Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography

Throughout its history as a social science discipline, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying population problems. An important outcome of this is that demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from their embeddedness in dynamic relationships and in varied local contexts and processes. The collection of essays in this volume questions these fixed categories in two ways: firstly, by examining the historical and political circumstances in which such categories have their provenance, and secondly, in reassessing their uncritical applications over space and time in a diverse range of empirical case studies. Reflexive questioning is achieved by encouraging a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue involving anthropologists, demographers, historians, and sociologists. This volume seeks to examine the political complexities that lie at the heart of population studies, through a focus on category formation, category use, and category critique. It is shown that this takes the form of a dialectic between the needs for clarity of scientific and administrative analysis and the recalcitrant diversity of the social contexts and human processes that generate population change. The critical reflections on the established categories in each of the essays included here are enriched by meticulous ethnographic fieldwork and historical, archival research, drawn from all the continents. The essays collected here, therefore, exemplify a new methodology for research in population studies, which does not simply accept and use the established categories of population science, but seeks critically and reflexively to explore, test, and re-evaluate their meanings in diverse contexts. The essays show that for demography to realise its full potential, there is an urgent need to re-examine and contextualise the social categories used today in population research.