Afterword

Summary

How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children’s learning morality teach us about ethnographic knowledge or any social knowledge? My book explores such questions via analyzing old fieldnotes collected by Arthur and Margery Wolf in a Taiwan village (1958–60) in Martial Law Era, before rapid economic growth, industrialization and urbanization. Born from the Six Cultures Study, a landmark project in cross-cultural research, the Wolfs’ fieldwork was the first ethnographic study on ethnic Han children. Bringing to light the rich texts of systematic observation, interview and projective tests, I combined ethnographic interpretation with NLP and machine learning techniques, behavioral coding and social network analysis. I explain how children defied parental commands and violated cultural precepts. I trace how they navigated cooperation, conflict and the gray areas in between, with complex moral sensibilities and gendered expressions, and highlight the role of peers and siblings. I connect the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and urge all of us to take children seriously.