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

Authors :
Xu, Jing
Source :
Journal of Chinese History; Jul2022, Vol. 6 Issue 2, p337-363, 27p
Publication Year :
2022

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
20591632
Volume :
6
Issue :
2
Database :
Complementary Index
Journal :
Journal of Chinese History
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
157991358
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2021.31