Situating Fertility

Download or read book Situating Fertility written by Susan Greenhalgh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection addresses the world-wide pattern of falling birth rates. Fertility has commonly been treated from a specialized demographic perspective, but there is today widespread dissatisfaction with conventional demographic approaches, which are criticized for neglecting the cultural, social, and political forces that affect reproductive behavior. For their part, anthropologists have only recently begun to apply their characteristic approaches to the study of reproduction. Drawing on new ethnographic and historical research and on a variety of theoretical approaches, the contributors to this book indicate some of the ways in which demography might take into account historical processes, political forces, and cultural conceptions.