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7 results

  • Introduction

  • Jing Xu, University of Washington
  • Book:
    ‘Unruly’ Children
    Published online:
    31 October 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024, pp 1-35

  • Summary

    This chapter introduces my research questions, framework, and main findings. It begins with two striking vignettes to engage the readers and outline the significance of the two basic questions that motivate this book and intersect at children's social cognition: How do humans learn morality? How do we make sense of fieldnotes? The chapter situates the book in intellectual history, including the Wolfs’ original research, its connections to the Six Cultures Study, and its legacies. It then presents a new framework of cognitive anthropology distinctive from the behaviorist paradigm that motivated the original research. I situate the book in three broad streams of discussions: (1) theoretical conversations between anthropology and psychology on morality; (2) cross-cultural research on childhood learning; (3) studies of Chinese kinship, families, and childhood. I explain why it is important to study children to understand morality, human relatedness, and cultural transmission. I also make the case for reanalyzing historical fieldnotes. I then lay out a methodology that incorporates computational approaches into ethnography, summarize my main arguments, and outline the book structure.

‘Unruly’ Children
  • Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village
  • Jing Xu
  • Published online:
    31 October 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024
  • 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.

  • Taming Violence: The Shanghai Green Gang and its Self-Legitimation Claims in the Early Twentieth Century

  • Wei Luo
  • Journal:
    Social Science History / Volume 47 / Issue 4 / Winter 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    26 October 2022, pp. 585-608
    Print publication:
    Winter 2023
    • Article
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  • From the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, gangs and secret societies (banghui) exercised enormous influence on Chinese society and politics. The two portrayals of banghui in historiography – as modern criminal syndicates that came out of an emerging capitalist economy or, alternatively, a cultural succession of traditional secret society – are so distinct that their proponents often speak past each other. Revisiting primary and secondary materials on the Shanghai Green Gang, one of the most active banghui organizations during the Republican era (1911–49), this article aims to bridge the two understandings by focusing on the gang’s self-legitimation claims. Facing rapid social changes of the early twentieth century, I argue, the Green Gang reframed its use of violence as disciplinary, revolutionary, and nationalistic to gain public legitimation. Together with its involvement in state building and resource extraction, the gang’s cultural work contributed to its prominence and led multiple political authorities to promote it to an exceptional degree.

  • Subjective wellbeing of Chinese elderly: a comparative analysis among Hong Kong, Urban China and Taiwan

  • Jia Miao, Xiaogang Wu
  • Journal:
    Ageing & Society / Volume 41 / Issue 3 / March 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    24 October 2019, pp. 686-707
    Print publication:
    March 2021

  • This study investigates the relative importance of living with adult children and social participation for the elderly's subjective wellbeing (happiness) in three Chinese societies (Hong Kong, urban China and Taiwan). We use data from the 2011 wave of the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics (N = 1,658), the 2010 China Family Panel Studies in mainland China (N = 3,198) and the 2010 wave of the Taiwan Social Change Survey (N = 790). The ordinary least squares regression shows that, as the family value of society moves forward on a traditional–modern continuum, the elderly benefit more psychologically from social participation and less from living with children. The older people in Hong Kong who live independently with a spouse are in a significantly better emotional state than those living with adult children. Social participation is positively associated with subjective wellbeing among the aged in Hong Kong but not among those in urban China and Taiwan. The findings suggest that encouraging social involvement is important for effective public policy to tackle rapid population ageing in Chinese societies.

  • 11 - Cross-Dressing, Queerness, and the Early Modern Stage

  • from Part II - Renaissance and Early Modern
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 197-217

  • Summary

    Female-female eroticism had no formal space in the dominant premodern discourse on sex, which posited the phallus as indispensable to a woman's social and sexual fulfillment. For this reason, inevitably this chapter largely focuses on male, rather than female homoeroticism. The chapter provides a review of some of the earliest Chinese sources on male-male relations, especially because they gave rise to a classic lexicon of homosexuality. The expressions "longyang", "shared peach", and "cut sleeve" are the most prominent of such lexicon, and are still used. Some pornographic narratives from the second half of the seventeenth century indeed feature a new type of libertine, who can be sexually penetrated without his masculine credentials being compromised. The homosexual initiation takes the form of a rape, with the husband taking advantage of the libertine young scholar's intoxicated state. A discursive orientation more critical of homoeroticism can certainly be detected in eighteenth-century fiction.

  • 6 - The warlord era: politics and militarism under the Peking government, 1916–28

  • Edited by John K. Fairbank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of China
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    30 September 1983, pp 284-321

  • Summary

    The time between 1916 and 1928 is commonly called the 'warlord period'. While warlords used such personal ties to cultivate the loyalty of their officers, their subordinates often had similar relationships with their own juniors. Some commanders tried to minimize these secondary loyalties, and focus all allegiance directly on themselves, but it was difficult to eliminate them. The percentage of public revenue actually devoted to public purposes evidently declined in most provinces through the warlord era. The chaos of warlordism, and the concomitant weakness of the Peking government, rendered China peculiarly vulnerable to foreign pressures and encroachments. This chapter looks at some events to note how militarism supervened and finally supplanted the vestiges of constitutionalism. On the one hand, the warlord years represented the low point of political unity and national strength in the twentieth century. On the other hand, they also represented the peak of intellectual and literary achievement.

  • 10 - Currents of social change

  • Edited by John K. Fairbank, Kwang-Ching Liu
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of China
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    30 September 1980, pp 535-602

  • Summary

    This chapter elucidates the internal dynamic of China's social evolution at the end of the Ch'ing by looking at the rural world which still contained some 95 per cent of the total population. In the very last years of the monarchy, division among the new privileged classes grew from within and was actually more ideological than social. Instability and precariousness more aptly characterize lower class conditions in Chinese society at the end of the monarchy than do models of continuous evolution. Among the many factors contributing to changes in Chinese society during the last forty years of the monarchy, the foreign intrusion, in various forms, was of primary importance. The force behind the changes which shook Chinese society at the end of the imperial era perhaps lay more in the progressive deterioration of the agrarian situation and especially in landowners' relationships with their tenants.