with each of the Wolfs' published works, and Xu's own previous research in China and experiences as a parent submit passages of recorded observations and interactions to thoughtful interrogation. The fluidity with which Xu has given voice to the formidable and largely unpublished Wolf Archive is breathtaking, and the book serves very well as a tribute to the legacy of the Wolfs' work. This reader enjoyed reading the book out of curiosity regarding how Xu might use digital tools, particularly topic modeling, alongside traditional ethnographic analysis. Some readers might find Xu's broad claim about anthropology's relative neglect of children, particularly why this might be the case, to beg a bit more discussion. Past CAE president Norma González has made this point in several places more recently than a main source (over twenty years old) Xu cites twice on this tendency: the field is of course not the same as twenty years ago, and perhaps reasons have shifted. There are also some ghosts of fieldwork past for our field's ongoing discussions, namely how anthropologists have come to address informed consent and future uses of fieldnotes that were generated at the time of different protocols. Xu's access to the notes allowed her to track down some of the child villagers, quite a few of whom participated in scenes of anger or physical punishment (a subject of recent AEQ articles by Chandras on India and Wilson and Wilson on Ghana), and interview them as adults. From what Xu reports about her contact with them, they do not seem to have minded the unexpected new additional researcher unexpectedly bringing up that older research. As with any review of a protocol, there is of course a degree of risk to be considered as well as the potential benefits of the research. This reader finds that the benefits of this provocative and very fruitful polyvocal ethnography outweigh the risks. “Unruly” Children offers a very timely stretch of our methodological imagination.
Jonathan L. Larson (Fri,) studied this question.
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