Editors' Introduction

The chapters in this section provide a set of well-documented examples that the socio-demographic options and strategies that families and individuals pursue are powerfully influenced by the dynamic and gendered social and natural worlds or 'imagined communities' to which they owe allegiance. These studies show how demographic analysis can benefit from paying much greater attention to contexts and that this will require much more investigative, historical, and anthropological work and a much less rapid move to quantification and comparisons that deploy 'scientific' categories, taken off the peg. Time and space need to be problematised not merely controlled.