The Impact of Postmarital Residence of Fertility, Early Childhood Mortality, and Child Health in Southern Ethiopia

The link between family systems and demographic behavior has recently been the subject of important new theoretical and empirical work by anthropologists and others. Among the key foci for this work has been the link between coresidential arrangements following marriage and young wives' status and power, and the impact this and gender preferences typical of certain family systems have on fertility and on infant and child mortality. To date, this new work has focused largely on East and South Asia. We here take advantage of the 1997 Community and Family Survey data from the Southern Region of Ethiopia to see whether any evidence of these coresidential effects on demographic outcomes can be found in an African context. THEORETICAL ISSUES In a recent series of papers, G. William Skinner (1993, 1997, 1999) has argued the importance of examining the impact of family systems on demographic processes. It is a position that has major potential implications for much of demographic theory and methodology, despite the fact that demographers have been interested in family effects for a long time. Seen from this perspective, decisions about marriage, reproduction, and migration, as well as decisions affecting mortality, are typically made in family contexts and are influenced by family strategies. "Natural fertility," still today an influential if not dominant framework for dealing with demographic dynamics in premodern or economically underdeveloped societies, is, from this vantage point, wholly misleading and erroneous. Skinner (1997:54) defines family systems in terms of the "customary, normative manner in which family processes unfold," involving "marriage form(s) and preferences, succession, transmission of property, the normal sequence of coresidential arrangements, the normative roles associated with family statuses and relationships, and the customary bias by gender and relative age that informs the system as a whole." He devotes special attention to the implications of different kinship systems for the relative desirability of various gender combinations of offspring, and has devised ingenious methods for empirically testing these hypotheses. Among those who have recently taken up these propositions are Tsuya and Kurosu (1999), who have used Japanese population register data from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show dramatic limitation in offspring sets linked to existing gender combinations of surviving offspring. Closely tied to the key role played by gender bias in Skinner's model is the importance of different practices of postmarital residence: the gender bias of any stem family system is expressed with neat consistency in terms of marital residence and the linearity of the family stem. If the preferred sex of the single heir is female, then marital residence is uxorilocal and the family system is matrilineal. (... ) If the preferred sex of the single heir is male, then marital residence is virilocal and the family system is patrilineal. Such systems were widespread in early modern western Europe and Tokugawa Japan. If the normative preference is indifferent as to sex, then marital residence is ambilocal and the family stem is ambilineal. Gender-neutral heirship was the norm in local areas of Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Japan (Skinner 1997:59). Patrilineal, patrilocal societies--such as the ones we examine in the African context below--place great emphasis on the continuity of the male line. Moreover, insofar as young women move into the preexisting households of their husbands' natal families, in whose lineages they are not full members, they are in a relatively powerless position. Along similar lines, in work focusing primarily on India, Monica Das Gupta (1987, 1997, 1999) has seized on just this element of the nexus of family systems to argue that young wives living patrilocally are in relatively powerless positions, a powerlessness with important demographic implications. …