Situating Fertility
Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry

A collection of essays outlining new anthropological approaches to the issue of fertility.

Susan Greenhalgh (Edited by)

9780521469999, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 July 1995

324 pages, 2 maps 14 tables
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.564 kg

"Surely anthropologists interested in diversity and cultural specificty should applaud this demonstration of autonomy and resistance to anthropological hegemony." Susan Cotts Watkins

In this collection of essays ten anthropologists and two historians address the world-wide pattern of falling birth rates. Fertility has commonly been treated from a specialized demographic perspective, but there is today widespread dissatisfaction with conventional demographic approaches, which are criticized for neglecting the cultural, social, and political forces that affect reproductive behavior. For their part, anthropologists have only recently begun to apply their characteristic approaches to the study of reproduction. Drawing on new ethnographic and historical research and on a variety of theoretical approaches, the contributors to this book indicate some of the ways in which demography might take into account historical processes, political forces, and cultural conceptions.

1. Anthropology theorizes reproduction: integrating practice, political economic, and feminist perspectives
2. Political economic and cultural explanations of demographic behavior
3. Agency and fertility: for an ethnography of practice
4. Invisible cultures: poor women's networks and reproductive strategies in nineteenth-century Paris
5. The power of names: illegitimacy in a Muslim community in Cote d'Ivoire
6. Marginal members: the problem of children of previous unions in Mende households in Sierra Leone
7. Women's empowerment and fertility decline in western Kenya
8. High fertility and poverty in Sicily: beyond the culture versus rationality debate
9. History, marriage politics, and demographic events in the central Himalaya
10. Economics 1, Culture 0: fertility change and differences in the northwest Balkans, 1700–1900.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], Population & demography [JHBD]