Contingent Lives
Subtitle: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa (Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series)
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: July 1, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9780226058511
Subjects: Ethnic studies; Population & demography; Social & cultural anthropology; Social Science; Sociology; Religion; Sub-Saharan Africa; Abortion & Birth Control; Anthropology - General; Statistics; Social Science / Statistics; Anthropology - Cultural; Birth control; Family size; Fertility, Human; Gambia; Social aspects
First sentence: Kaddy Seesay, a thirty-year-old remarried divorcee, happened to fall into a sample of women interviewed every month for fifteen months, during a 1992-95 research project on contraception and birth intervals in rural Gambia.
Description: Most women in the West use contraceptives in order to avoid having children. But in rural Gambia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women use contraceptives for the opposite reason - to have as many children as possible. Using ethnographic and demographic data from a three-year study in rural Gambia, 'Contingent Lives' explains this seemingly counterintuitive fact by juxtaposing two very different understandings of the life course: one is a linear, Western model that equates ageing and the ability to reproduce with the passage of time, the other a Gambian model that views ageing as contingent on the cumulative physical, social, and spiritual hardships of personal history, especially obstetric trauma.