'Unruly' Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village

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.

我們如何成為道德人？相較於父母教養，孩子的主動學習又是什麼？孩子能教我們更廣泛的知識製造嗎？通過深入研究人類學家阿瑟和瑪格麗·沃爾夫在台灣戒嚴時期一個漢族村莊（1958-60）進行的開創性民族志田野調查，這是首次對漢族兒童進行的研究。徐靜巧妙地重新詮釋了沃爾夫夫婦的大量田野筆記，採用了人文解讀、自然語言處理和機器學習技術的獨特結合。通過社會認知的視角，本書揭示了兒童道德成長的複雜性，揭示了不服從、談判和同儕動態的情況。作者通過田野筆記寫作，將兩個主題，學習道德和製作民族志，與社會認知相結合，並邀請我們所有人認真對待孩子。這本書非常適合人類學和教育研究的研究生和本科生閱讀。