Anthropological Demography

Anthropological Demography
Author: David I. Kertzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1997-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226431967

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Revised papers originally presented at the Brown University Conference on Anthropological Demography, Nov 3-5, 1994.

Culture And Reproduction

Culture And Reproduction
Author: W. Penn Handwerker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-03-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 042971212X

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This book originated in a conference on Culture and Reproduction held at the University of California. It discusses conceptual changes in demographic theory, focuses on micro-level issues, and explores linkages between micro-level processes and the macro-level constraints that shape those processes. World population growth, especially its fertility component, poses a major dilemma for policymakers throughout the world. However, theoretical developments in demography have not yet provided a solid foundation for understanding contemporary population processes. From an anthropological perspective, the current micro-level models do not properly recognize the cultural and biological constraints within which people make reproductive decisions. On the macro level, demographic transition continues to be linked to processes of "modernization." Arguing that it is necessary to readdress micro-level issues in light of the cultural-historical variability of particular places and times and to explore linkages between macro- and micro-level phenomena through which population processes work themselves out, the contributors point the way to new theoretical formulations of the concept of culture, the nature of macro/micro linkages, and methods of placing demographic theory within the more encompassing framework of evolutionary theory.

Categories and Contexts

Categories and Contexts
Author: Simon Szreter
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2004-03-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191533696

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Throughout its history as a social science, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying social problems. As a result, demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from dynamic relationships and local contexts and processes. This volume questions these fixed categories in two ways. First, it examines the historical and political circumstances in which such categories had their provenance, and, second, it reassesses their uncritical applications over space and time in a diverse range of empirical case studies, encouraging throughout a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue involving anthropologists, demographers, historians, and sociologists. This volume seeks to examine the political complexities that lie at the heart of population studies by focusing on category formation, category use, and category critique. It shows that this takes the form of a dialectic between the needs for clarity of scientific and administrative analysis and the recalcitrant diversity of the social contexts and human processes that generate population change. The critical reflections of each chapter are enriched by meticulous ethnographic fieldwork and historical research drawn from every continent. This volume, therefore, exemplifies a new methodology for research in population studies, one that does not simply accept and re-use the established categories of population science but seeks critically and reflexively to explore, test, and re-evaluate their meanings in diverse contexts. It shows that for demography to realise its full potential it must urgently re-examine and contextualize the social categories used today in population research.

Counting Populations, Understanding Societies

Counting Populations, Understanding Societies
Author: Véronique Petit
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2013-02-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9400750463

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The core aim of this book is to determine how anthropology and demography can be used in conjunction in the field of population and development. The boundaries of demography are not as clearly defined or as stable as one might think, especially in view of the tension between a formal demography centered on the ‘core of procedures and references’ and a more open form of demography, generally referred to as Population Studies. Many rapprochements, missed opportunities and isolated attempts marked the disciplinary history of anthropology and demography, both disciplines being founded on distinct and highly differentiated traditions and practices. Moreover, the role and the place assigned to epistemology differ significantly in ethnology and demography. Yet, anthropology and demography provide complementary models and research instruments and this book shows that neither discipline can afford to overlook their respective contributions. Based on research conducted in West Africa over more than twenty years, it is a defense of field demography that makes case for a continuum ranging from the initial conception of fieldwork and research to its effective implementation and to data analysis. Changes in behaviors relating to fertility, poverty or migration cannot be interpreted without invoking the cultural factor at some stage. Representations in their collective and individual dimensions also fit into the extended explanatory space of demography.

The Anthropological Demography of Health

The Anthropological Demography of Health
Author: Véronique Petit
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2020-10-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0192607324

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The anthropological demography of health, as a field of interdisciplinary population research, has grown from the 1990s, extending to a remarkable range of key human and policy issues, including: genetic disorders; nutrition; mental health; infant, child, and maternal morbidity; malaria; HIV/AIDS; disability and chronic diseases; new reproductive technologies; and population ageing. By observing group formation and change over time, tracking people's networks, and observing variance between what people say and do, anthropological demography goes beyond the characteristically top-down formal methodologies of most mainstream socio-economic demography and population health. This path-breaking volume charts and integrates the growing body of research that combines ethnography with quantitative models and methods in the field of population health. It offers a clear agenda based on important conceptual and methodological advances, and often working in close collaboration with medical and historical research. Approaches to population that are grounded in sustained ethnographic and historical research provide more than substantive knowledge of how cultural and social formations interact with health. They enable understanding of how local institutions and experience of vital events come to be translated into the demographic and health measures on which survey and clinical programmes rely. This, in turn, makes possible critical evaluation of the empirical adequacy of such translation, reflection on what happens when these models and measures become standardised evaluations of health statuses, and what this implies for governance. The combination of anthropological, demographic, historical, and biological research has gone beyond the initial demographic prioritisation of fertility regulation, to take on an expanded range of key health policy issues, and locate them in the context of the inequalities that so frequently give rise to major health differentials. The Anthropological Demography of Health offers a clear agenda for the application and extension of combined anthropological and demographic thinking in population health, and will provide a point of reference for the field.

Dynamic Population Models

Dynamic Population Models
Author: Robert Schoen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2007-05-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1402052308

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Dynamic Population Models is the first book to comprehensively discuss and synthesize the emerging field of dynamic modeling. Incorporating the latest research, it includes thorough discussions of population growth and momentum under gradual fertility declines, the impact of changes in the timing of events on fertility measures, and the complex relationship between period and cohort measures. The book is designed to be accessible to those with only a minimal knowledge of calculus.

Paleodemography

Paleodemography
Author: Robert D. Hoppa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2008-10-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1139441558

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Paleodemography is the field of enquiry that attempts to identify demographic parameters from past populations (usually skeletal samples) derived from archaeological contexts, and then to make interpretations regarding the health and well-being of those populations. However, paleodemographic theory relies on several assumptions that cannot easily be validated by the researcher, and if incorrect, can lead to large errors or biases. In this book, physical anthropologists, mathematical demographers and statisticians tackle these methodological issues for reconstructing demographic structure for skeletal samples. Topics discussed include how skeletal morphology is linked to chronological age, assessment of age from the skeleton, demographic models of mortality and their interpretation, and biostatistical approaches to age structure estimation from archaeological samples. This work will be of immense importance to anyone interested in paleodemography, including biological and physical anthropologists, demographers, geographers, evolutionary biologists and statisticians.

Understanding Family Change and Variation

Understanding Family Change and Variation
Author: Jennifer A. Johnson-Hanks
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2011-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9400719450

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Fertility rates vary considerably across and within societies, and over time. Over the last three decades, social demographers have made remarkable progress in documenting these axes of variation, but theoretical models to explain family change and variation have lagged behind. At the same time, our sister disciplines—from cultural anthropology to social psychology to cognitive science and beyond—have made dramatic strides in understanding how social action works, and how bodies, brains, cultural contexts, and structural conditions are coordinated in that process. Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action argues that social demography must be reintegrated into the core of theory and research about the processes and mechanisms of social action, and proposes a framework through which that reintegration can occur. This framework posits that material and schematic structures profoundly shape the occurrence, frequency, and context of the vital events that constitute the object of social demography. Fertility and family behaviors are best understood as a function not just of individual traits, but of the structured contexts in which behavior occurs. This approach upends many assumptions in social demography, encouraging demographers to embrace the endogeneity of social life and to move beyond fruitless debates of structure versus culture, of agency versus structure, or of biology versus society.

Population Growth: Anthropological Implications

Population Growth: Anthropological Implications
Author: University of Pennsylvania. Near East Center
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press
Total Pages: 466
Release: 1972
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

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The essays collected in this book explore a new and important field of study--the interrelationship between population growth and decline and changes in technology, culture, and social organization. They were generated by a discussion of Ester Boserup's anti-Malthusian theory that the increased pressures of population on resources triggered evolutionary changes in the technology, culture, and social organization of historical agricultural societies. Each author has reacted to the "Boserup Model" both in terms of his own sets of data and his personal theoretical inclinations; yet a common theme emerges--that changes in population pressure are a "sometimes gentle, sometimes compelling [but] ever-present force" in history and society.Chapters are arranged according to the types of data they present. The first half of the book deals with agriculture as a subsistence base, while the second half treats broader problems of cultural change or intensification in the context of technological diversity. The book itself is based on a conference, "Population, Resources, and Technology," which was organized by anthropology professor Brian Spooner and held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1970.Contents: "The Evolution of Early Agriculture and Culture in Greater Mesopotamia: A Trial Model, " Philip E. L. Smith and T. Cuyler Young, Jr.; "Demography and the "Urban Revolution" in Lowland Mesopotamia, " Robert McC. Adams; "From Autonomous Villages to the State, a Numerical Estimation, " Robert L. Carneiro; "A Regional Population in Egypt to circa 600 B.C., " David O'Connor; "Population, Agricultural History, and Societal Evolution in Mesoamerica, " William T. Sanders; "Plow and Population in Temperate Europe, " Bernard Wailes; "Some Aspects of Agriculture in Taita, " Alfred Harris; "Farm Labor and the Evolution of Food Production, " Bennet Bronson; "Sacred Power and Centralization: Aspects of Political Adaptation in Africa, " Robert McC. Netting; "The Iranian Deserts, " Brian Spooner; "Demographic Aspects of Tibetan Nomadic Pastoralism, " Robert B. Ekvall; "Population Growth and Political Centralization, " Don E. Dumond; "Prehistoric Population Growth and Subsistence Change in Eskimo Alaska, " Don E. Dumond; "Population Growth and the Beginnings of Sedentary Life among the !Kung Bushmen, " Richard B. Lee; "The Intensification of Social Life among the !Kung Bushmen, " Richard B. Lee; "Biological Factors in Population Control, " Solomon H. Katz; "The Viewpoint of Historical Demography, " John D. Durand.