Diffusion Processes and Fertility Transition Selected Perspectives (2001) / Chapter Skim
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5 Social Processes and Fertility Change
5 Social Processes and Fertility Change
Pages 138-178
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From page 138... ...
Diffusion, therefore, tends to move a population from one homogeneous state to another. Accounts of fertility change emphasizing the role of social processes have been constructed against a background of microeconomic models of fertility determinants (e.g., Easterlin, 1978, 1983~.
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From page 139... ...
Learning is social as well as individual. Attention to the role of social processes in fertility change has led to renewed interest in community-level effects.2 In microeconomic accounts of fertility change, structural characteristics of communities such as the level of nonagricultural employment, literacy, and accessibility are conceived of as determining the costs and benefits of children and the costs of fertility regulation.
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From page 140... ...
Nevertheless, there is considerable anthropological interest in theories that comprehend human agency as embedded in or spread over culture and social organization. The key to these diverse responses to research on social processes and fertility change is the history of anthropological theory.
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Recognizing that the partisans of the GermanAustrian and British schools "very early took a long a priori leap" from a "modest empirical beginning" (Kroeber, 1931:142) , American anthropologists eschewed historicist cultural archetypes and universal patterns in cultural history.
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put it in his inaugural lecture as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, Functional research investigates either the part played by institutions and customs in operating and maintaining the total structure of a society or of a type of society; or conversely, it seeks to analyse the action upon one set of institutions of the other parts of the social system. In the past several decades, the mid-century structural-functionalist consensus has broken up, and not a few anthropologists have turned to one or another version of practice theory.6 Practice theorists reject structural functionalism's sharp separation of culture and human agency, the former conceived of as a set of rules or meanings and the latter as universal, abstract rationality.
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From page 143... ...
Where diffusionism in anthropology was concerned almost exclusively with the spread of cultural elements from one society to another, diffusionism in studies of fertility change gives at least equal attention to the spread of knowledge and ideas concerning contraception from one person to another within populations.8 In its heyday, diffusionism in anthropology was embedded in arguments about the meaning of human cultural diversity, the psychic unity of mankind, and the mechanisms of human progress. Until the advent of structural functionalism, the principal alternatives were various theories of universal stages of cultural evolution.
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From page 144... ...
in demography are related to the limits of diffusionism in anthropology. These limits turn on arguments that birth control is not and cannot be new and that the meanings of birth control technologies change as they move from one culture to another.
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From page 145... ...
Seen through the lens of the age pattern of marital fertility, eighteenth-century Japan appears to conform to the criteria for natural fertility (Smith, 1977:61-62; see also Hanley and Yamamura, 1977~. However, analyses of the distribution of completed family size, the age at which couples stop child bearing, the gender of next surviving children in relation to the gender of previous children, and the length of particular birth intervals, all within the framework of the movement of persons and resources into and out of stem family households, demonstrate that parents in Nakahara actively attempted to control the composition and timing of formation as well as the size of their families.
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Nevertheless, his concern with the gender biases inherent in different kinds of family systems provides a useful link to the volume edited by Newman (1985) on Women's Medicine: A Cross-Cultural Study of Indigenous Fertility Regulation.
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Rather than using birth control pills and Depo-Provera to stop child bearing and reduce fertility, they employ them to manage birth intervals and enhance the ability to bear large numbers of children. Three elements of the Gambian cultural logic are crucial.
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In this environment, Western contraceptives are used alongside traditional contraceptives in ways that were not anticipated by outside family planning agencies and Western social scientists. They are used in part to achieve the otherwise unreconcilable goals of resuming sexual relations while continuing to maintain long birth intervals.
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From page 149... ...
The Ubiquity of "Diffusion" The connection between conceptions of culture informed by practice theory and the ubiquity of a more complex variety of diffusion can be made through the work of the Swedish sociocultural anthropologist Ulf Hannerz. Hannerz's work on "the global ecumene" has attracted the attention of scholars interested in the role of social processes in fertility change at the regional and global levels, but has been taken to reinforce the interest in spreading cultural uniformity.
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From page 150... ...
Following Peirce, however, linguistic anthropologists now recognize that signs and their interpretants can, and routinely do, differ from one another in an indefinitely large number of ways. Social Learning The linked concepts of social learning and social influence are key elements of work on diffusion and fertility change.
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further argue that social processes involving community mediation are manifested in distinctive outcomes. One is the "snowball" effect in which the probability that an individual who has not yet done so will adopt the innovation during a given month increases over time.
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From page 152... ...
Channels of Communication Social learning and social influence are accomplished through channels of communication among individuals and between individuals and impersonal sources. Though the diffusion literature contains many references to different, culturally specific kinds of communication visits from drug company detail men, medical journals, hospital grand rounds, and consultations with other physicians in the American Midwest (Coleman et al., 1966~; the famous Korean Mother's Clubs (Park et al., 1976~; and women's voluntary associations (tontines)
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work on activity types and inference promises to be particularly useful for work on social processes and fertility change. Building on Wittgenstein's (1958)
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Community and Social Structure Sliding away from microeconomic accounts of fertility change along the continuum from gesellschaft to gemeinschaft, the new line of demographic research appears to assume that villages, provinces, nation-states, and regions are, in fact, more or less inclusive communities, collectivities of persons whose interactions are marked by communion and mutuality. It appears to assume, too, that as far as diffusion is concerned, the one critical characteristic of such communities is communication networks.
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From page 155... ...
The paper makes excellent use of limited resources, but it entirely lacks any picture of the internal organization of Thai villages and its consequences for village talk.~9 This is all the more remarkable from the perspective of anthropology, for anthropologists have long regarded the social structure of Thailand as distinctly unusual. As Potter (1976:149)
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From page 156... ...
Fellow villagers do not entirely lack mutual interests, but in many respects Indian villages are the arenas in which caste differences are experienced and competition for ritual status is played out.22 The preceding paragraphs have been concerned with features of what Potter calls "the 'natural' village community." In Thailand, this is a "spatially defined rural village, which receives the allegiance of its members, furnishes an important part of their social identity, manages its own affairs and its common property, and has its own temple and school" (Potter, 1976:203~. I have also rather downplayed variation among Thai villages.
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The overwhelming weight of ethnographic research decisively demonstrates that people playing particular kinds of social roles talk or do not talk to people playing other kinds of social roles in particular kinds of ways about particular kinds of things. In some cases, certain sorts of persons may communicate about some topics in front of certain other sorts of persons, but not to them or with them.
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, indicate some of the things that might be learned from ethnographic research on key communicative activity types thought to be involved in fertility change. Much of the policy-related literature on family planning and reproductive health services and fertility change is prescriptive.
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From page 159... ...
or the fit between the behaviors of counselors and clients and an idealized model of informed choice, but describe no other features of the content or context of counseling sessions. And, even though it is based on direct observation, the linked decisions to base all of the analyses on English translations of the original Kenyan-language transcriptions and to use observers' categories to code the transcripts effectively erase the cultural content and social setting of the material.
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From page 160... ...
Conversation analysis, with its focus on sequences of utterances in conversations and conversational activity and on positioned turns within sequences, offers additional insights.27 Studies in linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis of provider/client interactions in a variety of other settings and my own preliminary investigations of family planning counseling in the United States (Carter, 2001a, 2001b) suggest that the uses of language in family planning and reproductive health counseling sessions are very much more complicated than the analyses of the Kenya Provider and Client Information, Education and Communication Project would suggest.
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From page 161... ...
Explicitly using a theory of family interaction, the counselors also constrain their patients to speak about sensitive matters by formulating questions in a way that takes advantage of culturally specific notions of relationships and knowledge. Clients are understood to be the "owners" of their experience, but their relatives and partners should also have some knowledge of what the clients are experiencing.
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From page 162... ...
Nevertheless, there appear to be a variety of quantitative approaches to the assessment of counseling sessions that are simpler and easier to execute than the coding strategies used by Kim and her colleagues in the Kenya Provider and Client Information, Education and Communication Project. For example, Erickson and Shultz (1982)
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From page 163... ...
Given the concerns addressed in family planning counseling (contraceptive choice, abortion, etc., versus the management of severe heart defects) and the ideology of choice and empowerment that informs family planning and reproductive health counseling, one would expect that in "successful" or "proper" counseling sessions, disposal statements generally would be uttered by clients or, if the counselor utters a disposal statement, that it would be framed in a way that invites the client's participation in a shared decision.
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7 Counselor 8 Client SOCIAL PROCESSES AND FERTILITY CHANGE 22 Client Well, I talked to my boyfriend, of course. I have talked to a couple of my friends.
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There is nothing on Cameroonian communicative activity types, the manner in which they are situated in the local social organization, or the kinds of topics appropriate in each. An alternative approach would break the question concerning the relationship between informants and their interlocutors ("How are you
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Elements of one culture routinely are adopted by others but they are systematically reinvented in the process. Birth control is new only if various forms of "child control" (Greenhalgh, 1988:639)
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From page 167... ...
Variations in communicative resources and social structure are intimately connected to the outcome of diffusion processes. Research on the spread, translation, and continuous alteration of new ideas concerning family planning requires detailed knowledge of a social system's communicative resources and the social structure in which they are situated.
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His source for Korea is Park (1983~. For an elegant analysis of "deliberate birth control in [rural]
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Langerock 1994 Constructing natural fertility: The use of Western contraceptive technologies in rural Gambia. Population and Development Review 20~1~:81-113.
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Washington, DC: National Acad emy Press. 2001a Legitimate Tangential Participation: Toward an Ethnography of Family Planning Counseling.
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Population and Development Review 13~1~:77-100. Cicourel, A.V.
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Population and Development Review 14~4~:629 674. 1990 Toward a political economy of fertility: Anthropological contributions.
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Watkins 1997 Feminists and neo-Malthusians: Past and present alliances. Population and Development Review 23~3~:469-523.
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1980 On the social control of human reproduction. Population and Development Review 6(4)
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Chung 1999 Social networks and the diffusion of fertility control in the Republic of Korea. In Dynamics of Values in Fertility Change, R
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1993 Coitus interruptus in the twentieth century. Population and Development Review 19~4~:767-792.
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1978 Infant mortality and behavior in the regulation of family size. Population and De velopment Review 4:385-403.
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Unpublished paper prepared for discussion at the National Academy of Sciences Workshop on Social Dynamics of Fertility Change in Developing Countries, January 29-30, Washington, DC. Watkins, S.C.
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