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Learning Morality with Siblings: The Untold Tale of a Mid-Twentieth Century Taiwanese Family

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2021

Jing Xu Open the ORCID record for Jing Xu [Opens in a new window]
Jing Xu*
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University of Washington, USA
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*Corresponding author. Email: jingxu1983@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article uses a new theoretical and methodological framework to reconstruct a story of two children from fieldnotes collected by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in rural Taiwan (1958 to 1960). Through the case of a brother–sister dyad, it examines the moral life of young children and provides a rare glimpse into sibling relationship in peer and family contexts. First, combining social network analysis and NLP text-analytics, this article introduces a general picture of these siblings’ life in the peer community. Moreover, drawing from naturalistic observations and projective tests, it offers an ethnographic analysis of how children support each other and assert themselves. It emphasizes the role of child-to-child ties in moral learning, in contrast to the predominant focus of parent–child ties in the study of Chinese families. It challenges assumptions of the Chinese “child training” model and invites us to take children's moral psychology seriously and re-discover their agency.

Keywords

childhoodsiblingmoralityfamilyTaiwan
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Chinese History 中國歷史學刊 , Volume 6 , Special Issue 2: Family Relations in Chinese History , July 2022 , pp. 337 - 363
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I thank the Journal of Chinese History editor Patricia Ebrey, the special issue editor Cong Ellen Zhang, and two anonymous reviewers for the time and effort they put into my manuscript. Their generous feedback helped me improve my work. I am grateful to Hill Gates for welcoming me to this precious, fascinating archive left behind by Arthur P. Wolf. Stevan Harrell provided invaluable support for this research and writing. Lu Zhou, Huiqin Gao, Molly Taylor, Ashley Zhou, Christian Chan assisted with data transcription and organization. This paper was made possible through the support of a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (RG013-A-18) and a fellowship co-sponsored by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCKF, NAEd or Spencer.

References

1 CO # 1176, 05/04/1960. Throughout this article, each episode of field-notes, an observation, an interview, or a projective test transcript, is indexed by the initials of its data type, followed by its unique ID assigned to each episode within that data type. All unique IDs were generated in Python programming environment and therefore begin with #0. “CO” refers to Child Observation.

2 Hsiung, Ping-chen, A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 261CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 This assessment is still largely valid: In a comprehensive literature review we see very little research focused on children, in a century-long span of sinolgoical anthropology; see Santos, Gonçalo D., “The Anthropology of Chinese Kinship: A Critical Review,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 5.2 (2006), 275–333CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In most recent edited volumes on the anthropology of Chinese families there are a few chapters on childrearing, but not on children themselves; see, for example, Gonçalo Santos and Stevan Harrell eds., Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-First Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), Yunxiang Yan ed., Chinese Families Upside Down: Intergenerational Dynamics and Neo-Familism in the Early 21st Century (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

4 Arthur Wolf started writing a book manuscript entitled “Chinese Children and Their Mothers” in his final years and wrote several draft chapters before he passed away in May 2015. Hill Gates holds the Wolf Archive and Arthur's unpublished writings in his private library at Santa Rosa, Northern California. With Hill's permission and generous support, I visited this library, scanned these field-notes and Arthur's draft chapters.

5 A few anthropologists did pay attention to Chinese children's life during their fieldwork in the mid-twentieth century, but those accounts were based on anecdotal observations rather than systematic research. See for example Barbara Ward, Through Other Eyes: Essays in Understanding “Conscious Models,” mostly in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1985), 173–200; G. William Skinner, Rural China on the Eve of Revolution: Sichuan Fieldnotes, 1949–1950, edited by Stevan Harrell and William Lavely (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2017), 74–76.

6 Hirschfeld, Lawrence A., “Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?” American Anthropologist 104.2 (2002), 611–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 I use quotation marks for “the Chinese family” because the term “Chinese” has become politically controversial in the body of sinological anthropology literature: Many foundational works in this field looked at Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere to study “the Chinese society,” because anthropologists could not enter the PRC for fieldwork. Therefore I use the term “Chinese” in the broad sense of cultural heritage, not national identity.

8 See Charles Stafford's interview with James L. Watson, Rubie S. Watson, and Yunxiang Yan, “A Different Kind of Chinese Family,” Anthropology of This Century 25 (2019), at http://aotcpress.com/articles/kind-chinese-family/. In this interview James Watson said: “Let me raise another issue, the question of children. In reading the papers and thinking about China today, one of the things that really strikes me is this: if I look at the photographs from our research in the New Territories over the long term, they are littered with children, kids, everywhere. Every ritual, every family shot, there are waves of kids. If you look at the photos we have of village events, there are rafts of children of every age. Every family had multiple kids. And there are kids managing kids. 10 year old girls carrying their brothers around, all day long.” It means, at the very least, that anthropologists had convenient access and abundant opportunities to studying children's life.

9 For an important exception see Charles Stafford, The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification in Angang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

10 See Barbara Ward, “The Integration of Children into a Chinese Social World: A Preliminary Exploration of Some Non-literate Village Concepts,” in Through Other Eyes, 185.

11 See for example, the assertion that harsh discipline of children leads to respect for parents and fear for aggressive ancestral spirits, in Emily Martin Ahern, The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), 213–19.

12 Yunxiang Yan ed., Chinese Families Upside Down.

13 Amanda Lee, “China Population: Concerns Grow as Number of Registered Births in 2020 Plummet.” China Macro Economy, www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3121112/china-birth-rate-population-concerns-grow-number-registered; “China Allows Three Children in Major Policy Shift.” www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57303592.

14 A recent, exemplary ethnography is Teresa Kuan, Love's Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). One caveat is that a few ethnographies did feature the world of Chinese children, but they focus either on older children, e.g. Vanessa Fong, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), or on children in the school context rather than the family; see Jing Xu, The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).

15 Judith R. Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 2009).

16 Gonçalo D. Santos, “The Anthropology of Chinese Kinship,” mentioned sinological anthropologists’ attitudes toward psychology in the study of Chinese kinship and family (pp. 305–6, 327). For a brief history of anthropology's complicated relationship with psychology in the study of Chinese childhood, see Jing Xu, “Daode cong he erlai: Xinli renzhi renleixue shiye xia de ertong daode fazhan yanjiu” 道德從何而來：心理認知人類學視野下的兒童道德發展研究 [Where does Morality Come from? Research on Children's Moral Development from Psychological & Cognitive Anthropology Perspectives], Shehuixue pinglun, 2020.4, 3–19.

17 For this predominant focus on parent–child ties, a great example is Margery Wolf, “Child Training and the Chinese Family,” in Studies in Chinese Society, edited by Arthur P. Wolf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 221–46.

18 Among the works about lineage and family division and unity, see Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society (London: Athlone Press, 1966); Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Myron Cohen, House United, House Divided (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).

19 For a critique of the inadequate attention to sibling and other sorts of kin and fictive-kin relations, see Charles Stafford, “Chinese Patriliny and the Cycles of Yang and Laiwang,” in Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, edited by Janet Carsten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35–54.

20 Santos, Gonçalo D., “On ‘Same-year Siblings’ in Rural South China,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14.3 (2008) 535–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Helena Obendiek, “When Siblings Determine Your ‘Fate’: Sibling Support and Educational Mobility in Rural Northwest China,” in The Anthropology of Sibling Relations, edited by Erdmute Alber, Cati Coe, and Tatjana Thelen (New York: Springer, 2013), 97–122.

22 Erdmute Alber, Cati Coe, and Tatjana Thelen, eds., The Anthropology of Sibling Relations (New York: Springer, 2013); Tatjana Thelen, Cati Coe, and Erdmute Alber, “Introduction to the Anthropology of Sibling Relations: Explorations in Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange,” in The Anthropology of Sibling Relations, 1–26.

23 Ashley E Maynard and Katrin E Tovote, “Learning from Other Children,” in The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood, edited by David F. Lancy (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2010), 181–205.

24 Tom S. Weisner, “Comparing Sibling Relationships across Cultures,” in Sibling Interaction across Cultures: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, edited by Patricia G. Zukow (New York: Springer, 1989), 14.

25 Liberman, Debra, Tooby, John, and Cosmides, Leda, “The Architecture of Human Kin Detection,” Nature 445 (2007), 727–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Arthur P. Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

27 Thelen, Coe, and Alber, “Introduction to the Anthropology of Sibling Relations.”

28 For the double-edged quality of kinship, see Carsten, Janet, “What Kinship Does–and How,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8.2 (2013)Google Scholar, https://doi.org/10.14318/hau3.2.013; For these ambivalent and contradictory dimensions in cross-sex sibling relation in adulthood, see Joseph, Suad “Brother/Sister Relationships: Connectivity, Love, and Power in the Reproduction of Patriarchy in Lebanon,” American Ethnologist 21.1 (1994), 50–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Margery Wolf, A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

30 The district name changed to 板橋區 in 2010, when Taipei County 台北縣 became New Taipei City 新北市.

31 Margery Wolf, The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Family (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968). But even the House of Lim split into two smaller households (between two brothers’ families) not long after the Wolfs returned to America.

32 Stevan Harrell, “Lessons from the Golden Age of ‘China Ethnography,’” in Anthropological Studies in Taiwan: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Hsu Cheng-kuang and Huang Ying-Kuei (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1999), 211–40.

33 From Arthur Wolf's unpublished draft manuscript.

34 Maurice Freedman, “Foreword.” In Wolf, The House of Lim, xii.

35 For a bibliographical list of research and publications by the Wolfs and their students on the Haishan area, see Arthur Wolf and Chieh-Shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), Appendix B.

36 Arthur Wolf, Chinese Children and Their Mothers: Cultural and Psychological Aspects of Socialization in a Taiwanese Village, Project Summary for National Science Foundation (1982), 4.

37 Especially the younger research assistant MC: The children called her “older sister Chen.”

38 Phone interview with Mr. Huang, May 2021. Mr. Huang, at that time a local youth from the nearby town Shulin 樹林鎮, worked with Arthur Wolf from 1959 to 1960 in this fieldwork. He later became an important collaborator in Wolf's famous “Taiwanese household registers” project and the co-author of the book Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945.

39 For a comprehensive review of the Six Cultures Study, see Levine, Robert A., “The Six Cultures Study: Prologue to a History of a Landmark Project.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 41.4 (2010), 513–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 For a detailed comparison see Xu, Jing, “The Mischievous, the Naughty and the Violent in a Taiwanese Village: Peer Aggression Narratives in Arthur P. Wolf's ‘Child Interview’ (1959).” Cross-Currents: East Asia Culture and History Review 9.1 (2020), 180–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Miller, George A., “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Perspective,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7.3 (2003), 141–44CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

42 Hyowon, Gweon, “Inferential Social Learning: Cognitive Foundations of Human Social Learning and Teaching,” Trends in Cognitive Science, in press; Michael Tomasello, Ann Cale Kruger, and Hilary Horn Ratner, “Cultural Learning,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16.3 (2010), 495–511Google Scholar.

43 Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019).

44 For a popular account of research synthesis, see Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown, 2013); For a summary of latest research on infant moral cognition, see Lucca, Kelsey, Hamlin, J. Kiley, and Sommerville, Jessica A., “Editorial: Early Moral Cognition and Behavior,” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019), DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02013CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

45 See Wolf, “Child Training and the Chinese Family” and Ward, “The Integration of Children into a Chinese Social World.” Among the field-notes this project focuses on, only a tiny portion was used in Margery Wolf's classic works (1972, 1978), and was presented sporadically.

46 John Whiting, Field Guide for a Study of Socialization (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966).

47 A majority of themes were graded according to a binary system, for example, dominating: a score of “0.5” means mild dominating, a score of “1” means severe or repeated dominating. A few themes that have a reactive dimension were graded according to a tripartite system, for example, sharing: a score of “0” means no sharing despite being asked to, a score of “0.5” means mild sharing, and a score of “1” means generous or repeated sharing.

48 For a historical account, see Rebecca Lemov, “X-Rays of Inner Worlds: The Mid-Twentieth-Century American Projective Test Movement,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Science 47.3 (2011), 251–78. The movement certainly influenced sinological anthropologists at that time: For example, G. W. Skinner brought projective tests to his fieldwork in Sichuan as part of the plan to study Chinese social personality (Skinner, Rural China on the Eve of Revolution, vii).

49 H. A. Murray, Thematic Appreception Test (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947).

50 Whiting, Field Guide for a Study of Socialization, 118–28.

51 91 children were interviewed for TAT (in Summer 1960) and 46 for Doll Play (during the weekends in Fall 1960).

52 Wolf, Margery, “The Woman Who didn't Become a Shaman,” American Ethnologist 17.3 (1990), 419–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Wolf, A Thrice-told Tale, 95.

54 Although Margery Wolf used the surname “Tan” for her protagonist in “Thrice-told Tale,” according to the demographic data, this newly settled family actually shares the same surname as the prominent Lin lineage in the village. I use the Romanization “Lin,” the equivalent of “Lim.” All the names are pseudonyms.

55 Wolf, A Thrice-told Tale, 93.

56 Wolf, A Thrice-told Tale, 95.

57 CO #1009, 04/05/1960.

58 The Wolfs’ original research defined 3–11 as their target age range and they did not collect much data on infants, so Lin Chenxin's youngest child is not my focus here.

59 Analyses in Figures 4 and 5 were performed and visualized in Python programming language.

60 Xu, “The Mischievous, the Naughty and the Violent.”

61 For example, if A asked for help from B but B didn't offer help, B would get a score of 0 as an initiator of helping. In this case, B's score 0 would be treated as non-cooperation, instead of cooperation.

62 There is very little observational research in sinological anthropology about gender and children's aggression. One exception is William Jankowiak, Amber Joiner, and Cynthia Khatib, “What Observation Studies Can Tell Us about Single Child Play Patterns, Gender, and Changes in Chinese Society,” Cross-Cultural Research 45.2 (2011), 155–57. Their research on single children in urban China found that boys displayed more physical aggression than girls during play time. In the Wolf archive, Child Interview data did not show significant influences of age or gender on peer aggression in children's answers to hypothetical questions (Xu, “The Mischievous, the Naughty and the Violent.”). Observations of Lin Yikun and Lin Meiyu didn't reveal a male-biased physical aggression either. But they are just two among numerous children. Comprehensive analysis of all observations in the Wolf archive will clarify to what extent children's aggression is related to gender or age.

63 Children's fighting was very common. See episodes of Yikun's conflicts with other children in the next sections.

64 CO # 836, 02/21/1960.

65 CO # 1655, 07/28/1960.

66 SO (situation-based observation) # 59, 08/02/1959.

67 CO # 277, 10/29/1959.

68 CO # 492, 12/30/1959.

69 CO # 313, 11/19/1959.

70 CO # 32, 08/04/1959.

71 CO # 497, 01/01/1960.

72 CO # 1640, 07/20/60.

73 CO # 72, 08/13/1959.

74 DP #50, Session I, 10/07/1960.

75 In the English translation of TAT and Doll Play transcripts, “A” refers to the child's answer, and “Q” refers to the adult interviewer's question.

76 These kinship terms were translated from the Chinese transcript. Without access to the original audio-tapes, unfortunately it remains unclear whether she used Taiwanese or Mandarin terms in the actual conversation. According to Mr. Huang Chieh-Shan, some children were better than others in Mandarin, and some might have spoken a mixture of both languages in projective tests.

77 TAT # 80, P50, summer 1960.

78 Ward, “The Integration of Children into a Chinese Social World”; Wolf, “Child Training and the Chinese Family”; Ahern, The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village, 213–19; Norma Diamond, K'un Shen: A Taiwan Village (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969), 33.

79 TAT # 56, P49, summer 1960.

80 Arthur Wolf, unpublished manuscript.

81 Leigh Minturn and William W, Lambert, Mothers of Six Cultures: Antecedents of Child Rearing (New York: John Wiley,1964), 159. Lambert was Arthur Wolf's psychology advisor at Cornell, and this book was based on the Six Cultures Study. In a Taiwanese village with no lineages during the early 1970s, anthropologist Stevan Harrell observed that children's fights were considered relatively unimportant conflicts, see Stevan Harrell, Ploughshare Village (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), chapter 4.

82 CO # 137, 08/25/59.

83 Wolf, A Thrice-told Tale, 95. Elsewhere in the Wolf archive, for example, in the episode MO (Mother Observation) #70, 09/20/1960, other adults and children complained that Yikun's mother didn't properly discipline him when Yikun was reported climbing up on the fence of someone's house.

84 MO #119, 08/11/1960.

85 A common cursing word in Hokkien, 姦.

86 Wolf, “Child Training and the Chinese Family,” 245.

87 CO # 69, 08/13/1959.

88 CO # 314, 11/20/1959.

89 I am currently preparing a manuscript on this subject.

90 Shaming is an enduring socialization technique in Chinese child socialization, as research in different time periods and regions demonstrate; see, for example, Fung, Heidi, “The Socialization of Shame among Young Chinese Children,” Ethos 27.2 (1999), 180–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jing Xu, The Good Child, 179–180.

91 Quinn, Naomi, “Universals of Child Rearing,” Anthropological Theory 5.4 (2005), 477–516CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Heidi Fung and Benjamin Smith, “Learning Morality,” in The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood, 263.

93 Stafford, The Roads of Chinese Childhood, 11.

94 Blum, Susan D., “Why Don't Anthropologists Care about Learning,” American Anthropologist 121.3 (2019), 641–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Xu, “The Mischievous, the Naughty and the Violent.”

96 Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

97 Hirschfeld, “Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?,” 11.

98 See Thelen, Coe, and Alber, “Introduction to the Anthropology of Sibling Relations”; Joseph, “Brother/Sister Relationships.”

99 Janet Carsten, “What Kinship Does–and How.”

100 In today's Taiwan, adult siblings play an important role in care work and emotion work, facilitating family intimacy and relationality in Taiwan. See Amy Brainer, Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 95–111.

101 The experience of growing up as lonely singletons shape Chinese young adults’ belief that having two children is better, see Zhang, Cong, Yang, Aaron Z., won Kim, Sung, and Fong, Vanessa L.. “How Chinese Newlyweds’ Experiences as Singletons or Siblings Affect their Fertility Desires,” The China Quarterly, 247 (2021), 835–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Despite some increase of second-births, however, new census data shows that China's TFR (total fertility rate) in 2020 dropped to 1.3; see Ryan Woo and Kevin Yao, “China Demographic Crisis Looms as Population Growth Slips to Slowest Ever,” Reuters, May 11, 2021, www.reuters.com/world/china/china-2020-census-shows-slowest-population-growth-since-1-child-policy-2021-05-11/.

102 Weisner, Tom S., “Mixed Methods Should Be a Valued Practice in Anthropology.” Anthropology News 53.5 (2012), 3–4Google Scholar. As Weisner postulated: “Anthropology should be at the forefront of such research and practice, not critiquing from the margins or simply ignoring important methodological and research design innovations” (p. 4.)

103 The humanities are far ahead of socio-cultural anthropology, in using data science text-analytics, even though anthropologists also largely rely on textual records, fieldnotes, for our scholarship.