Dr. Charles Stafford

Biography

Professor Charles Stafford is a prominent anthropologist whose research has primarily focused on issues related to learning cognition, child development, emotions, identity, morality, ethics, and the economic life of communities. His major fieldwork project in the late 1980s in a Taiwanese fishing community investigated child development through the lens of nationalist schooling and popular religion, resulting in the monograph 'Roads to Chinese Childhood' published by Cambridge in 1995. In the early 1990s, he began research in mainland China, exploring kinship, religion, and historical consciousness, with particular interest in the rituals of separation and reunion and their social implications in rural communities, documented in 'Separation and Reunion in Modern China' (Cambridge 2000). His work examines the intersection of everyday moral and ethical life with economic psychology, as seen in recent edited volumes such as 'Ordinary Ethics in China' (Bloomsbury 2013) and 'Cooperation in Chinese Communities' (Bloomsbury 2018). His latest single-author work, 'Economic Life in the Real World: Logic, Emotion, Ethics' (Cambridge 2020), engages in a dialogue between anthropology, psychology, and economics. He has conducted recent fieldwork in Oklahoma, studying kin and non-kin cooperation across cultural contexts, and has expertise in China, Taiwan, and the USA, particularly in learning, schooling, and cognitive anthropology.

Research Interests