Table Of ContentOUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 09/09/20, SPi
The Anthropological Demography
of Health
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 09/09/20, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 09/09/20, SPi
The Anthropological
Demography of Health
Edited by
VÉRONIQUE PETIT, KAVERI QURESHI,
YVES CHARBIT,
and
PHILIP KREAGER
1
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1
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Preface
Programmatic efforts to improve public health were a motive force in the nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century formation of disciplines we know today as
demography and anthropology. From the beginning, the collaborative study of
population and socio-cultural variation was recognized as an evident necessity.
On one hand, quantifying vital events, human bodies and their characteristics,
and distributions of diseases, showed that trends were closely bound up with
social, cultural, and economic variation. On the other, it was clear that putting
into action clinical and epidemiological criteria of good health would require
many changes in everyday life, often impinging on strongly held moral values and
practices. Social theorists, meanwhile, drew readily on analogies to medical con-
cepts and evolutionary anthropology in formulating their vision of the new social
sciences, and of the instrumental role which subjects like demography and
anthropology could be expected to play in social improvement. There were ser-
ious false starts (eugenics, social Darwinism, nationalism), as the science of the
time often came to be embedded in political agendas of vested cultural interests.
Many of the racial assumptions in these agendas came to be projected globally
as part of colonial policies. In short, integrating quantitative and qualitative
approaches to culture and population proved to be difficult and liable to contro-
versy. No agreed programme for this purpose emerged over nearly a century.
Major public health interventions again became a primary focus of science and
policy in the post-war era, as controlling fertility and mortality was seen as a pre-
requisite to sustained economic modernization and political stability in the devel-
oping world. Early health programmes relying, for example, on vaccination and
antibiotics, achieved major successes without giving major attention to social and
cultural variation. By the 1970s, however, as agendas turned increasingly to fertil-
ity and to diseases bound up with poverty and inequalities, the demography of
population and development was again confronted by the need to incorporate
cultural diversity into explanation and programme implementation. In the same
period, research was revealing the remarkable heterogeneity of demographic
transitions, whether in the era of European industrialization or over the twentieth
century. The difficulty of formulating an adequate general theory which could
account for mechanisms underlying this diversity drew historical demographers
and anthropologists together in recognizing that social and cultural processes at
many levels of society underlie continued population heterogeneity.
By the 1990s, a growing body of soi-disant ‘anthropological demography’ had
emerged, initially with reference chiefly to fertility, family, and kin structures, and
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vi Preface
in medical anthropologists’ attention to diverse aetiologies. Contributions by
social and economic demographers now participated actively in this discussion,
which recognized the need to formulate integrated qualitative and quantitative
methodologies. Anthropological demography may be defined not merely as an
academic sub-specialism of demography, but as an interdisciplinary demography
grounded in ethnography and in critical examination of the social, political, and
economic history that has shaped relations between peoples. The evolution of
methods and concepts used to describe, analyse, and govern peoples has often
become a central problem in those relations. This is especially the case where
there is difficulty striking a fair balance between people’s local history and experi-
ence and the generalizing aims of science and policy. Anthropological dem og-
raphy addressed to population and health directs this approach to population
heterogeneity and socio-cultural diversity collaboratively with biomedical and
other human sciences.
Developments from the 1990s onwards have significantly opened anthropo-
logical demography to a significantly wider range of health issues, and increased
the scope for collaborative projects. As the following pages show, the research
brief now extends to a remarkable range of key human and policy issues, including,
for example: genetic disorders; nutrition; mental health; infant, child, and maternal
morbidity; malaria; HIV/AIDS; disability; and population ageing. Collaboration
of anthropological demographers with social, medical, and demographic historians
enables these issues to be situated in relation to the institutional structures and
inequalities that commonly shape health and access to health care. The preoccu-
pation of post-war population studies with fertility levels and trends has similarly
widened, moving beyond parity, numbers of children, contraception, and rates
of childbearing to a wider purview on the many health risks and alternative
health systems that shape the incidence and course of childbearing and rearing.
Developments include, for example, renewed attention to endemic infertility and
childlessness (linked variously to AIDS, pathological ster il ity, sex work, circum-
cision practices, and social and age-structural constraints), and to genetic and
related medical developments (notably in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other
assisted reproductive technologies). In these and other areas, collaboration
between social, natural, and medical scientists is actively pursued.
To synthesize and clarify recent and continuing methodological and conceptual
developments, and to provide links between applications to substantively differ-
ent health problems, a workshop was organized in March 2017, at the instigation
of the Centre Population et Développement (CEPED, Paris), and the Institute of
Human Sciences and Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group (Oxford). The
chapters making up this book are revised papers from that meeting, which was
supported by CEPED, the Centre Virchow Villermé (University Paris Descartes),
the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford), and by a start-up
grant from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, to whom the editors
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Preface vii
express their warm thanks. We are also grateful to Mark Harrison and Simon
Szreter, who participated in the meeting and whose research assisted the planning
both of the meeting and this book. Oxford University Press have provided superb
support in the final production of the volume, and our thanks go particularly to
Henry Clarke, Fiona Barry, Sumintra Gaur, and Denise Bannerman. Finally,
thanks too to Sara Randall, Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill, Alison Shaw, and Soraya
Tremayne, who provided acute comments on sections of the introduction.
Véronique Petit
Kaveri Qureshi
Yves Charbit
Philip Kreager
April 2020
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 09/09/20, SPi
Contents
List of Figures xiii
List of Tables xv
List of Contributors xvii
Introduction 1
Philip Kreager, Véronique Petit, Kaveri Qureshi, and Yves Charbit
I. TAKING THE LONGER VIEW: HEALTH
INTERVENTIONS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
1. Cultures of contagion and containment? The geography
of smallpox in Britain in the pre-vaccination era 61
Romola Davenport
2. Medical topography as an instrument of colonial management
in French Algeria, 1830–71 85
Hugues Moussy
3. The prostitute as an urban savage, Paris 1830–1914: French
nineteenth-century premises of the anthropological demography
of health 103
Yves Charbit
4. Peer learning and health-related interventions: family planning
and nutrition in Kenya and Uganda, 1950–2019 127
Shane Doyle
II. HEALTH AS AN OBJECT OF CONTEMPORARY
DEMOGRAPHIC GOVERNANCE
5. An anthropological demography of mental health in Senegal 153
Véronique Petit
6. ‘As list e karhayee ke bayad anjame midadam khat khord’:
contemporary reproductive body politic in Iran 183
Soraya Tremayne
