The Uses of Culture in Demographic Research: A Continuing Place for Community Studies

Abstract

FOR A CULTURAL anthropologist, one of the most promising developments in demography over the last 20 years has been the demise of its once guiding paradigm, classic demographic transition theory. Wielding the hammers that drove the nails into its coffin were demographers themselves, writing in the summary volume of the Princeton study of European fertility transitions. Comments on that study by John Knodel and Etienne van de Walle, Susan Watkins, and Barbara Anderson (Coale and Watkins 1986) all referred to the failure of the supposed predictors-urbanization, literacy, infant and child mortality, and industrialization-to account for the pattern of decline in the various regions of Europe. All of these authors noted the impact of a theretofore little understood variable, cultural setting, on the rates and shape of transition. Their striking candor, along with the parallel developments in John Caldwell's work in other geographic areas (Caldwell 1982; Caldwell, Reddy, and Caldwell 1988), opened a new era in demographic research. The new era, which we are still in, is marked by a self-conscious search for methodologies that will allow demographers to incorporate cultural meanings into their explanations of demographic processes. All of us have benefited from the resulting openness to methodological experiment and, especially, from the welcome extended to anthropologists interested in demographic issues. That welcome has provided me with the opportunity to engage in a series of ongoing collaborations that have been among the most satisfying and intellectually exciting of my career as an anthropologist and a demographer. Nevertheless, I see the current state of our discipline as posing some danger for the continued exploration of ways to introduce culture and meaning into our explanations and interpretations of demographic phenomena. I once raised the hackles of some of my demographic colleagues by suggesting that demography was in the midst of what some philosophers

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