Anthropology and demography
Authors: Boskovic Aleksandar 
Published: February 2014

The paper presents an outline of the relationship between anthropology and
demography, sometimes depicted as "long, tortured, often ambivalent, and
sometimes passionate." Although early anthropologists (primarily British
social anthropologists) routinely made use of demographic data, especially in
their studies of kinship, the two disciplines gradually drifted away from
each other. The re-approachment took place from 1960s, and the last fifteen
years saw more intensive cooperation and more insights about possible mutual
benefits that could be achieved through combining of methodologies and
revision of some theoretical assumptions, primarily through anthropological
demography. As summarized by Laura Bernardi and Inge Hutter, "Anthropological
demography is a specialty within demography that uses anthropological theory
and methods to provide a better understanding of demographic phenomena in
current and past populations. Its genesis and ongoing growth lies at the
intersection of demography and socio-cultural anthropology and with their
efforts to understand population processes: mainly fertility, migration, and
mortality. Both disciplines share a common research subject, namely human
populations, and they focus on mutually complementary aspects" (2007: 541).
In the first part of the paper, the author presents some general
considerations, like the one that "demography is one of the best understood
and predictable parts of human behavior, even if demographers still find
themselves unable to predict accurately when parameters will change in
interesting ways, such as the ?the baby boom? or the shift to later
childbeanng in the 1970s and 1980s North America" (Howell, 1986: 219). Nancy
Howell also noted the importance of demographic anthropology, because, in her
words "if we knew, reliably, the birth and death probability schedules of
particular populations, we would know a great deal about their size, age
composition, growth rate. And with just a little more information we would
know a great deal more such as household and family composition, economic
organization, social problems, and something of the political structure. It
we knew the schedules for populations in general and could correlate the
schedules with the causes, genetic or environmental, that produce them, we
would know a great deal about the possible range of human social structure"
(Howell, 1986: 219). In the second part of the paper, the author discusses
several examples of interplay between anthropology and demography. One of
them is Patrick Heady?s study of the shift in ritual patterns, which combines
elements of some "classical" anthropological topics (Mauss?s theory of gift
exchange and L?vi-Strauss?s concept of kinship) with his own field research
in the Carnian Alps. "By marrying and raising children, parents participate
in a system of gift-exchange in which the gifts in question are human lives,
and the parties to the exchange are the kinship groups recognized in the
society concerned. Fertility reflects the attitudes of prospective parents to
their place in the existing system of reproductive exchange, and the
relationships of cooperation and authority which it implies - as well as
their confidence in the system?s continuing viability. It is shown that this
view is compatible with earlier ideas about self-regulating population
systems - and that changing economic circumstances are an important source of
discrepancy between existing exchange systems and the attitudes and
expectations of prospective parents" (Heady, 2007: 465). The paper concludes
with the discussion of the directions in which relationship between these two
disciplines can proceed. Some of the epistemological issues are mentioned, as
well as a need to apply different theoretical perspectives to better
understand demographic behavior (especially in Europe) and to better
understand certain cultural components that shape this behavior. In order to
achieve this, most of the scholars whose works are discussed in this paper
emphasize "the need for a holistic approach to data collection and the added
value of triangulating quantitative and qualitative analyses" (Bernardi,
Hutter, 2007: 541).