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An Untold Tale of a Sibling Dyad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2024
Abstract: Chapter 5 presents an untold tale of an older brother and his younger sister. While their mother was the protagonist in Wolf’s classic ethnography, "A Thrice-told-Tale," the story of these children was obscured. Childhood sibling relation in “the Chinese family” was rarely studied by anthropologists, yet it is an important relation that shapes children’s moral development and family dynamics. I present systematic patterns of this sibling dyad’s social network positioning, uncover their distinct personalities, and trace their nuanced dynamics of care, rivalry and coalitional maneuvers. I closely examine projective tests data to reveal children's own emotional experience in and perspectives about their family life. This chapter is a unique narrative: in addition to illuminating childhood sibling relation, it simultaneously rediscovers the voices of these two children from ethnographic omissions and silences. Therefore, this case study echoes the dual themes of the entire book, children learning morality and anthropologists reconstructing an ethnography.
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