In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, temples dedicated to Laldas, who was born to Muslim parents, have mushroomed all over north India. Although he is currently mostly worshipped by the Hindu caste of Baniyas (merchants or traders), Laldas was historically known for having a dual religious identity as a Sufi pīr (Islamic mystic or saint) among Muslims and bābā or sant among Hindus. He preached nirgu bhakti (formless devotion) to the Hindu god Ram, lived a married life, combined ‘Islamic’ and ‘Hindu’ religious doctrines and developed a distinct form of religiosity shared by people across religious denominations. The saint taught his followers to observe five rules: to refrain from killing animals and eating meat (particularly beef); to abstain from alcohol consumption; to avoid partaking of any food in their daughter's home; to not cultivate tobacco and sugar cane in the area; and to avoid stealing. The ultimate objective for devotees from diverse socioreligious backgrounds was to continuously chant the name of Ram.

Laldas and his teachings straddled the boundaries of ‘Islam’ and ‘Hinduism’. But his main followers, Hindu Laldasis of the Baniya background and Muslim Laldasis of the Meo Muslim background, began to identify him more closely with either ‘Islam’ or ‘Hinduism’ in the twentieth century. Born into a Meo Muslim family in the sixteenth century (1540 CE) as Lal Khan Meo, the saint is presently more popular under the designation of Baba Laldas. Following his guru Kabir, Laldas not only advocated worshipping ‘God’ in a nirgu bhakti manner but also lived by the values of ‘Islam’ in his personal life. Like Kabir, Laldas, his religious instructions and the Laldasi panth (religious path or way) founded by his followers traditionally did not discriminate on caste and religious levels. The saint considered institutional religious identities as impediments in the path of bhakti (devotion). His teachings are still followed by people of both religions. But the saint's identity and associated religious practices have recently been transformed, indicating a shift from a shared liminal religious entity to an emerging component of north Indian devotional Hinduism.

This book is an attempt to understand historically and anthropologically a changing form of religious culture around the bhakti figure and the religious order of Laldas that has undergone multiple transformations since its inception in the sixteenth century.

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.

How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children’s learning morality teach us about ethnographic knowledge or any social knowledge? My book explores such questions via analyzing old fieldnotes collected by Arthur and Margery Wolf in a Taiwan village (1958–60) in Martial Law Era, before rapid economic growth, industrialization and urbanization. Born from the Six Cultures Study, a landmark project in cross-cultural research, the Wolfs’ fieldwork was the first ethnographic study on ethnic Han children. Bringing to light the rich texts of systematic observation, interview and projective tests, I combined ethnographic interpretation with NLP and machine learning techniques, behavioral coding and social network analysis. I explain how children defied parental commands and violated cultural precepts. I trace how they navigated cooperation, conflict and the gray areas in between, with complex moral sensibilities and gendered expressions, and highlight the role of peers and siblings. I connect the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and urge all of us to take children seriously.

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.