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.

‘A unique book where Jing Xu gains access to a vast collection of observations concerning children’s behavior in Taiwan. As a renowned specialist in childhood and morality, she is uniquely qualified to explore this treasure trove of evidence and document the historical and psychological processes that inform young children’s moral behavior.’

Pascal Boyer - Washington University in St. Louis

‘In Unruly Children Xu Jing masterfully takes on the formidable task of analyzing the voluminous Wolf Archive data. After digitizing the Archive and building a database, Xu used an array of techniques to analyze the textual data, including topic modeling and social network analysis. The richest data was found in the extended interaction sequences in the child observation episodes, and Xu artfully uses these peer play dramas to illustrate children's active role in constructing moral rules to guide and manipulate their play, deal with conflicts, and subvert parental control. Xu transcends older frameworks emphasizing the top-down perspectives of child-rearing and socialization to enter the sometimes rough and tumble world of children learning to cope with siblings, playmates, parents and neighbors. Unruly Children is a landmark work of anthropology, China studies, and child moral development.’

John R. Shepherd - University of Virginia

‘Through a careful and methodologically innovative analysis of the Wolf archives, Xu reconstructs the lives of children growing up in a Taiwanese village in the late 1950s. Xu’s book provides rich insights into their experiences and their social and moral development. Amid intense debates on open science and AI-assisted approaches, this work presents a landmark exploration of the value and limitations of both human and machine intelligence in anthropological knowledge production.’

Anni Kajanus - University of Helsinki