BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY SEMINAR SERIES (BASS)
Tuesday, May 7th in Denny 313
Seminar: 3:30 – 4:30 pm
Reception: 4:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Abstract: How do humans become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? My talk explores these questions through re-discovering the late anthropologist Arthur Wolf’s unpublished fieldnotes collected in Taiwan (1958-1960). Designed as an improved replication of the Six Cultures Study of Socialization (SCS), a landmark project in the history of anthropology of childhood, Wolf’s project was the first systematic, ethnographic research on ethnic Han children. I analyzed these field notes, including interviews, observations and psychological tests, using a cognitive anthropology approach distinguished from SCS’ behaviorist paradigm and a new methodology combining ethnographic interpretation, behavioral coding, NLP (natural-language-processing) techniques, and SNA (social-network-analysis). My book unravels the complexities of children’s moral development, exposing instances of disobedience, negotiation, and peer dynamics, in contrast to the tropes of “obedience” and “innocence” prevalent in scholarly and public discourses about culturally Chinese children. Writing through and about fieldnotes, I connect the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and invites anthropologists to take children seriously.
Dr. Jing Xu
Affiliate Assistant Professor,
Department of Anthropology,
Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology
University of Washington
Biography:
Jing Xu holds a B.A. and M.A. from Tsinghua University, a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis (2014). She received postdoctoral training in developmental psychology at the University of Washington. She is the author of The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (Stanford University Press, 2017) and “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She has published peer-reviewed articles in journals spanning multiple disciplines, for example, American Anthropologist, Ethos, Feminist Anthropologist, Journal of Chinese History, Developmental Psychology, Child Development Perspectives, Sociological Review of China.
