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MILLERTEXchapter4.docxAnthro Connections
In Havana, Cuba, a girl celebrates her fifteenth birthday known as a fiesta de quince. In Hispanic culture globally, a girl’s fifteenth birthday is a coming-of-age ceremony marked by lavish expenditures on an elegant gown and a party including a fancy cake. Whereas sons are preferred in many Asian populations, in much of Latin America, daughters are equally or even more desired than sons. In Havana, Cuba, most women prefer to have a daughter (Härkönen 2010). Mothers who have a daughter spend a lot of money on frilly baby outfits and hair ornaments, while mothers who have a son console themselves by saying that it is cheaper to have a son because they do not have to buy the pretty clothes and accessories. Cuba has the lowest rate of fertility in the Western hemisphere, at 1.5 births per woman, which is lower than the United States and Canada. Given the odds of fairly equal chances of having a boy or a girl, many Cuban mothers are likely disappointed when they have a son.
This chapter covers cross-cultural patterns of sexuality and having children and the formation of personality and identity over the life cycle. The first section provides an overview of reproduction in relation to modes of livelihood. The second section traces the connections between culture and reproduction, especially birth rates. The third section provides insights into how culture shapes personality and identity throughout the life cycle.
A mode of reproduction is the dominant pattern, in a culture, of population change through the combined effect of fertility , or number of births in a given population or per woman, and mortality , or the number of deaths in a given population. Cultural anthropologists have enough cross-cultural data to provide the general characteristics of only three modes of reproduction (Figure 4.1) that correspond to three of the five modes of livelihood discussed in Chapter 3.
Figure 4.1
The Foraging Mode of Reproduction
Evidence about the foraging mode of reproduction comes from a classic study based on fieldwork conducted with the Ju/wasi in the 1970s (Howell 1979) (review Culturama in Chapter 1). The study shows that birth intervals (the time between a birth and the next birth) among the Ju/wasi are often several years in duration. What accounts for these long birth intervals? Two factors are most important: breastfeeding and women’s low level of body fat. Frequent and long periods of breastfeeding inhibit progesterone production and suppress ovulation. Also, a certain level of body fat is required for ovulation. Ju/wasi women’s diets contain little fat, and their regular physical exercise as foragers keeps their body fat level low, further suppressing ovulation. Thus, diet and work are key factors underlying Ju/wasi population dynamics.
Ju/wasi women, during the time of the study, typically had between two and three live births, of which two children survived into adulthood. This mode of reproduction is adaptive to the Ju/wasi environment and sustainable over time. Among the Ju/wasi who have become farmers or laborers, the number of births per woman is higher. This change is related to the facts that their diet contains more grains and dairy products and women are less physically active.
The agricultural mode of reproduction is associated with the highest birth rates of the three modes discussed here. Pronatalism, an attitude or policy that encourages childbearing, is prevalent among farm families cross-culturally. It is prompted by the need for a large labor force to work the land, care for animals, process food, and do marketing. In this context, having many children is a rational reproductive strategy related to the mode of livelihood. Thus, farming people who live in family farming systems have their own “family planning,” but one that promotes rather than prevents the birth of many children.
High birth rates of seven or more children per woman exist in several low-income agricultural countries of Africa, such as Niger (7.4 births per woman), Somalia, (6.7 births per woman), Uganda (6.7 births per woman), and Angola (6.5 births per woman) (Population Reference Bureau 2009). Lower rates, of two or three children per woman, however, are found in many agricultural countries in South America, such as Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina.
Within countries, groups with the highest birth rates in the world are the Mennonites and Hutterites. They are Christians of European descent living mainly in the United States and Canada. Women in these groups typically have between 8 and 10 children who survive into adulthood. High birth rates also characterize the Amish, a closely related group (see Culturama).
In another pronatalist context, rural North India, having many children—especially sons—is important in farming families. Young boys learn to do farm work with their father. As adults, they are responsible for plowing the farm and for protecting the family land from takeovers by neighboring farmers. When Western family planning experts visited villages in North India in the late 1950s to promote the idea of small families, the farmers expressed dismay (Mamdani 1972). To them, a large family, especially one with many sons, is a sign of wealth and success, not poverty and failure.
In industrial countries, reproduction is at the point of either replacement-level fertility, in which the number of births equals the number of deaths, leading to maintenance of the current population size, or below-replacement-level fertility, in which the number of births is less than the number of deaths, leading to population decline. Children in these contexts are less useful in production because of the reduced labor demands of industrialism. Furthermore, children must attend school and therefore cannot work for their families much during the school year. People respond to these factors, unconsciously, by having fewer children and by investing more resources in the children they have.
Population changes that take place during the transition to the industrial/digital mode of reproduction correspond to what is called the demographic transition , a process during which the agricultural pattern of high fertility and high mortality becomes the industrial pattern of low fertility and low mortality. There are two phases in the demographic transition model (Figure 4.2). In the first phase, mortality declines because of improved nutrition and health, so population growth rates increase. The second phase occurs when fertility also declines. At this point, low rates of population growth occur to the extent that many industrial/digital countries have below-replacement fertility including Japan, Canada, the United States, and countries in Europe. While such low rates of population growth are welcomed by many thinkers as reducing the burden on the environment, leaders of some countries worry about labor shortages and a declining tax base.
The industrial/digital mode of reproduction has three distinguishing features:
· stratified reproduction: middle-class and upper-class people tend to have few children with high survival rates while among the poor, both fertility and mortality rates are high. Brazil, a newly industrializing state, has the world’s most extreme income inequality and extremely stratified reproduction.
· population aging: when the proportion of older people increases relative to younger people. In Japan, the national fertility rate declined to replacement level in the 1950s and later reached the below-replacement level. Japan is currently experiencing a decline in population growth of about 15 percent per generation and, simultaneously, rapid aging of the population. As many people enter the senior category, they create a population bulge that is not balanced by the number of younger people (Figure 4.3). A population projection for the year 2050 suggests that the bulge will increase.
· high level of involvement of scientific (especially medical) technology in all aspects of pregnancy: becoming pregnant, through artificial insemination, preventing pregnancy, and terminating pregnancy (Browner and Press 1996). This trend is accompanied by increasing levels of specialization in providing new services (discussed below).
Figure 4.3
Source: Statistics Bureau, MIC, Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Reproduced with permission.
Journal 4.1 Siblings
The Kingdom of Morocco is the westernmost country of the Arab world. A border dispute continues with the Western Sahara, which Morocco has administered since 1975. Morocco’s population is 33 million. The terrain ranges from coastal lowlands to rugged interior mountains. Morocco’s economy is based on mining phosphates, remittances, and tourism. It is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of cannabis and the world’s largest per capita consumer of sugar. Most Moroccans are Sunni Muslims. The official language is classical Arabic, but Moroccan Arabic is widely spoken. More than 40 percent of the people speak a variety of Berber. INTERCOURSE FREQUENCY AND FERTILITY Cross-culturally, the frequency of sexual intercourse varies widely. The relationship between frequency of sexual intercourse and fertility, though, is not simple. A common assumption is that people in cultures with high fertility rates have sexual intercourse frequently. Without modern birth control, such as condoms, birth control pills, and intrauterine devices (IUDs), frequent intercourse would seem, logically, to produce high rates of fertility.
A classic study of reported intercourse frequency among Euro-Americans in the United States and Hindus in India, however, throws this assumption into question (Nag 1972). The Indians had intercourse less frequently (less than twice a week) than the Euro-Americans did (two to three times a week) in all age groups. Several features of Indian culture limit the frequency of sexual intercourse. First, the Hindu religion teaches the value of sexual abstinence, thus providing ideological support for limiting sexual intercourse. Hinduism also suggests that one should abstain from intercourse on many sacred days: the first night of the new moon, the first night of the full moon, the eighth day of each half of the month (the light half and the dark half), and sometimes on Fridays. As many as 100 days each year could be observed as days of abstinence. Another factor is Hindu men’s belief in what anthropologists term the lost semen complex, which links men’s health and strength to the retention of semen. An anthropologist learned about this complex during his fieldwork in North India:
Everyone knew that semen was not easily formed; it takes forty days and forty drops of blood to make one drop of semen… . Semen of good quality is rich and viscous, like the cream of unadulterated milk… . Celibacy was the first requirement of true fitness, because every sexual orgasm meant the loss of a quantity of semen, laboriously formed. (Carstairs 1967:83–86, quoted in Nag 1972:235)
The fact remains, however, that fertility is higher in India than in many other parts of the world where such religious restrictions on sexual intercourse do not exist. Obviously, sheer frequency of intercourse is not the explanation because it takes only one act of sexual intercourse at the right time of the month to create a pregnancy. The point of this discussion is to show that reverse reasoning (assuming that high fertility means people have nothing better to do than have sex) is wrong. The cultural dynamics of sexuality in India function to restrain sexual activities and thus keep fertility lower than it otherwise would be.
Anthropology Works
Studying Sexual Behavior among MSM in New York City
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Lara Tabac, medical anthropologist, worked at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), along with another cultural anthropologist and 6,000 other employees (2003). Her unit was the DOHMH’s Epidemiology Services. Epidemiology is the study of the factors that cause health and disease in different populations, and it provides information to public health-care providers so that they can improve their programs.
Tabac was hired to collect qualitative information from New Yorkers about their behavior and how it related to their health, specifically MSM (men who have sex with men).
Tabac describes her job as a challenging mix of words and numbers (2003). The department is highly quantitative, using statistics to shape health-action agendas. Tabac explains that while the numbers tell us how many people do X or Y and suffer from X or Y disease, they say nothing about why people behave the way they do and therefore put themselves at risk for certain health problems. Tabac’s expertise as a cultural anthropologist allowed her to provide insights into the “why” question and help make the work of the DOHMH more effective.
Anthropological training reinforced and shaped Tabac’s personal inclination to observe and ask questions. She put her skills and interests to work, listening to people on a wide range of topics. With her MetroCard, she reached people in far-flung neighborhoods who were willing to share with her their health dilemmas and life struggles as well as their suggestions for improving services and programs that they needed.
Tabac’s goal was to learn about condom use among the MSM population: who uses or does not use condoms, and why they do or do not do so. To gather qualitative information, Tabac spent many hours conducting individual interviews. She found these interviews to be crucial for gaining a deep understanding of sensitive issues. People are more honest in a one-on-one interview with someone they trust compared to talking about their sexual lives in a focus group that includes several people. Tabac found her job with the DOHMH challenging and socially relevant. She took the job because she wanted to help improve people’s lives. She has not been disappointed.
Food for Thought
1. Are you inspired by this story to want to follow in Lara Tabac’s footsteps? If yes, why? If not, why not?
Depending on the gender division of labor and on other social features, families may prefer sons, daughters, or a balance of each. Preference for sons is widespread, especially in South Asia (including India and Pakistan) and East Asia (China and Korea), but it is not universal. Throughout much of Southeast Asia, for example, people prefer a balanced number of sons and daughters. A preference for daughters exists in some parts of Africa south of the Sahara and in some Caribbean populations.
AT THE STATE LEVEL State governments formulate policies that affect rates of population growth within their boundaries. These policies vary from being antinatalist to pronatalist, and they vary in terms of the methods of fertility management promoted. Factors that affect government policies include economic factors, such as projected jobs and employment levels, public services, and maintaining the tax base, as well as other factors, such as filling the ranks of the military, maintaining ethnic and regional proportions, and dealing with population aging.
AT THE GLOBAL LEVEL The most far-reaching layer that affects fertility decision making occurs at the international level, where global power structures such as pharmaceutical companies and religious leaders influence country-level and individual-level decision making. In the 1950s, there was a wave of enthusiasm among Western nations for promoting family planning programs of many types in developing countries. In the 1990s, the United States adopted a more restrictive policy toward family planning, withdrew support for such options as abortion, and began to promote abstinence as the foundation of population control.
A family planning clinic in Baghdad, Iraq. Throughout much of the world, Western-style family planning advice is controversial because it may conflict with local beliefs and values.
1. In your cultural experience, what is the prevailing attitude about family planning?
