Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography

Throughout its history as a social science, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying social problems. As a result, demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from dynamic relationships and local contexts and processes. This volume questions these fixed categories in two ways. First, it examines the historical and political circumstances in which such categories had their provenance, and, second, it reassesses their uncritical applications over space and time in a diverse range of empirical case studies, encouraging throughout a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue involving anthropologists, demographers, historians, and sociologists. This volume seeks to examine the political complexities that lie at the heart of population studies by focusing on category formation, category use, and category critique. It shows that this takes the form of a dialectic between the needs for clarity of scientific and administrative analysis and the recalcitrant diversity of the social contexts and human processes that generate population change. The critical reflections of each chapter are enriched by meticulous ethnographic fieldwork and historical research drawn from every continent. This volume, therefore, exemplifies a new methodology for research in population studies, one that does not simply accept and re-use the established categories of population science but seeks critically and reflexively to explore, test, and re-evaluate their meanings in diverse contexts. It shows that for demography to realise its full potential it must urgently re-examine and contextualize the social categories used today in population research.

Table of Contents:
Foreword ; List of Contributors ; SECTION 1 THE HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF DEMOGRAPHY AND ITS CATEGORIES ; 1. Contextualising categories: towards a critical reflexive demography ; 2. Objectifying demographic identities ; 3. Malthus' Anti-Rhetorical Rhetoric, or, on the Magical Conversion of the Imaginary into the Real ; SECTION 2 CATEGORIES AS POLITICAL INTERVENTIONS ; 4. Editors' Introduction ; 5. The linguistic construction of social and medical categories in the work of the English General Register Office, 1837-1950 ; 6. Racial / Color Categorization in US and Brazilian Censuses ; 7. Toward a Soviet Order of Things:The 1926 Census and the Making of the Soviet Union ; 8. Making up China's "Black population" ; 9. Internal diaspora and State imagination: Colombia's failure to envision a nation ; 10. Users, non-users, clients, and help-seekers: the use of categories in research on health behaviour ; 11. Etic and emic categories in male sexual health: a case study from Orissa ; SECTION 3 CONTEXTS AS CRITIQUES OF CATEGORIES ; 12. Editors' Introduction ; 13. Measuring the population of a northeast Thai village ; 14. 'Un noviazgo despues de ser casados': Companionate marriage, sexual intimacy, and the modern Mexican family ; 15. Gender Roles and Women's Status: What They Mean to Hausa Muslim Women in Northern Nigeria ; 16. Re-contextualizing the Female-Headed Household: Culture and Agency in Uganda ; 17. Demography's Ecological Frontier: Rethinking the 'Nature' of the Household and Community ; 18. Spillovers, subdivisions and flows: questioning the usefulness of 'bounded container' as the dominant metaphor in demography ; 19. Situating migration in wartime and post-war Mozambique: a critique of "forced migration" research ; Index