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Kindreds of the Earth: Badaga Household Structure and Demography. Paul Hackings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. 302 pp.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the idea of what may be called Public Demography, wherein the practitioners and interpreters of the discipline of population studies inform (and sometimes inflame) the popular discourse on population‐related matters. It looks at the representation of demographic research and policies in one form of public engagement, namely fiction — literature being an important way of transmitting the substance of a technical field of study to a lay public. Reviewing a sample of fictional writing that is clearly derived from a specialized knowledge of the subject of demography, the article finds it useful to classify this genre into two groups. The works in the first group tend to reproduce or reiterate the mainstream assumptions underlying the academic discipline, while those in the second group seem to take on board more recent criticisms of these assumptions, sometimes in unexpected ways. Readers, however, seem to react much more readily to those works that repeat some of the 'bad' habits of the discipline.

Birth rates in India have been in a definite decline since about 1985. However, contrary to our assumption that fertility declines in this region hinge on improvements in the status of women, declining fertility seems to be going hand in hand with worsening population sex ratios. This article examines the evidence for a causal connection between fertility decline and increasing gender imbalance by looking at differences in fertility and in gender inequalities between North and South India in the past, and their increasing convergence in gender inequalities in recent years. It pays special attention to the southern state of Tamil Nadu which has been in the forefront of the country's fertility decline but is nevertheless moving towards a North Indian pattern in many aspects of women's status. The Tamil Nadu example is a particularly striking way of studying the country‐wide trend because it represents a break from the past, in contrast to North India, where increasing gender differentials may be seen more as an accentuation of long‐existing trends. The main problem seems to be that pressures to lower fertility are occurring independently of a change in underlying son preferences and falls in fertility are being aided by technologies which allow one to manipulate not just the sex composition of living children, but also that of children as yet unborn. Some policy implications of this last situation are discussed.