Fertility and Culture: Anthropological Insights

Between the fertility event that increases a population and the cultural ideas that shape how it is perceived and analyzed lies an engaging set of issues. To grapple with them, demographically oriented approaches to fertility, and to reproduction more broadly, have increasingly sought insight from sociocultural anthropology and its longtime concern with the ideas by which people understand their worlds. The results, despite the vast differences in method and philosophical orientation that typically separate demography and anthropology, are forging new ways to look at fertility. This article addresses the recent history of the anthropology and demography relationship in studies of fertility, focusing especially on developments that take culture as a fluid and contested set of mental schemes.