Special Issue: Population and Development: Comparative Anthropological Perspectives

Abstract

The methods and approaches of anthropology make the discipline particularly well positioned to understand how populations are implicated in, and respond to, development programs. These methods and approaches include in-depth explorations of how power operates, the exposition of long-term effects of policies and programs on everyday life, the careful focus on the relationship between the values people articulate when asked directly and their actual lived practices, and the insistence on intimate research conducted over long periods of time. But anthropology's contribution to the study of comparative international development has been marginal compared to that of other social sciences such as economics, political science, and sociology. The relative dearth of anthropology articles in most issues of this journal is representative of a wider pattern in development studies publications. The explanation for anthropology's outsider status is worth considering. In part, many anthropologists who study development are highly critical of dominant paradigms, and choose not to situate their work in relation to mainstream academic discourse on the topic. Anthropologists commonly ask, for example, who determines what development even means, and we worry whether it actually benefits those in whose name it is undertaken. Indeed, much of the anthropological literature suggests that development reinforces rather than ameliorates inequalities. Anthropology's critical stance toward development may also lead its perspective to be excluded from debates where -at least from many anthropologists' point of view -the prevailing wisdom accepts assumptions that our discipline questions. And anthropology does itself -and the populations we care about -no favors when we write about development, power, and inequality in insular jargon, excluding others who we often lament do not listen to us.By contrast, the role of population processes in development has been a topic of extensive scholarship among demographers and is a major area of focus in many development policies, programs, and interventions (think, for example, of the huge global investments over the past 50 years in population control, family planning, and reproductive health). In many respects, however, the demographic literature and other comparative approaches to development unfold in parallel scholarly worlds. The contributions of demography to the study of development often do not intersect with scholarship in political science, economics, and other branches of sociology because demography is not central to these disciplines' theoretical debates.Anthropology is, arguably, even more of an outsider in demography than it is in development studies, with some significant exceptions (Basu and Aaby 1998; Bledsoe and Pison 1994;Greenhalgh 1995; Kertzer and Fricke 1997;Lesthaeghe 1989). However, it is our goal to suggest the contributions that each of these disparate academic traditions can offer each other. In this special issue we bring together a group of papers that emerged from a con...

The Paradox of Planning: Agriculture, Schooling, and the Unresolvable Uncertainty of Ideal Family Size in Rural Sierra Leone

“…This juxtaposition, founded in and undergirded by gender inequality, exemplifies how the uncertainty of optimal family size in contemporary rural Sierra Leone remains unresolved. These inequalities work against the fertility transition, where decreased mortality rates are expected to eventually yield lower fertility rates (Johnson-Hanks 2007;Smith & Johnson-Hanks 2015), because predominantly male preferences for larger family size often ultimately win out. Because unemployment is so high and so many school migrants return to the villages empty-handed, as we will describe in the next section, the preference for larger families among men is likely to remain steadfast.…”