Anthropologist Arthur Wolf died in 2015, fifty-seven years after he and his then wife Margery Wolf had arrived in the north Taiwan village of Xia Xizhou to begin field research on the lives of children there. They stayed two years, collecting a huge trove of descriptive and quantitative data, including timed observations of child behavior, projective tests, parent interviews, and school questionnaires, all recorded on paper in that predigital age. Then those data sat. Margery Wolf clearly drew on some of the fieldnotes, although only a small part, for the three books she wrote based on that stay, and Arthur used some of them as background for his doctoral dissertation and his later research on the incest taboo. In his final years, Arthur returned to these data, beginning to digitize and analyze some of them, but he did not live to complete his analysis.
After Arthur died, his widow Hill Gates approached me asking if I could suggest a scholar who might make use of the data from the Wolfs’ stay in Xia Xizhou. As it happened, I knew the perfect person: XU Jing had recently arrived at the University of Washington as a postdoctoral researcher studying social cognition in American infants and toddlers. A native of Hunan in central China, XU Jing had never been to Taiwan, but she was a native speaker of Chinese, the mother of a young son, and the author of a recent book on moral development in a Shanghai preschool. She also, like Arthur, combined insights from psychology and anthropology and was not afraid of supplementing ethnographic observation with quantitative analysis. I recommended her to Hill, who cautiously agreed to consider XU Jing for the job.
Arthur had built his dream house – mostly out of locally sourced lumber and with his own hands – on his family’s ranch in the hills of Sonoma County, but he succumbed to prostate cancer before he could enjoy retirement there. The house became a library, data repository, and workspace for scholars interested in Arthur’s legacy, and Hill invited XU Jing to visit in 2018 and look through the materials. Passing the five-day “probation,” XU Jing came away with the trove. She quickly set to work analyzing, with the help of research assistants, data science consultants, and a few people, now old, who had participated in the Wolfs’ original research.
The result is “Unruly” Children, a unique and valuable book that addresses important issues, both substantive and methodological, for ethnography, Taiwan studies, family dynamics, and most importantly the anthropology of childhood. How does an anthropologist who has never been to the place she writes about reconstruct the local world of six decades before? How would her account have been different if she instead of her predecessors had made the observations and written the notes? What did they put in that she would have left out, and vice versa? How does the child-centered approach of the Wolf archive give us different insights into of childhood and learning from the parent-oriented, “socialization” approach of most ethnographies of childhood? How did growing up under martial law imposed by a military dictatorship, a factor that the Wolf’s did not write about (perhaps to protect their research subjects) affect children’s experiences? How did children’s process of moral learning in the Taiwan of that day, when the typical woman bore five or more children who took care of each other and spent most of the day outside, differ from the experience of today’s single children who spend solitary hours in front of a screen? Finally, what might be universal in the experience of Xia Xizhou children of the 1950s, and how might analyzing the meticulous and detailed records of their everyday lives inform our understanding of how human children everywhere learn to be moral beings?
XU Jing addresses all these important questions and more. Although she cannot, nor can anyone else, offer definitive answers, her perceptive analysis and innovative methodology can refine our understanding and point the way forward for future ethnographers, psychologists, and historians of childhood. They also bring to life a world that is no more, adding history to psychology and anthropology as disciplines to which she has something important to say.
Delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, XU Jing was finally able to visit Xia Xizhou at the end of September 2023.
