In Chapter 1 I outlined the analytic moves by which this book has sought to remake demographic analysis to incorporate the roles of culture and history, gender and power in reproductive life. In this brief afterword I turn to anthropology, suggesting how the discipline might be stretched, and thereby enriched, through closer attention to demographic and reproductive matters. I do so in two ways: by looking backward to review what has been accomplished here, and by looking forward to sketch out domains for future research.

Old themes and new

During most of this century anthropological interest in reproductive issues has been muted, depressed perhaps by the demographic construction of them as matters of modernization and mathematics. Nevertheless, anthropologists have not neglected these issues entirely. A close look at the history of our field indicates that reproduction was not a consistent theme in anthropology, but it attracted the attention of a good number of individual anthropologists, including leading practitioners of our craft. For reasons that cannot be pursued here, the interest in fertility was stronger among British than American anthropologists, at least in the early and middle decades of this century. Bronislaw Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages (1987 [1929]), Raymond Firth's We, The Tikopia (1936), and Meyer Fortes's The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi (1949) come readily to mind.

Long neglected by cultural anthropology, the subject of human reproduction is now being retrieved and made the focus of scholarly inquiry. Inspired by developments in feminism, political economy, and practice theory, growing numbers of anthropologists are probing the culture and political economy of reproduction. This book seeks to coax form out of this diverse body of studies, thereby making it accessible to colleagues in other branches of the discipline. Our hope is that, by bringing out the intellectual roots and intellectual promise of this new work, we might move this fundamental feature of human life closer to the center of anthropological inquiry.

Because demographers are the main group of scholars who have studied fertility, building an anthropology of reproduction entails critical reflection on and assessment of their work. Demography has developed impressive techniques for analyzing population data, but theoretical work on the sources of fertility change has lapsed. In seeking to improve the understanding of fertility dynamics, we aim not to reinvent the field of demography, but to create a different kind of demography, one better suited to the anthropological enterprise.

This book originated in a session called Rethinking Reproduction: Toward a Political Economy of Fertility, held at the 1990 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans.

Since the end of World War II changing birth rates have had far-reaching consequences for social life. In every region of the world couples have been having fewer children, shrinking the basic unit of social life. Issues surrounding reproduction, once considered the most private and taboo of subjects, have become matters of intense public concern, as neo-Malthusians and environmentalists claim third-world overpopulation as a threat to the future of mankind. Cultural understandings of reproduction have also been transformed, as new technological and biomedical breakthroughs have forced us to rethink our notions of personhood and gender, family and kinship.

As students of human societies and cultures, anthropologists ought to be curious about the causes and effects of these remarkable demographic changes. Yet, until recently, matters relating to human reproduction engaged the attention of a surprisingly small number of cultural anthropologists. (This discussion excludes work in biological anthropology and paleodemography; henceforth “anthropology” is used as shorthand for the cultural branch of the field.) In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of fertility remained the province of the subfields of demographic anthropology, cultural ecology, and cultural materialism. While interest in reproduction was keen in these specialized fields, anthropology at large continued to view social life through the lens of kinship and other traditional theories of the discipline, neglecting the impact of changing human numbers on social and cultural life.