Scholars across disciplines who are interested in children and childhood in China will be attracted by the title of this book at first sight. This work is the result of several years of careful analysis and a thoughtful reevaluation of a voluminous set of raw fieldnotes created by a research team led by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf. Conducted in Xia Xizhou, a now-urbanized village in northern Taiwan, the research took place from 1958 to 1960 during Taiwan’s Martial Law period. Jing Xu, the author, gained access to the Wolf Archive through Hill Gates, Arthur Wolf’s widow, upon the recommendation of Stevan Harrell, a former student of Wolf. They had secured a most appropriate candidate to conduct research on the “thousands of pages of fieldnotes” (221) left by the Wolf Team, most of which had remained largely unexamined in previous publications by Arthur Wolf and his then-wife Margery Wolf. Although Arthur Wolf returned to this project in the final stage of his life, aiming to produce a book manuscript, he, unfortunately, did not live to complete it.
The Wolf Archive “preserves systematic, ethnographic record of a historical world that no longer exists” (23), documenting the life of over 200 young children residing in Xia Xizhou six decades ago. The American anthropologist couple spent two years in this fieldwork, employing two Taiwanese research assistants to collect and preserve ethnographic records of children’s everyday lives. This rich data set includes 1,678 episodes of timed (meaning “scheduled”) observation and 173 episodes of situation-elicited observation of children; 160 mother–child interaction observations, standardized interviews with 79 children and 43 mothers; and 83 episodes of non-standardized, spontaneous interviews with children and mothers; along with documentation of children’s performance on project tests, including 92 children who participated in the Thematic Apperception Test and 46 who participated in the Doll Play (24–26). Each episode was systematically recorded with assigned IDs and event information, ensuring a professional preservation of demographic and household data.
In her examination, Xu strives to “stay faithful to the materials” (71), revisiting the historical fieldnotes with fresh methods and insights. Focusing on learning morality as the primary theme and the construction of ethnography as a secondary objective, Xu takes a new look at the Wolf Archive to address three questions: “The question of learning morality in childhood; the place of children in the study of Chinese culture and society; and the contributions of new methodologies to anthropological knowledge” (4–6). Xu employs computational techniques to reanalyze the records, arguing that, in addition to “close reading” of the texts, she has incorporated computational “distant learning” skills, such as natural-language-processing methods, social network analysis, and fine-grained behavioral coding. She seeks to approach projective test results differently from the original research team in order to make better sense of the data, taking advantage of a human–machine hybrid approach that her predecessors lacked. The approach includes exploring patterns of common words through their frequency and co-occurrence, as well as analyzing children’s networks and interpreting them in various ways.
While honoring the Wolf Team for their pioneering work in ethnography with Han Chinese children, Xu made a bold move to “write an ethnography without first-person fieldwork experience” (xx). She believes that “childhood provides a unique lens to explore fundamental dimensions of human experience” (xxii). That being so, she places the observed and interviewed Xia Xizhou children at center stage to study numerous episodes of their everyday life, exploring their active learning, fighting, teasing, emotions, and gendered expressions, and the ways they navigate social norms, cultural values, and familial expectations to negotiate rules, resolve conflicts, and develop their own sense of moral understandings. Xu also discusses “how children’s moral sensibilities about authority, punishment, and violence are influenced by schooling, policing, and gangsters in the historical context of Taiwan’s Martial Law Era” (23).
The book is well-structured and coherent. In addition to a Foreword by Stevan Harrell and an Afterword by Hill Gates, which both offer background information and further reflections about the Wolf Archive, the book consists of an Introduction, five major chapters, and an Epilogue, complete with figures, tables, abbreviations, and terminology notes, among other features. Chapter One outlines Xu’s “fieldwork beyond fieldwork,” detailing her “unusual journey of reconstructing an ethnography” (32) based on old sources and new methods. The subsequent chapters integrate the interview, observation, and projective test materials and employ computational analysis to uncover the experiences of “disobedient children.” Chapter Two thoroughly discusses the limits of parental punishment; Chapters Three and Five shed light on the significance of peer ties and sibling relationships respectively; and Chapter Four examines how gender influences moral experiences. The chapters are coherently linked, with Xu effectively guiding readers from one to the next. In the Epilogue, she critically reevaluates traditional paradigms, justifying her choice of the title “Unruly” Children to highlight how the children “defy parental expectations” and “negotiate with peers and siblings and develop their own moral understandings.” She positions her work as a “revisionist account” of the so-called “traditional Chinese family,” asserting that the two hundred normal but “unruly” children shed new light on “Chinese and East Asian childhood, family, and morality from the past to the present” (214). Xu concludes with a compelling call for taking children seriously, emphasizing that children “have much to teach us, with their unique positionality and enigmatic minds, about morality, learning, culture, and human knowledge in general” (223).
Departing from the conventional child-rearing concepts and parenting discourses in previous scholarship, Xu focuses on the textualized voices of the children to explore their social world and inner life, treating them as historical subjects and agents. Her work convincingly portrays children as more than passive recipients of imposed values. The book cover, featuring a picture of two Xia Xizhou children taken by the Wolf Team, symbolizes “a moment of mutual gaze between the anthropologist-photographer and his research interlocutors” (xxv), highlighting the subtlety of subjectivity involved in ethnography.
For historians, the Wolf Archive is invaluable. It preserves direct accounts of a community of children in a historical context. While there are numerous seminal works that meticulously utilize third-person writings, flashback memoirs, didactic literature, or other indirect materials to discuss the representations of childhood in historical China—such as those by Ping-chen Hsiung, Anne Behnke Kinney, Yuwen Zhou, Keith Nathaniel Knapp, and Limin Bai—the Wolf Archive offers a unique repository of firsthand experiences. Though the children did not directly produce the fieldnotes, the research team engaged with them closely, documenting their words and actions comprehensively, basically reporting “everything the subject (target child) did and said and most of what the other people present did and said” (27–28). Thus, the notes largely preserve the children’s voices word for word. Although the unavoidable “layers of translation” that arise during the process of reporting by the research assistants and scribing by the anthropologists (38) may raise questions about potential distortions in the children’s narratives, the Archive remains a precious resource for understanding childhood that historians cannot afford to overlook.
Published in the “New Departures in Anthropology” series, “Unruly” Children represents a significant interdisciplinary contribution, bridging anthropology, psychology, education, history, and computational studies, among other fields. Harrell notes in the Foreword that Xu’s work manages to “point the way forward for future ethnographers, psychologists, and historians of childhood” (xv). Yet, interdisciplinary dialogue requires addressing how perspectives differ among these fields. For instance, how might the fancy presentation of the machine-analyzed data on the frequency of behaviors, words, and networks (187–93) reshape the understanding of readers from different fields? How do the author’s statement that “anthropologists rely on gossip to gather data” (185) and her frequent references to weaving personal experiences, including dreams (e.g., 39–41), into the discussion resonate with historians who prioritize documented evidence?
It is encouraging that Xu finally managed to visit the Xia Xizhou site after the COVID-19 pandemic and connected with some of the children from the original study, now grandparents (216). She also interviewed one of Wolfs’ research assistants by phone during the pandemic (57–68). While these may compensate a little for her “absence” in the original fieldwork, readers might have appreciated more extended outreach to original stakeholders for additional context.
Lastly, while the visual materials about the village, children, and test information add intrigue, the absence of illustrations of the fieldnotes themselves is a missed opportunity. Including images of the fieldnotes and showing their classification and organization would have provided readers with a fuller understanding of the Wolf Archive.
Overall, “Unruly Children” is a valuable addition to scholarship on Chinese childhood. The unique insights from the Wolf Archive, Xu’s innovative methodologies, and her advocacy for “taking children seriously,” will continue to foster interdisciplinary conversations. Scholars must engage age as a category of analysis and take childhood history seriously. After all, all adults were once children.
