Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

The authors have used video diaries extensively in corporate ethnography and have found them to be an essential tool in the collection of observational data in health care and consumer research. Drawing on their experience, the chapter explores video diaries’ practical uses in ethnographic research, detailing their strengths and weaknesses in the types of research questions they can help answer and the kinds of data they produce. The chapter also serves as a guide to incorporating video diaries into ethnographic and qualitative research, offering practical advice on topics including video diary guides, communication strategies with participants, and the advantages and disadvantages of mobile phone diaries versus free-standing camcorder diaries.

This chapter seeks to advance the debate on digital research methods beyond the opposition between ‘face to face’ or online ethnography. Our focus will be on the practical experience of doing online ethnography, alongside how traditional and online ethnography can be integrated through the ideal of ‘being there’ i.e., direct observation. Christine Hine (2016: 257) notes that “the study of Internet interactions became popular in the 1990s.” We explore what is understood as authentic ethnography between the online and the offline through critically observing what is comfortable and uncomfortable in both worlds to argue that as a method and theory ethnography adapts.

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.

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.

This chapter shows how human sciences researchers in Puerto Rico faced pressure to abandon earlier traditions and embrace the methods and biomedical enterprise of the United States empire’s scientific modernity. Drawing on the history of mental testing and inmate assessment as well as designs for a new penitentiary, the chapter contends that while mid twentieth-century US-American social science engaged in intense processes of othering that aligned with imperial expansion, Puerto Rican social scientists combined US-American psychometrics with older Spanish ethnographic traditions that powerfully resurfaced in the 1940s. These diagnostic and descriptive tools revealed that incarcerated people required discipline, tutelage, and treatment, but that they also had redemptive potential regardless of social difference. Social scientists put mental test results into dialogue with ethnographic narratives of convicts to forge what to them were forward-looking treatment programs, illustrating how racialized racelessness and intersubjective exchanges transformed Puerto Rican corrections for a time. The result was a blended, “creole” nationalist science with decolonial aspirations, although one that was colonial-populist in practice.

Hybrids were integral to the classificatory schemes that organized knowledge in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. Texts produced by Hanno, Ktesias and Megasthenes reveal the slippage whereby ethnographic description created hierarchies of territories and cultures exemplified by hybrid animals and exotic humans. In literary texts India played an especially significant role. It was a mirror image of the Mediterranean, yet far enough away to also generate anomalous wonders on its borders. It was not merely the exotic animals of distant lands, such as camels, leopards, and giraffes, that astonished the Greek subjects of Hellenistic kings, but also the descriptions of anomalous humans, such as Blemmyes, Dog-Heads and Skiapods, that confirmed an orderly Mediterranean world of properly recognizable humanity, the edges of which were populated by the monstrous, the ugly and the deformed. Ethnography and paradoxography were therefore highly conservative genres that provided hierarchies structured on normality and anomaly to reinforce order.

Bioethnography, the combination of ethnographic observation and biochemical sampling, is a synthetic method for understanding environmental and bodily interactions. DOHaD researchers can use bioethnographically derived data to examine the complex processes that shape health and disease. Using examples from a longitudinal birth cohort study in Mexico City, the authors describe how bioethnography, which begins with an open-ended observational stage, can counteract some of the limitations of DOHaD research, which can be reductionist and universalising. DOHaD researchers often focus on the behaviour of individuals, especially mothers, instead of on the political-economic processes and environments that contribute to poor health and inequality. In addition, DOHaD researchers, who often reside in high-resource environments, tend to universalise their own experience rather than identify relevant research questions for people living in different circumstances. To combat reductionist and universalising tendencies, bioethnography allows researchers to develop inductively derived hypotheses and then test these in specific contexts. Validating and testing theories derived from bioethnographic methods in the same population where they were observed can fill critical gaps in DOHaD research that seeks to understand the complex relationship between environments and disease over the lifecourse.