Fertility, Conjuncture, Difference: Anthropological Approaches to the Heterogeneity of Modern Fertility Declines

Fertility, Conjuncture, Difference; Contents ; Illustrations, Figures and Tables ; Preface ; Introduction; Chapter 1. The Key to Fertility; Chapter 2. Becoming and Belonging in African Historical Demography, 1900-2000; Chapter 3. Between the Central Laws of Moscow and Local Particularity; Chapter 4. Feeling Secure to Reproduce; Chapter 5. Ambivalent Men; Chapter 6. Accounting for Reproductive Difference; Chapter 7. Understanding Childlessness in Botswana; Chapter 9. 'The Doctor's Way'; Chapter 10. Demographers on Culture; Chapter 11. Vital Conjunctures Revisited; Index.

In the last forty years anthropologists have made major contributions to understanding the heterogeneity of reproductive trends and processes underlying them. Fertility transition, rather than the story of the triumphant spread of Western birth control rationality, reveals a diversity of reproductive means and ends continuing before, during, and after transition. This collection brings together anthropological case studies, placing them in a comparative framework of compositional demography and conjunctural action. The volume addresses major issues of inequality and distribution which shape population and social structures, and in which fertility trends and the formation and size of families are not decided solely or primarily by reproduction.