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.

Chapter 5 examines the BJP’s attempt to build centres of elite, traditional intellectuals to legitimise its identity politics. While dismantling advisory committees, quashing dissent, and attacking universities and established research institutions, the BJP has built think tanks to bring together stakeholders in government and civil society and give its political ideology a footprint in already established policy networks. Some scholars have characterised the BJP’s think tanks as institutions of ‘soft Hindutva’ (see Anderson 2015), that is, organisations that avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu-nationalist linkages but pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda nevertheless. Through an ethnographic study of the BJP’s two most prominent think tanks, this chapter demonstrates how manifestations of Hindutva can be both explicitly political and anti-political at the same time: advocating for political interventionism while eschewing politics and forging an apolitical route towards cultural transformation.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the extensive summaries and paraphrases of books 1 and 5 of Agatharchides’ lost work On the Erythraian Sea (written c.145 BC) that were made by Diodoros (book 3), Strabo (book 16), and especially Photios (Bibliotheke, codices 213 and 250). Additional testimonia and fragments are arranged as five extracts. The chapter introduction reviews Agatharchides’ career, his writings, and his scholarly milieux in Alexandria and later (probably) Athens, and upholds the view that On the Erythraian Sea was a self-contained work, not part of a larger whole. The geographical and ethnographic material in this work–a historical work–is distinctive for being based on information from Ptolemaic commanders and explorers, and remarkable for its sympathy with some of the Ptolemies’ oppressed subjects. Agatharchides’ depiction of these peoples implies an evolutionary scheme of development–from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to farmers–such as Dikaiarchos (Chapter 9 of this volume) had suggested in his philosophical works. The surviving summaries include remarkable passages on elephant-hunting and the sufferings of gold-miners; but Agatharchides’ work was more often accessed through its reworking by Artemidoros (Chapter 18) than read in its own right. A new map highlights the principal places and peoples mentioned by Agatharchides in East Africa and Arabia.

This final chapter shifts to look to Herodotus’ reception in the early fourth century in the Dissoi Logoi. What questions does Herodotus raise for subsequent philosophers? How does allusion to the Histories in a treatise that is explicitly philosophical expand our understanding of his project? What is the consequence of this for Herodotus’ generic positionality? The Dissoi Logoi offers a case study in the reception of the Histories as an example of its prominence in intellectual culture. The second half of the chapter reprises the conclusions of the book and reexamines the value of reading what will become early Greek "historiography" alongside philosophy.

Chapter 5 situates Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue in the context of earlier Russian American travelogues. Like the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Soviet novelist Boris Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov drew on the tradition established by Maxim Gorky of depicting a journey to America as a descent into hell. Nonetheless, the Soviet funnymen had a far lighter touch than their predecessors. The chapter argues that the travelogue can also be read as an adventure story in the vein of director Lev Kuleshov’s 1924 hit comedy "The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks." Lighthearted ethnographers, Ilf and Petrov lingered over the “extra-ideological realities” of the American landscape and made gentle fun of themselves as eager adventurers and participant observers.

Chapter 15 places Ilf and Petrov’s reaction to American Indians in the context of Soviet nationalities policy. We can see in Ilf and Petrov’s insistence that the American government made “intentional” mistakes in its treatment of Native American peoples yet another example of their tendency to apply Soviet categories to American realities. Doing so, they provided oversimplified depictions of both American Indian policy and Soviet nationalities policy. The shortcomings of their analyses notwithstanding, reconstructing Ilf and Petrov’s encounters and observations in the desert Southwest opens a revealing perspective on the role of racialized difference in Soviet and American understandings of ethnic minorities. Behind this shared sensibility lay a long history of Russian–American anthropological exchanges that was coming to an end as Ilf and Petrov crossed the United States.