Children “Playing Anthropologist”
All grown-ups were once children, and many do remember it. Decades later, the once “subjects” of Arthur Wolf’s research in Xia Xizhou had a chance to talk – to the anthropologist – about their experience in his 1958–60 fieldwork. Arthur Wolf revisited his first fieldsite in the 1990s, introducing an American graduate student, Maria Duryea, to conduct her dissertation research on social change and childrearing in this community. Arthur Wolf and Maria Duryea spoke to some participants in Wolf’s original research, children who had become adults. Although having no idea what “anthropology” or “fieldwork” was at that time, these grown-ups did remember Wolf’s team and the strange things the researchers were doing.
They recalled Older Sister Chen (MC) following them around with her notebook. In fact, Chen’s responsible and meticulous observations of children’s social life constituted the most important and systematic records I could use to reconstruct their stories. They recalled Wolf’s incessant typing (A. Wolf n.d.: 32) – they probably walked straight into the courtyard and gathered at the window to watch the “foreigners” doing their work.Footnote 1 In The House of Lim, Margery Wolf recorded a snapshot of this common scenario – being watched by the very “subjects” they were studying: “One afternoon he [the youngest boy in the Lim family] spent half an hour constructing a precarious pile of junk under our office window to provide a comfortable platform from which to observe us” (M. Wolf Reference Wolf1968: 96).
When the anthropologists were studying children, the children were studying anthropologists too. They even invented a game called “Di di da da” (A. Wolf n.d.: 32). They were, essentially, “playing anthropologist”: “To this day [1990s], people tell stories of the children sitting out in the courtyard ‘playing anthropologist’, ticking away at an imaginary typewriter and shuffling an imaginary carriage back and forth, but the stories never mentioned the children asking endless, redundant questions” (Duryea 1997: 13).
Browsing the Wolf Archive, comparing what was stored in the archive – “the raw data” – and what was recalled, synthesized, and written later in all sorts of voices related to this research, I kept coming back to this scenario: Children observing, making sense of, and even mimicking what the anthropologists were doing. This scenario speaks to the fundamentally dialogic, intersubjective, and somewhat messy nature of fieldwork. It also echoes back to a central question motivating my rereading of the Wolf Archive: What children are and how they learn. Fieldwork, and the anthropological knowledge it produces, always builds from and through relationships between multiple actors. Different actors bring their own experience, curiosity, and positionality into ethnographic encounters. Such encounters always have some contingent elements and tend to leave puzzles.
In particular, children bring quite surprising social dramas of ethnographic encounters, in interesting or annoying ways. Children, due to their social positioning, warn us the extent to which adult researchers’ fieldwork can be immersive, both pragmatically and ethically (Allerton Reference Allerton2016): “Children not only share their experiences with anthropologists, but they also speak back to them, alternately suspicious and trusting, transgressive of social boundaries, critical of and cooperative with the researcher” (Borneman Reference Borneman and Allerton2016: ix). At the epistemological level, children are the world’s most exceptional social learners. They are natural observers with a keen eye for social knowledge. Therefore, ethnography with and of children poses some unique challenges and opportunities for anthropological knowledge production.
Notably, reconstructing this ethnography of children is rendered more challenging and interesting because of the various intermediate actors in the original fieldwork. Recovering the voices of these intermediaries and highlighting the collaborative nature of anthropological knowledge-making has become an important concern in our discipline’s reckoning with the past (Gupta and Stoolman Reference Gupta and Stoolman2022). The intermediate actors in Arthur Wolf’s fieldwork, his research assistants with local background, played a critical role in producing the fieldnotes. Not only serving as interpreters, more importantly, they were the ones, for the most part, directly and constantly engaged with the village children. Arthur Wolf was the team leader who designed the study protocols and supervised the entire fieldwork, while research assistants dutifully observed or interviewed children and their mothers, took notes in Chinese, and then reported to the Wolfs verbally, most often in English but sometimes in Mandarin; Margery Wolf was, in her own words, “administrator and scribe, spending long hours typing [in English] … verbatim accounts of observations as they were brought in by the field staff [the research assistants’ dictation]” (M. Wolf 1990: 344). This unique set of fieldnotes originated from various types of labor, wove together different voices, and reflects layers of translation.
Moreover, a different anthropologist later coming to reanalyze these fieldnotes would add “yet another level of complexity in our search for meaning,” as Margery Wolf foresaw in her reflections on this fieldwork (1990: 353). A stranger to these children and their researchers, my work inevitably complicates the already massive, polyvocal ethnographic project. Reading through these fieldnotes and related records time and again, I wish I had been there to witness the lively moments of fieldwork, to know these children in person. I fantasized about sci-fi time-travel scenarios. I had dreams about the village and its children. This project became an existential challenge for me as an anthropologist, as I lacked the kind of first-person experience, or “presence” in the fieldwork. I asked myself a million times: Is my attempt to reconstruct an ethnography of Xia Xizhou children doomed to fail?
But I was encouraged by my predecessor’s own vision about the fate of these fieldnotes:
However flawed, fieldnotes are not ephemeral but documents that record one mind’s attempt to come to understand the behavior of fellow beings. One day – fly specks, bacterial infection, and all – they must be part of the public record so that species should survive or be followed by some other postnuclear being cursed with curiosity, the fieldnotes can be reexamined for what they are: our feeble attempts at communication with one another.
With children as a special kind of interlocutors, this project therefore prompts me to rethink the nature of fieldnotes, ethnography and what it means by “knowing.” Since ethnography is always approaching some partial truth, let me take a step back and reframe my question: What sort of agency can I exert and what affordances of this archive can I utilize to make sense of these historical texts? The bottom line is, although written without first-hand fieldwork, this book does emerge from my experience of rediscovering the Wolf Archive. It emerges from overlaying my own vision onto what my predecessors wanted to see and what the research assistants saw, from blending my own voice with the multiple voices recorded and/or obscured in those layered texts, and from piecing together one puzzle after another. This chapter presents an account of one mind’s journey of meeting and attempting to communicate with other minds: my unconventional “fieldwork” about my predecessors’ original fieldwork; my efforts, through different epistemological lenses and methodological tools, to give new life to old fieldnotes.
Tracing My Predecessors’ Footsteps: The Village and Its Children
During my special “fieldwork,” I kept a journal to document important moments of confusion and revelation, my various attempts at time travel or bits of detective work, in the process of figuring out what had happened in my predecessors’ fieldwork. On January 20, Reference Yan2021, I added this entry about what I dreamt the night before, me visiting a village that no longer existed.
Don’t know why I had such a dream with an absurd plot (an emoji of embarrassment). I finally got to see this village that I had scrutinized on Google Maps to locate the river and the elementary school. A village whose houses, big and small, I had imagined for many times. I walked on the path towards the village and saw the largest house at the entrance, “the House of Lim”, but somehow I did not find the big Banyan tree next to that house. Not far away I saw the village temple (tudigong), but it was burned down, and what remained was some kind of relic. There were people still living in the largest house. I started chatting with them. One moment it was “oral history”, me talking to adults about their childhood. The next moment the adults became children and I was interviewing them! One child told me: “Our ancestors came from Hunan [a province in China, where I grew up].” That perplexed me: “Wait a second. Weren’t they from Anxi, Fujian province?” And that thought woke me up from the dream
I was obsessed with the village map those days, trying to recreate an image on my computer from a pencil-drawn map Arthur created and preserved in the archive. The house-number system Arthur used was completely different from the one on the village map in Margery Wolf’s “Women and Family in Rural Taiwan” (M. Wolf Reference Wolf1972: 44). But I also had to rely on Margery’s books to figure out which household had what general stories and double-check some details as part of my detective work, because Arthur himself did not write a village ethnography. I managed to produce an e-version of Arthur’s village map (Figure 1.1), imagining children playing in the various yards or gardens. My dream about revisiting the village, as absurd as it was, is a reminder that one inevitably inserts oneself into the story, consciously or not, while tracing other people’s footsteps.
Figure 1.1 Village sketch map.
On June 15, 1958, Arthur Wolf, then an anthropology graduate student from Cornell University, arrived at his fieldsite. He first hopped on a train from Taipei to a town called Shulin – the pseudonym of which was “Ta-pu” in Margery Wolf’s works. From the train station, along the east side of the town center square, he walked to a busy commercial street, then along an irrigation canal constructed by the Japanese colonial regime, down an alley on the right, then across a small bridge at the edge of the town, and finally, on a path into the countryside. As he remembered, “all this (buzzing town-style) activity gave way, abruptly, to a quiet rural landscape. The stained red brick and tile of the town was replaced by the bright green, of paddy fields, vegetable gardens, bamboo grooves, and great spreading banyan trees” (A. Wolf n.d.: 6). Walking another quarter mile down the path, he arrived at the Shalun Elementary School – where children in the village ahead studied. The village, Xia Xizhou, appeared a quarter mile ahead, along the path and beyond the school (Figures 1.2 and 1.3).
Figure 1.2 Children playing at the irrigation canal in Shulin.
Figure 1.3 Village houses and paddy fields.
Decades later, Arthur recalled his first sight of the farmhouse he lived in for over two years: “Here, on the left-hand side of the path, stood the great banyan tree pictured on the cover of Margery Wolf’s The House of Lim, and, on the right-hand side of the path, the home of the Lim family, the largest and finest in the village” (A. Wolf n.d.: 6). The real surname of this Lim (Lin) family is Wang, and the Wang lineage is the main one in the village. Arthur rented some space in this Wang house, joined by Margery Wolf later that year. Arthur lived with this Wang family until late 1960, in a house with fourteen regular members and another fifteen who were in and out of it every day (M. Wolf 1990: 346). They witnessed all kinds of Wang family dramas and even frequently attempted to mediate the quarrels (quan jia) (Chou Reference Chou2011). Once settled in the village, Arthur Wolf’s first task was to reconstruct its history. He gained in-depth knowledge about this area from two key informants who were connected to this village but living in the nearby Shulin town: Wang ShiqingFootnote 2 and his mother Ms. Lai. One day an old gentleman in the village was exasperated by the anthropologist’s questions about history. He suggested that Arthur go talk to a member of the Wang lineage, a man who “knows all about such things” (A. Wolf n.d.: 40). That’s how Arthur came to know Mr. Wang, who later became a very well-known historian of Taiwan. Arthur often walked to Shulin town to meet with Wang, and he appreciated that Mr. Wang had taught him “what amounted to a year-long course on Taiwanese customs and the history of Taiwanese society” (p. 41). From this fieldwork, they two established a life-long friendship. Wang visited Stanford (1970–71) and taught Arthur and his research collaborator Huang Jieshan (Chieh-Shan) how to use the Japanese colonial household and land registers.Footnote 3
On a hot and humid day in late September 2023, guided by Mr. Wong Min-Liang, Wang Shiqing’s son, I visited Xia Xizhou for the first time, on the same exact route that Arthur took. We took the train from Taipei to Shulin town, walked along a bustling old street, amid newer streets later built during the industrialization era. The irrigation canal was long covered by concrete surface, the bridge marking the boundary between Shulin and Xizhou was replaced by a new street sign, and the big Banyan tree at the entrance to the village was gone. Most of the old houses were replaced by new ones and villagers had long moved into apartment buildings. But the Wang house that the Wolfs once lived was still intact, inviting me to imagine the naughty boy from this family climbing up the window to peek into the strange anthropologists’ room (Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4 The Wang family house that Arthur Wolf lived in. The small section connected to the main house was the cement bag factory that belonged to the Wang family, where village children often came to play.
Village History, Kinship and Economy
Kinship was an important element of this community’s history, and Wang Shiqing’s mother, Ms. Lai, became a key informant on these subjects. Her deep knowledge about the village households helped Arthur reconstruct accurate genealogies for a community with a high rate of adoption and other complications to its kinship structures. The founding ancestors of the Wang lineage came to Taiwan as immigrants from the mountainous interior of Anxi, a county in Quanzhou Prefecture in southern Fujian, during the Qianlong years in the eighteenth century. Although Ms. Lai was adopted into Wang’s grandfather as a sim-pu-a (little daughter-in-law) at a young age, she was still called a Chiang-chiu-a by the villagers, because her biological family descended from Zhangzhou immigrants (Chou Reference Chou2011: 79). According to the colonial household registers, in 1905, 65.7 percent of the male population bore the surname Wang. The Huang lineage also claimed to be among the earliest settlers here, with 8 percent of the male population bearing that surname in 1905 records.
The dominance of Wang lineage persisted. Even in the late 1950s, people living in Shulin town addressed Arthur as Mr. Wang, seeing him going in and out from Xia Xizhou and assuming he had to be a Wang (A. Wolf n.d.: 43). According to the census compiled by Arthur during this fieldwork, the village had a total population of 586 in 1958, including more than 200 children. Among the seventy-five families in this village, thirty families had the surname Wang, and six had the name Huang. Between 1905 and 1958, the village witnessed striking changes in kinship structures, the increase of stem families, and the decline of both joint families and elementary families (A. Wolf n.d.: 69). This means that, at the time of the Wolfs’ fieldwork, grandparents were important caregivers of Xia Xizhou children and cousins were likely common playmates.
Despite the typical landscape of a farming village with plenty of paddy fields and some water buffalo, Xia Xizhou was never purely an agricultural community in its modern history. It was located on the Dahan River (Ta-k’e-k’en was its old name), the upper branch of Tamsui River, and midway between two towns, Shulin and Tucheng, while administratively in Banqiao township. The village was an excellent port in the Taipei Basin water transportation system during the late Qing and early Japanese colonial rule. At this bustling port, cargo ships transported tea and rice wine, while ferries and small boats carried goods and people to Taipei. After the Taoyuan irrigation dam was built, the river port gradually declined in Xia Xizhou. By 1958, the only clues to its past were “three rotting boats in the bamboo groves” by the river (A. Wolf n.d.: 49).
From a child’s point of view, the river was an attractive yet dangerous place. Adults told children tales of river ghosts. Children were not allowed to play near the river due to the risk of drowning. In many episodes, however, I have read about children having fun there, swimming in the river, holding parties on the riverbank, or hanging out on the tree nearby. But danger did lurk, and on one occasion, a research assistant happened to be there observing the children and she interfered in time. As Arthur recalled: “Good fortune had it that one day when a small boy fell in the river Chen Suhua (MC) was following him to make an observation. She called a farmer from a nearby field and the child was saved with the result that she became more popular than ever. I also benefitted as the person responsible for her presence” (A. Wolf n.d.: 59).
In 1958, male household heads in this village included coal miners, wage laborers, small business (factory or store) owners, vegetable or peanut farmers, and others. Married women made money through picking rocks for construction companies, washing clothes, and doing other menial labor. Some were supported by their daughters working as prostitutes in towns or in the city (M. Wolf Reference Wolf1972). Young men and women joined the labor force early, working in factories or doing apprenticeships in shops. For example, Wang Shih-ting, the head of “the House of Lim,” ran a cement bag factory, using a shed attached to his house, and hired his relatives among other villagers. The great majority of families were still poor by local standards, even with a mixture of farming and other income: Average daily earnings were 20–30 yuan (NT) for men (the exchange rate was 1 USD = 40 NT), 15–20 for young men, and 7–10 for women (A. Wolf n.d.: 51). They were not equally poor though. The “House of Lim” family had the highest standing, distinguished by the largest house with all-brick walls and concrete floors (two rooms even with terrazzo floors), while others had smaller houses with brick walls or mud brick walls.
Under these circumstances, “mothers were reluctant to give a child fifty cents for a new eraser or two yuan for a pencil set” (A. Wolf n.d.: 51). For a typical family with three or four children, “the ten-cents children demanded several times a day added up to substantial expenditure,” and daughters-in-law had reason to be angry at their lenient in-laws who indulged grandchildren with money to buy candy (A. Wolf n.d.: 52). But children did often succeed in wheedling pocket money from their mothers or grandparents, often as a bargaining strategy. There were three small stores in the village, selling a variety of goods, but as Arthur remembered, children were the most profitable customers (A. Wolf n.d.: 59). In fact, shopping, including running errands for adults, buying snacks, and even just mentioning the stores, appeared so much in the observational notes that I decided to create an entire category of it and feed the category to machine learning algorithms to sort out the texts.
The Question of Schooling
While shopping was always a source of excitement to these children, schooling was a mixture of bitterness and fun. Many children had fun playing outside class time, chasing around inside the classroom, in the hallway, or more enjoyably, playing in the schoolyard with swings, seesaw, and spaces for hopscotch, marbles, shooting rubber bands, and other games. The bitterness documented in observational fieldnotes – children’s tears and fears – was largely induced by teachers’ harsh discipline. Yelling and corporal punishment toward students who did not read or write well was so common that children played “school” and mimicked teacher–student dynamics during their leisure time at home. Some kindergarteners and first graders had an especially tough time, because they were still confused by school routines, and they were learning Mandarin from scratch as part of their compulsory education. At the height of ROC’s Martial Law Era, students were not allowed to speak Taiwanese. At school, children were reported by each other when they lapsed into Taiwanese and offenders would be punished. They were vigilant at school. But at home they’d rather be called their Taiwanese nicknames, instead of official Mandarin surnames and given names. This leads into a brief explanation of the context and history of schooling in Xia Xizhou as it matters to children’s developing sense of identity.
When the Japanese arrived in 1895, Wang Shiqing’s great grandfather was the only fully literate resident of the village. Shalun Elementary School, a public school located between the village and Shulin town, was built and developed from the 1910s to 1920s under Japanese rule. At its founding, the school had quite a few teachers who were Japanese and had received training in Japan. As part of the colonial government’s modernization project, the school saw a steady increase in Xia Xizhou children’s enrollment in the 1930s and 1940s. This modernization project also included encouraging families to send their adopted daughters to school. In the postwar context, Mandarin was a new language to the village. Most adults grew up speaking a mixture of Japanese and Taiwanese Hokkien,Footnote 4 except a few mainlanders who moved here around 1949 – one of whom was teaching at this school. Most school-age children were educated at Shalun, and by third to fourth grade, they spoke fluent Mandarin.Footnote 5
After the KMT took over Taiwan, education in the late 1950s, from policy to practice, focused on the principle of “Sinicization” (zuguohua), with the purpose of making Taiwanese children Chinese and cultivating their loyalty to the ROC party-state (Chang Reference Chang2015: 155–204). Prioritizing two subjects, guowen (Chinese language and literature) and shidi (Chinese history and geography), elementary education aimed to improve children’s understanding of China and cultivate a sense of affection for the Chinese homeland (Chang Reference Chang2015: 156). Nonetheless, as pioneers in the golden age of “China” ethnography, the Wolfs went to Taiwan to examine patterns of “traditional Chinese” society. They were not particularly concerned about the effects of schooling on identity or social change (Harrell Reference Harrell, Hsu and Huang1999). Therefore, among the observations at the local school or interviews about schooling, very few records touched upon the question of identity education, for example, what sorts of topics were taught to children in class, what stories were used, or how parents and children reacted to the content of teaching. Arthur Wolf and his assistant Mr. Huang Chieh-Shan even collected hundreds of what they called “School Questionnaires,”Footnote 6 but the focus was behavioral questions similar to the ones in Child Interview, without any related to identity or political socialization.
I did catch a glimpse of schooling’s “identity molding” dimension, however, even in the very naming of classrooms. In one observation, for example, some children were bragging whose class was better, “loyalty classroom” (Zhong-ban) or “filial piety classroom” (Xiao-ban). These typical Confucianist terms were an integral part of ROC government’s core doctrine, “Three Principles of the People” (Sanminzhuyi). Moreover, beyond school-related notes, bits of stories scattered across fieldnotes did shed light on children’s own understandings and expressions of “insiders/outsiders.” Exploring these stories and the puzzles behind them allowed me to peek into the different identities, boundaries, and relationships in this fieldwork.
The Making of Fieldnotes: Boundaries, Identities, and Relationships
“Adoga (Big Nose) Is Coming!”
Residents in Shulin town once frowned upon Arthur Wolf’s choice of fieldsite. In their eyes, the village people in Xia Xizhou were too crude and had no culture. The village was home to hooligans and gangsters – lo-mua in Hokkien (liumang in Mandarin) – who preyed on the town’s merchants and were well-known in the Taipei basin area (M. Wolf Reference Wolf1968: 3, 46–49). As Arthur vividly remembered, the physical boundary between the town and the village was also a marker of social distinction and group identity, even for young children. The anthropologist found himself an outsider to these children when inside their village but an insider to them when outside their village (A. Wolf n.d.: 7–8):
Everyone knew exactly where the boundary was. For local officials and people who had to deal with them, it was important because it was the line between two townships; for people who felt a need for supernatural protection, it was important because it divided the realms of two gods; for gamblers and people who needed another kind of protection, it mattered because it was the passage between the territories of rival gangs; for men involved in local politics, it was significant because it divided communities that were and were not controlled by the Wang lineage; and for the children who are the subject of this study, it was significant because it was the outer edge of a safe world in which everyone was a neighbor if not a relative and beyond which everyone was a stranger and therefore dangerous. Meeting me on their side of the boundary, these children shouted, “Ah-tok-a, ah-tok-a,” this being the most common of the many rude ways Taiwanese refer to Caucasians. But meeting me on the other side of the boundary, these same children addressed me using my Chinese surname and often walked the rest of the way home holding my hand. An outsider on one side of the boundary was an insider on the other.
Reading this scenario, I found myself amused by children’s clear and flexible understanding of identity and their shrewdness in navigating social dramas. Boundary and identity are always relative, contingent upon the concrete situation. Xia Xizhou children would gang up against children from the neighboring Western village, not to mention against those from Shulin town. They would throw stones at newcomers to their territory, a few children who recently moved from Jinmen (Quemoy).Footnote 7 But within the village, the “foreigners” – or in their words, “Big Nose” (“Ah-tou-ka” or “Adoga” in Hokkien) – were the most visible outsiders to them. Children had an ambivalent attitude toward them: A little boy was scared of going to the store when he saw Margery Wolf there. An older boy felt embarrassed when he saw Margery observing him joking around. A father teased his little girl about giving her away to “the foreigner” as an adopted daughter, describing all the places she would get to visit by air. The girl grinned but insisted that she did not want to go.Footnote 8
Most of the time, children were teasing the anthropologist behind his back, using this derogatory term to mock each other, or bringing the presence of “Adoga” to scare other children. On a hot summer day, two boys were climbing up a wall to catch bugs. One urged: “Give me some bugs!” The other refused. A third boy shouted: “Ahtogah is coming!” [To warn them because climbing the wall would be frowned up by adults] The boy holding the bugs was not deterred at all: “It doesn’t matter. I won’t stop.” He even started grinning at the others – including research assistant MC who was observing this episode. He looked at them and sang: “Oh, Ahtogah please don’t come, etc.”Footnote 9 “American/foreigner/Big Nose” even became a convenient phrase for children to irritate others. Two siblings, seven-year-old Huang Shu-ting and six-year-old Shu-song got into a fight, simply because the little brother kept poking his older sister and pulling her nose: “You are an American. You are a foreigner. You have a big nose.”Footnote 10
Arthur sometimes followed his research assistant MC to observe children at school. One day, Wang Chen-jin, a seven-year-old boy who really hated studying, was fidgeting and jiggling the desk. Two classmates came over, jokingly warning him: “Big Nose. Big Nose!” Chen-jin turned around: “Where is the Big Nose?” One of those two naughty classmates smiled: “No, it’s Sister Chen (MC).” Chen-jin ran up and grabbed him: “It’s Sister Chen. Who told you it was Big Nose?” The other classmate went on with his chant, “Big Nose, Big Nose,” while Chen-jin walked up to make a threatening motion to him. Chen-jin must have felt relieved to see MC, the children’s trusted “older sister,” but at the same time annoyed or embarrassed to be tricked by his classmates.Footnote 11
“Why Do You Live with Foreigners?”
Children were quite curious about the relationship between the foreigners and their Taiwanese research assistants. They also felt a little confused about the status of these assistants. They would tease MC about her association with “foreigners.” For example, a four-year-old boy Wang Jun-hsian saw his observer MC and told his older sister Wang Shu-yu: “Hit that Big Nose!” Shu-yu was embarrassed and scolded him: “I’ll hit you instead of her! That isn’t a Big Nose!”Footnote 12
Although in somewhat naïve manners, children probed into the abstract categories beneath the surface features, just like ethnographers reflecting on the question of positionality. The following conversation,Footnote 13 between a seven-year-old girl Chen Yu-li, research assistant MS (whom children called “Teacher Ma”), and Yu-li’s ten-year-old sister Chen Yu-chin, epitomizes children’s understanding about identities in the larger context of the Cold War era.
Yu-li asked MS: “Are you American?”
MS: “Look at my nose and my skin. Isn’t it the same as yours?”
Yu-li: “Yes.”
MS: “Do you think I’m American?”
Yu-li: “Then why do you live with the foreigners?”
MS: “We are friends.”
Yu-chin [Yuli’s older sister]: “Of course the Chinese.”
Yu-li: “Why don’t we ask the Americans to fight the Communists?”
MS: “Why ask them to help us?”
Yu-li: “Because Americans have lots of money.”
Yu-li “Do you think the Americans or the Chinese will win?”
MS: “We aren’t fighting with Americans.”
Yu-li: “Oh!”
Yu-li was clearly perplexed why MS was living with the Wolfs. She was also a bit confused by the relationship between the United States and Taiwan at that time. American presence in Taiwan increased a lot by the late 1950s, in response to the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, bringing in soldiers, military support, and popular culture.Footnote 14 The May 24 incident in Taipei, 1957, marked the culmination of tensions in U.S.-Taiwan relations: An angry crowd of Taiwanese stormed the U.S. Embassy to protest the acquittal of American Sergeant Robert G. Reynolds who killed a ROC government employee Liu Tzu-jan (Teow and Pang Reference Teow, Pang and Johnson2015). Even in this relatively peaceful village, children saw KMT soldiers camping in their elementary school grounds or doing military exercises along the river bank. They probably heard about American soldiers or even saw some when they got a chance to visit Taipei streets. In a Child Observation (CO) episode, two boys were holding sticks as machine guns and “shooting” at each other, one pretending to be Sun Yat-sen and the other George Washington.Footnote 15
Confusion about military activities aside, children’s perception that “Americans have lots of money” was not an overstatement. Living among the villagers, the anthropology graduate student and his wife hired a cook, a translator, and research assistants. They lived in the finest house by the village’s standard. Yu-li’s way of thinking, the Chinese versus the Communists, also reflects the political atmosphere at that time. Framed in the ROC-PRC-USA triangle relation, they saw themselves as “Chinese,” those in mainland as “Communists.” But within the village, they saw themselves as Taiwanese, different from the few mainlander-immigrants in the village.Footnote 16 Children saw the research assistants as “insiders,” quite different from how they saw the foreign anthropologists.
Moreover, it was not the Wolfs, but their Taiwanese research assistants – especially MC – who directly interacted with children the most and collected the great majority of the observational and interview data. They were intermediaries between the anthropologists and the research participants, and eyewitnesses to what was recorded in the fieldnotes. The close relationship between children and MC, and to a lesser extent, between children and MS, is worthy of exploration in detail.
Research assistant MS, shorthand for Ms. Sheng, a married young woman, was just completing a teacher training program at National Taiwan Normal University when she met Arthur Wolf. Her main role was to collect observational data centered on specific situations – “situation-based observations” (SO). In addition, she also participated in miscellaneous spontaneous interviews (SI), together with MC and Margery Wolf. Instead of following village adults and addressing her as “Ms. Sheng” (her maiden name), children mostly called her “Teacher Ma” – “Ma” as in her last name. This indicates a certain degree of power differential, as children saw her as an adult, and “teacher” was a respected category. In the example discussed earlier, right before asking the blunt question “Are you American?,” little girl Yu-li was chatting with MS about teaching and studying. She first asked MS to show her how to write her (MS’s) name. MS wrote it in the dirt. Then their conversation spun into an interesting direction:Footnote 17
Yu-li: “Would you teach me next year?”
MS: “I am a very mean teacher.”
Yu-li: “Then I would get to be first name [first place].”
A little later Yu-li asked MS: “Would you give me first name in the class?”
Her two older siblings and another child present all laughed at her. They said (to Yu-lin): “Aren’t you ashamed? You ask her to give you first name!”
Yu-lin looked embarrassed and said: “No! No! My meaning was, if I studied very well I could get first name.”
She looked at MS and said: “Isn’t that true?”
MS agreed.
Although Teacher Ma was an authority figure, she was not really these children’s teacher. Therefore, they were not afraid of her. They got used to her presence, her taking notes while they were playing, although parents tended to remind them to treat MS politely. A naughty toddler girl once took MS’s notebook and looked through it. Her mom immediately scolded: “Your hands are too busy!”Footnote 18 But when parents were not around, the observed were quite comfortable teasing the observer MS. For example, when several girls were “playing house,” pretending to make a meal with flowers and grass, they jokingly invited Teacher Ma to eat their cooked “cai” (vegetables) and had a great laugh about it.Footnote 19
These episodes of children teasing MS or asking her funny questions immediately reminded me of my own fieldwork in a Shanghai preschool during the early 2010s: Children addressed me respectfully as “Teacher Xu.” But unlike their real teachers, most of the time I just sat in a corner of their classroom to observe them or chat with them when they were playing during recess. I did not need to discipline them. Instead, they happily anticipated me to bring them candy or other small treats, their reward for participating in certain research tasks during my fieldwork (Xu Reference Xu2017: 16–19). Being a special kind of teacher, an alternative to the typical schoolteacher, between merely an authority figure and a relatable person, was a common experience for ethnographers who study children. This liminal role, when played well, can stimulate creative engagements with children (Allerton Reference Allerton2016: 34).
“Everyone’s Confidante”: MC and Children
Compared to MS whom children still saw as an adult and a special kind of teacher, the younger research assistant MC (shorthand for “Miss Chen”) was perhaps as close to her young interlocutors as a researcher could ever be. Within a week or two of her arrival in the village children already began to call her “Older sisterFootnote 20 Chen” (A. Wolf n.d.: 16). Within the first year of fieldwork Chen had become “everyone’s confidante, everyone’s friend” (M. Wolf 1990: 422). She often spent her free time gossiping in the village mothers’ kitchens. These adult women would disclose their grievances to her (see M. Wolf 1990). They praised her for being kind to all of the children (M. Wolf 1990: 421). Some even thought that she would make a good daughter-in-law (A. Wolf n.d.: 16).
Several personal traits of Chen, not just her Taiwanese identity, helped explain why she could build such extraordinary rapport with her interlocuters and gather so much data with extraordinary quality: Child Observations, Mother Observation, Mother Interview, Child Interview, and miscellaneous data. According to Mr. Huang, MC was an experienced maid employed by an American family when she first met Arthur Wolf, at the age of about sixteen or seventeen.Footnote 21 She was intelligent, lively, and only a few years older – and only a little taller – than several of the children included in the study (A. Wolf n.d.: 16) (Figures 1.5 and 1.6).
Figure 1.5 MC with a girl.
Figure 1.6 MC with young children.
The Wolfs spoke highly of MC’s work. In the field, they soon discovered that MC could observe up to four minutes of timed interactions among children and repeat every word of it an hour later, with the aid of some notes (M. Wolf 1990: 344). The American anthropologists attributed this exceptional skill to Chinese schools’ rigorous training of memorization. Moreover, Arthur confidently concluded that MC’s rapport with children allowed her to “move freely in and out of the children’s play groups without affecting their behavior …. Chen was sometimes drawn into the children’s activities and then appear as an actor in her observation, but she is always there as Older Sister Chen, not as an observer and certainly not as a foreigner” (A. Wolf n.d.: 18).
True, MC was not just an observer to these children. Children were used to the presence of this “Older Sister.” They would tease her as they teased each other. They wanted to involve her in their games. Rereading MC’s observations, however, I found that she made a great effort to act as a detached observer instead of an involved participant. After all, she was a dutiful research assistant following her supervisor’s command, that is, to study children’s natural behavior.Footnote 22 But sometimes her close relationship with interlocutors posed a challenge to fulfilling her duty.
In some sidenotes within MC’s observational texts, she complained how her emotional bonding with children could be a problem. For example, when Cheng Shi-lin noticed MC, she ran up and threw her arms around her, ending the observation. MC expressed her frustration at the end of this episode: “She ruins many observations this way!”Footnote 23 This five-year-old girl was quite naughty. Once when MC was quietly observing a play session, Shi-lin teased her: “I am going to make some rice balls for Sister Chen!” MC added that she was furious, because Shi-lin always spots her before the other kids do.Footnote 24
Feelings can be mutual though. Jokingly or seriously, children might get irritated at MC’s performing a detached observer’s role, because she was playing with them as a friend on other occasions outside her designated research time. During a fun, “playing house” observation,Footnote 25 Tsai Su-ying reached her playmate Cheng Shu-ching and said indignantly: “This Sister Chen! She won’t play with us but she always stays around when we are playing.” Shu-ching replied: “That’s right.” She threw MC an accusing look.
MC tried to cope with these situations through self-effacing tactics, but these tactics did not always work. She pretended to be doing something else on the side instead of observing children, for example, drawing on some tiles near the observed children, looking busy, but a child saw her, grabbed her tile, and started imitating her drawing.Footnote 26 Or, she tried not to respond when children cued her, assuming or inviting her as a participant in their play. At a hide-and-seek session, two three-year-old girls wanted to play with MC and kept saying boo at her. They were only interested in MC, despite another child trying hard to boo back and engage them. But MC just looked off into the distance and kept doing so until those two girls lost interest due to her lack of cooperation.Footnote 27 Because of her special bonding with children, even MC’s action of “detachment” sometimes conveyed a message to the observed, however unintended it was. For example, during a Five-Sticks game, to settle repeated disagreements with another child, a girl turned to MC for support. MC simply ignored it and the girl felt embarrassed.Footnote 28 Despite trying so hard, however, there were moments when MC could not or did not detach herself from the observed situation. Many of these ambiguous situations lead to, or manifest as, moral entanglements.
Ethical Entanglement, Ethnographic Epistemology, and Learning Morality
Moments of dilemmas, ironies and ethical entanglements sprinkled across MC’s observations could, according to her own mindset, raise concerns about compromising her research quality. However, from today’s vantage point, we understand ethnographic encounters as inherently intersubjective, contingent, and messy. These moments make her notes more realistic and her testimonies more believable, especially in this research, where children were her main interlocutors. After all, immersive fieldwork entails the risk of exposing oneself, and MC, for sure, put herself in the thick of it. Her experience bears witness to “the often threatening, sometimes embarrassing, but always potentially insight-bearing situations of fieldwork” (Borneman Reference Borneman and Allerton2016: x). MC cannot directly tell us what kind of insights her fieldwork experience, crucial for the making of these fieldnotes, might offer to her anthropologist-supervisors at that time. I only know that she parted ways with research afterwards and I was not able to get hold of her. However, when I reread these notes, MC’s ethical entanglements become particularly meaningful not only to understanding how ethnographic knowledge was formed. These entanglements also shed light on how children learn morality, the central question that motivated this book.
Some of these moments tell us about norms of courtesy and propriety central to the moral fabric of the local society. In a Mother Observation episode,Footnote 29 a young mother Wang Fei-yi punished her daughter in front of MC. The naughty eight-year-old girl Wang Lin-fang kept evading her responsibility, defying her mother’s discipline, and even making fun of her mother. The mother became really angry, pinching Lin-fang until she began to cry. But the mother then apologized to MC for having punished her daughter when MC was present, explaining that she just couldn’t help doing that because the girl was too naughty and annoying. Why did the mother have to explain herself to MC? A naïve reader might interpret this as the mom trying to save her own face for losing her temper in front of an outsider.
But the mother actually said: “I’m not punishing her because I don’t like you.” Right after this sentence, MC inserted an insider’s explanation, as a supplementary note in parentheses: (There is a proverb to the effect, “You point at the chicken and scold the monkey.”Footnote 30 Some people feel that if a person scolds a child in their presence, it is to show that they don’t like them.) This short exchange captured layers of intentionality: First, MC was an insider, which is why the mother assumed that MC would understand this custom encapsulated in the Chinese proverb Sha ji jing hou. Second, precisely because the mother saw MC as an insider, she worried that MC would misunderstand the mom’s real intention and thought that she scolded her daughter in order to express her dislike of MC. She worried that MC would feel bad. Third, the very fact that the mother bothered to explain herself shows that she actually cared about MC and her relationship with MC, which, again, testifies to MC’s popularity and likability in the village.
This encounter well illustrates the richness of ethnographic intersubjectivity, the foundation for MC’s knowledge and my reinterpretation. Moreover, this episode also leads me to the question of children’s learning itself. Given that the daughter was present during the conversation between her mother and MC, I couldn’t help but wondering about the child’s experience at that moment: Wasn’t it a moment of education to her, to learn about the custom of Sha Ji Jing Hou? She might also learn the multiple moral messages adults were trying to convey when punishing a child in front of other people – beyond simply showing a child that she would bear the consequences of her bad behavior. Meanwhile, she might learn about the meta-properties of communication itself, of detecting the speaker’s intentions and the relevance to the audience (Sperber and Wilson Reference Sperber and Wilson1996), which would be essential in her daily interaction with other people.
MC’s ethical entanglements offer a window into children’s colorful moral world itself. MC was not just a witness to children’s stories. She even became, to some extent, a character in their very journey of learning morality. Some children cared about reputation. Inside the classroom, a six-year-old boy, a class leader, suddenly stopped his dueling game with another child, when he noticed MC, in order to project a “model student” image.Footnote 31 Other children loosened up more with her. They played “mambo dance,” mimicking what they saw in popular culture at that time and addressing MC as “Miss, Miss.”Footnote 32 They played “engagement” ritual and invited MC as an important guest.Footnote 33 They tried to enlist MC’s support during disputes or asked for her help when they met difficulties. Some defended MC when other children tried to tease her. Some showed clear favoritism toward MC, sharing things with her but not with other children.
Adults and older siblings also seized the opportunity to teach a moral lesson to their youngsters in front of MC. When a naughty three-year-boy kept asking MC for pocket money, his older brother scolded him for being rude.Footnote 34 When two sisters fought during a meal, their mother teased them: “Aren’t you afraid Sister Chen will laugh at you?”Footnote 35 In another occasion, the same girl who was teased by her mom assumed the role of moral authority: She scolded her younger siblings for having no manners because they just let MC stand while observing, and she quickly offered MC a stool.Footnote 36
The presence of distant foreigners and familiarized local research assistants, and their engagements with children, all stimulated children to think about identities in their historical context. Their daily interactions with research assistants, and especially with MC, not only were shaped by local social norms, but also became part of their own moral experience, of managing reputation, navigating cooperation and conflict, and learning propriety. Examining the relationships and encounters behind the fieldnotes helped me to better understand the making of ethnographic knowledge and to reinterpret these fieldnotes through the new lens of learning morality. My reinterpretation, however, involves more than listening to the different voices present in or behind the notes. I also had to discern silences, deal with voids, and inevitably, draw on my own experiences to make sense of these texts.
Reinterpreting Fieldnotes
Voices, Silences, and Voids
Sometimes the conversations they [research assistants MS and MC] memorized and repeated to us made no sense even to them, but often the pages I typed from their dictation recorded material that we as foreigners would have found difficult to elicit – not because it was particularly private but because it was pithier, more judgmental, less considered.
Reflecting on these fieldnotes, Margery Wolf deemed her research assistants’ voices as “more judgmental, less-considered,” compared to what she or Arthur would have written. She was referring to some of the sidenotes MC and MS inserted into their dictation of what they observed. The research assistants often used these sidenotes to add explanations or assert their own comments about a situation, a cultural idiom, or a person. As I examined in the previous section, some of these sidenotes, however, turned out quite important for understanding local customs or individual personalities. These pithy notes disclosed the research assistants’ personal opinions and impressions at the scene of observation, thus were helpful to remedy my problem of lacking first-person fieldwork experience. Such direct voices from the research assistants, however small in volume, added valuable, eyewitnesses’ accounts to enrich the observational record.
The only male research assistant, Mr. Huang Chieh-Shan, whose straightforward voices, together with children’s silences, taught me a different lesson of reinterpretation, that is, of reading between the lines. Huang was a college student who grew up in the nearby Shulin town. He worked for the Wolfs during his summer break and some weekends at the later stage of their fieldwork (1960), in charge of conducting two projective tests with children, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and Doll Play. These psychological tests, using a standardized set of pictures (TAT) and dolls (Doll Play) adapted to the local context to elicit children’s imaginative storytelling, were consigned to a more peripheral, less important place. Some of the Mandarin transcripts of the original audiotapes were not even translated into English until the time of my re-analysis. Arthur Wolf (n.d.: 23) gave the following explanation, attributing the dissatisfying results of these tests to the instruments and to children’s lack of imagination: “Very few of the children were willing or able to respond to either test with a spontaneous story. Huang had to ask again and again …, ‘What is the father doing now? ….’ In many cases the ‘story’ elicited was little more than a recitation of the child’s family’s daily routine.” To me, however, these materials offer precious insights into the issue of studying children. Children’s silences indeed scattered across the transcripts, and Huang indeed had to repeat his questions again and again. Huang’s personal comments about the participants, inserted at the end of each transcript, also confirmed this awkward atmosphere: The child’s attitude was unnatural, the child’s voice was so small that even his breathing could be heard, the child was nervous, and so forth. In several transcripts, Huang mentioned that the child in question seemed really frightened, as if talking to a judge in an interrogation room. When I first read these comments from Mr. Huang, I wrote in my journal: “It must have been an awful experience feeling like trapped in an interrogation room, during the White Terror era in TaiwanFootnote 37!” But what might have led to such silences and fear?
These interactions were not just affected by the pictures and dolls, or by children’s personalities. After all, many of the same children also participated in Child Interview, but in that context the children were quite willing to answer MC’s questions about hypothetical scenarios. The awkwardness had to do with the research setting and the researcher-child relationship as well. Huang went around to find the specific child assigned by Arthur Wolf, explaining that Prof. Wolf wanted the child to tell a story. Then the child was brought into a small room within the Wang house, which the Wolfs rented as their “testing room.” According to my phone interview with Huang on April 20, 2022, many children were scared or reluctant to enter the room. “The children would have been even more scared if Arthur were to administer these tests himself, because he was a foreigner and he did not speak the children’s native tongue,” said Huang. But being a cultural and linguistic insider doesn’t necessarily guarantee smooth communication or trust, especially when it comes to studying children. In this community, adult men, for example, father figures, were more distant to children than women (M. Wolf 1978). In this research setting, an isolated testing room in the house that the Wolfs lived in, Huang, a male adult with an abrupt personality, someone who had not spent much time with these children, could have triggered some nervousness among them. As shown in the transcript, he tended to insert short, sharp questions and keep pivoting back to his own questions instead of accommodating to children’s direction of speech. Without access to the original audiotapes of these tests, I could not retrieve the scenes or figure out what Mr. Huang’s exact tone and manner were like when talking to the children. But children indeed felt less comfortable talking to him than to MC. One observational episode confirmed my hypothesis, albeit in an indirect way: A mother was telling MC that her son, almost nine years old then, wouldn’t go to the testing room to take the TAT with Mr. Huang, unless MC came to call him.Footnote 38
Like spotting children bluntly chanting “Adoga/Big Nose” in observational texts, sensing their shyness in TAT transcripts was also a moment of revelation to me, not a setback. There are, however, voids in this archive that I cannot get around to and meanings I cannot recover. Arthur Wolf’s draft introductory chapters were written in a narrative ethnography mode, from which I caught a glimpse into his first-person experience in the field. But besides those, he did not leave behind any personal diaries or reflective writings about that fieldwork. I got to know how children saw “the foreigners,” but not how he thought about those children. This is not surprising. It was common at that time for male anthropologists not to write ethnographies in a personal narrative voice. Women anthropologists – or to be more accurate in the perceptive framework at that time, male anthropologists’ wives – tend to write in a more personal voice (Tedlock Reference Tedlock, Behar and Gordon1996).
Margery Wolf did write a journal during that fieldtrip: “My journal recorded my irritation with village life, some wild hypotheses of causation, an ongoing analysis of the Chinese personality structure, various lascivious thoughts, diatribes against injustices observed, and so forth” (1990: 345). Imagine what kind of vivid stories in the village that journal must have recorded! But that was not part of the Wolf Archive that I have access to. As Margery stated, she “would have been outraged had any of my coworkers attempted to read it” (1990: 345). At the time of fieldwork, as a wife, a scribe and an aspiring novelist, Margery did not consider her journal as part of “fieldnotes.” In fact, many anthropologists at that time were taught to separate personal journals from serious fieldnotes.Footnote 39 It was not until later, when she carefully looked through different types of fieldnotes and her journal, that Margery Wolf began to piece together a fuller picture of the village and the personalities of its individuals. And that’s how her ethnographies came into being, including her meta-reflections on ethnographic epistemology itself, A Thrice-told Tale. Perhaps every ethnographer, however much “first-person” experience they can hold on to, when looking back to past fieldwork, will always end up in a situation where they have to reconstruct meanings out of voices, silences and voids. Some of the challenges I face are common to all ethnographers, others unique to this project.
“It Serves You Right!”: The Nature of Sensemaking
I read “It serves you right!” or “Serve you right!” in Child Observation episodes, one child scolding or teasing another. Then Wandou [my son, eleven years old] came into my office, shouting mischievously: “It serves you right!,” for some trouble I complained about earlier. Well, Wandou can definitely help me to understand these children whom I’ve never met.
Making sense of these fieldnotes seemed like an impossible mission. Getting the words correct, the numbers right, and the names matching the numbers, back and forth. Learning computer programming, forgetting, and re-learning. Meticulously coding every CO episode, sentence by sentence, into behavioral categories and scores. Sometimes the work was so tedious that I felt I was losing my sense of purpose. But many sparkling moments, moments when I was amazed or amused by children, like the one I captured in this journal entry, gave new meaning to my journey. Sensemaking always involves using one’s own experience as a resource or reference. My predecessors never addressed or got a chance to address the issue of children’s developing minds, but I have long been fascinated by cognitive development, especially in the socio-moral domain. This distinct interest provides a vantage point for my ethnographic reinterpretation.
Children are very smart at reading social cues and learning about their social environment, as numerous studies in developmental psychology have shown. Yet children also pose unique risks for ethnographers. They cross boundaries that adults might cautiously observe, they make “total immersion” – a predominant model of village fieldwork – nearly impossible, and they make ethnographic encounters more or less difficult depending on the people and the situation (Allerton Reference Allerton2016: 1, 8–9). Therefore, I paid particular attention to how children engaged with different researchers, the contexts of such engagement, and why they were assertive in one occasion but timid in another. Children’s various relationships, with the distant “foreigners” – distant in children’s eyes, the familiar “Teacher Ma,” the dear “Older Sister Chen,” and Mr. Huang – who was native but perhaps a bit intimidating, form a full spectrum. I closely examined scenarios of children’s emotional and moral entanglements with researchers. These encounters blur the boundary between “participant” and “observer,” highlight the paradoxical nature of “participant-observation” at the core of the ethnographic method, and equally important, illuminate various moral lessons children were learning.
Morality and ethics have recently become a focus in anthropological theories, and fieldwork experience itself provides an important site for us to reflect on the intrinsic ethical dimension of human action (Lambek Reference Lambek and Lambek2010b). Social theories tend to formulate human action “too automatically, too strategically, too self-consciously, or too self-interestedly,” therefore flatten or obscure the ethical texture of social encounters (Lambek Reference Lambek and Lambek2010b: 40). But most anthropologists who study the ethical nature of social life are talking about the adult world. Taking childhood learning as a central focus, I have shown that young children anthropologists encountered in the field drew from their rich moral sensibilities to make sense of human speech and action. Moreover, due to the nature of early childhood, a significant phase of acquiring social knowledge and ethical dispositions, the ethnographers even became interesting characters in these young actors’ journey of learning morality.
Immersed in these fieldnotes, I often felt a sense of awe. It is an unusual archive, its volume and systematicity far beyond my expectations. Its quality probably exceeds that of many other fieldnotes-archive preserved privately or in public databases. Any first-person ethnographic fieldwork is necessarily incomplete (Carsten Reference Carsten2012: 29), but the repertoire of experiences documented in this rare archive exceeded what I could have ever gained if I were to have done solo, first-person fieldwork. These vicarious experiences in all the richness, layering with my own experience of studying children and raising a child, together helped me to make sense of Xia Xizhou childhood through texts.
Besides the special interlocutors and various intermediaries, the Wolfs’ fieldwork distinguished itself from many village ethnographies back then in another crucial aspect, its mixed methods design that involved systematic, precise observations and standardized interviews and projective tests. This feature made it possible for me to incorporate quantitative, programmatic analysis of texts, behaviors, and social networks into ethnography. Contrary to the actual fieldwork that was a continuous, natural flow of experiences, these fieldnotes only captured discrete, “snapshot” units of data. Various types of computational analyses provide a new way to, in mathematical terms, connect the dots into lines, planes and multidimensional vector space, and reveal aggregative patterns. As the following chapters will show, machine “distant-reading” and my close reading together enabled me to transform individual participants from index numbers into embodied personalities and discover social relationships in bits and pieces of events. I was able to connect the dots, figuratively.
But above all, the foundation for sensemaking in this unique project was my effort to stay faithful to materials. The anthropologist Robert Smith, once a colleague of the Wolfs at Cornell University, reconstructed an ethnography out of another scholar Ella Lury Wiswell’s fieldnotes, about women in a Japanese village Suye Mura. What he said illustrates this sensemaking process (Smith Reference Smith and Sanjek1990: 363–64)Footnote 40:
For weeks I spent most of every day retyping the marked passages verbatim, beginning with the first entry. Before I was well into this stultifying task, I began to know the people in a new way. Some of the payoff was purely technical. For example, for the first time it became clear to me that XX, XXX, X [different names] were all the same woman …. When I was finally done, I had learned enough to spot continuities and inconsistencies, resolve most of the occasional ambiguities, and see how passages that had appeared to be unrelated (or unrelatable) to anything or anyone did in fact connect with what had gone before or came after …. So I am led to make the audacious claim that the voices of the women of Suye could be heard more clearly once I had interposed myself between them and their ethnographer.
I do not dare to say that the voices of Xia Xizhou children would be heard more clearly once I had interposed myself between them and their original researchers. I still wish that I had known those children in person rather than reading bits and pieces of their lives in texts. But if at the end of the day fieldnotes are nothing but anthropologists’ “feeble attempts at communication with one another” (M. Wolf 1990: 354), I hope this chapter has made it clear that, although complicated by all the problems of reinterpreting other people’s fieldnotes, my feeble attempts are worthy.
