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This chapter examines the fertility decline in mainland China since the 1970s. Using data from a wide range of sources, including the 2000 census and through linking recorded children to their mothers, it shows that China's Total Fertility Rate was likely to have fallen to 1.6 at the end of the 20th century. Useful information on changes in cohort fertility is provided through the examination of a tempo-adjusted Total Fertility Rate.

The chapter discusses the relationship between population growth and the natural environment as mediated through economic development. It discusses both the classical and the neoclassical theories of relationship between population growth and economic development with varying implications of the importance of population growth and environmental resource limitations in development theory and policy. It analyses the relationship between fertility behaviour and economic growth and reviews the theory and evidence of demographic transition in terms of micro-economic logic of income – price based choice of family size, gender power structure, property rights, family institution and cultural norms at the different stages of development. Finally the chapter discusses the impact of population growth on environment by way of direct pressure on resource use due to reproductive externalities and focuses on the vicious circular relationship among high fertility, poverty, low female empowerment and over use of commons in the rural sector with its policy implications.

The chapter discusses the population dynamics and future prospect of India’s population growth till around the middle of the present century. In this context it has analysed the regional pattern of demographic transition as driven by the dynamics of fertility preference in the different regions of India and has examined how poverty and gender-power relationship have influenced the fertility behavior. The discussion refers to the new poverty line and the poverty ratios as per Tendulkar Committee Report as well and its implcations. Besides, the chapter also describes the micro environmental living condition of households in India with special references to housing space, homelessness, drinking water, sanitation and urbanization. The chapter has further extended the discussion in the urban context to the problems of slums and slum improvement policy in India. It concludes by discussing the historical dynamics of population policy and programme of India including its current state.

This paper reviews the literature in economics and related fields on the role of social norms in shaping fertility patterns and demand for contraception. The case of Sweden is discussed in detail both with regard to the literature and the data. Measures of non-marital childbearing from the 19^th and early 20^th Century are presented and compared in relation to demand for oral contraceptives (‘the Pill’) over a half century later. The correlation of Pill take-up with historical illegitimacy is strongly positive, regardless of the measure used. The geographical variation of illegitimacy and contraceptive demand follow a strikingly similar pattern that is independent of urbanization and North/South development patterns.

From outside the toxified ‘work incentives’ debate in the UK, Anders Freundt, Simon Grundt Straubinger and Jon Kvist tackle the question of fertility and employment traps within contemporary social security systems. Their analysis explores cross-national differences between seven Northern European countries in the relationship between social security arrangements and opportunities for employment and family-building. Using economic indicators, the chapter focuses on the comparisons between the situations of lone parents and single people in order to examine the interface between economics and choices to work and have children. Lone parents are the focus because they are the fastest-rising family form and continue to represent the greatest challenge to the largely obsolete breadwinner model in many welfare states. The chapter shows a clear division between the social-democratic Nordic states and the others – Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. While this patterning may come as no surprise, the findings support the case for universalism rather than means-testing as the key to removing obstacles to employment and avoiding divisions between employed and unemployed people in family welfare.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the key issues and previous research relevant to changing gender roles and family formation. The chapter presents a review of the literature covering several inter-related topics. These include changing gender role attitudes and behaviour, as well as the relationship between women’s labour force participation and fertility. The effects of family policies on women’s labour force participation and fertility are also discussed. Special attention is paid to the demographic changes which have been occurring and the emergence of new family forms. Finally the chapter looks at the economic and social effects of these changes on society and the psychological effects of the changing nature of the family on individuals and on society. The approach is international, with a special focus on Ireland.

While the current Irish birth rate is still high by European standards, at approximately two children per woman, the total fertility rate has nevertheless fallen 50% over the last four decades from approximately four children per woman in 1970 to two children today. This chapter discusses the causes, significance and implications of this and presents results of new measures developed to explore current attitudes to childbearing. Four distinct dimensions emerged through factor analysis, including a Belief in the Necessity of having Children for Fulfilment, Perceived Economic Constraints to having Children, Belief in the Value of Smaller Families, and the Belief that Men want Children as much as Women do. The prevalence of these attitudes in the representative sample is presented as well as differences among groups. Respondents’ ideal, expected and actual family size, as well as discrepancies between these, are also explored.

This chapter explores people’s attitudes to childcare, work-life balance and related social policies in relation to their attitudes to having children. New measures were developed to tap attitudes in this sphere. It is clear that choices regarding family size are being influenced by child care costs and the data suggest that if these were more affordable people would be inclined to have more children than they are presently having. Another important factor which impinges on fertility decisions is that the workplace as currently constructed is not viewed as conducive to work-life balance and flexible working policies are perceived as relevant to childbearing decisions. Results signalled a readiness for greater sharing of childcare between men and women. The findings underscore the need for social policy to address the dilemmas faced by young people who want to start families, while at the same time fulfilling their own needs for autonomy and development.

Ireland’s fertility rate has decreased by 50% from an average of four children per woman to just two over the last 40 years. While it currently has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, this may not continue, as Ireland continues to become more like its European partners. There are discrepancies between people’s ideal and expected number of children, demonstrating that people expect to have fewer children than they would ideally like to have. In order to better understand the factors contributing to people’s attitudes to having children, we examined potential predictors of ideal and expected family size. These included a wide range of measures including demographic characteristics and attitudinal variables. The results showed that the most significant predictors of both ideal and expected family size came from a range of attitudinal measures, which included Attitudes to Gender Roles, Attitudes to Having Children, Attitudes to Social Policies, and Attitudes to Family Formation, as well as measures of values and priorities, with only a single demographic characteristic a significant predictor, demonstrating the strong predictive power of attitudinal variables.

Most ultra-Orthodox Jews, a growing percentage of the total population, lack the skills to work in a modern economy, having studied little or no math and science beyond primary school (their curriculum focuses almost entirely on religious texts such as the Torah and Talmud). As a result, more than 60 percent live below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent among non-Haredi Jews. Most also opt out of military service, which is compulsory for other Israelis. The net effect: as the Haredi community expands, the burden of both taxation and conscription falls on fewer and fewer Israelis. Trends towards increased fertility, decreased labor force participation, and increased supply of time to religious studies in the ultra-Orthodox community are explained in terms of the behavior of a “club” that has strengthened its norms of religious stringency in an attempt to brace exclusion. The economic self- preservation of the “club” is akin to the old age security motive of bringing children, where children is a means for parents from their income (female work income, child allowances, and other government subsidies) generating years to their old age unproductive years. The parents to minimize “defection” from the community do not endow the children labor- market skills.

In the last millennium BCE, Botatwe communities organized their subsistence system around a variety of strategies that combined horticulture with the keeping of small livestock, hunting, fishing, and foraging. This chapter reconstructs that subsistence system and tracks how it changed with a local instantiation of the familiar cereal-based Neolithic during the first half of the first millennium. During this time, Botatwe communities adopted cereal agriculture, limited cattle-keeping, and metallurgy into their technical repertoire. The adoption of a Neolithic way of life and a limited investment in pastoralism required new ways of thinking about increasingly sedentary lifestyles andthe means by which ties could be forged among the living and with the ancestors. As the climate shifted to less favorable conditions in the middle of the first millennium, communities struggled to ensure the fertility of people, livestock, and fields, resulting in new kinds of local leaders, including mwami.

Shell matrix sites as burial grounds are a common occurrence in littoral areas around the world. Canímar Abajo, an archaeological site in the Matanzas region of Cuba, is quite unique in presenting two levels of burial activities separated by roughly 1200 years of a midden layer. The Older Cemetery is dated at 1380–800 BC, while the Younger Cemetery is dated to AD 360–950. Chapter 5 examines differences between these two cemeteries in juvenile/adult (J:A) ratio and the mean childhood mortality (mcm) in order to assess changes in fertility pattern and potential sources of bias between the two buried populations. The elevated number of buried children is associated with high fertility in cemetery populations. High fertility has, in turn, been associated with a more sedentary lifestyle. Canímar Abajo—with its secure stratigraphic context and a substantial number of ¹⁴C dates on human skeletal remains—offers a possibility to examine these models in a single cemetery. The question of the persistent or changing identity of the occupants of the site and the persistence of a cemetery as a focal point after a 1200 year burial hiatus require the author to draw on multiple and varied lines of evidence.

This article explores the texts and visual representations of the ‘saints of the bowels’ in order to establish an anthropological classification of aching bellies in early-modern France. A web of symbols is found in the materiality of the viscera. Thus, this article argues that representations of the belly as cave-like mirrors some images of the bowels of the earth. The “Saints of the Entrails”, St Erasmus and St Mammes, and Saint Elmo, all of whom were eviscerated during their martyrdom, represented many popular beliefs of rural communities who conflated images of the soil and images of the belly.

This chapter explores how female authority is connected to the reproduction of religious experience in The Spirituall experiences of sundry beleevers, the first anthology of conversion narratives to appear in print when it was published in 1653. Arguing that the employment of authorial anonymity, coupled with the preponderance of female gender signifiers, foregrounds female experience in such a way as to frame the Experiences as a reproductive object, this chapter identifies how the text encourages a gendered hermeneutics: the reader goes looking for the gender of the convert and more often than not finds a woman. In order to explore the reproductive effects of this gendered bias the chapter looks firstly at how the use of authorial anonymity confers a feminised moral authority upon the text. It moves on to examine the importance of fertility as a spiritual trope for radical Protestants, before considering in detail how the Experiences utilises the symbolic associations of motherhood in a number of narratives composed by women.

In this chapter, the life, work and philosophy of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima are explored. It is argued that the most interesting and profound properties of Mishima’s thought, his writings, and of the films associated with his thought and writings, are those that leave us with a sense of the open-ended struggle involved in his effort to define himself. The chapter examines some of Mishima’s most important literary works – including Confessions of a Mask, Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Patriotism, and The Sea of Fertility – as well as cinematic interpretations of these works by directors such as Paul Schrader, Lewis John Carlino, and Yukio Mishima himself. It is concluded that for Mishima, the defeat of nihilism was ultimately realized in his suicide by ritual seppuku.

Chapter five moves from ethnography at the village level to examine the demographics of declining fertility and rural depopulation plaguing many affluent nations. A failure of generational renewal threatens the well-being of individuals, communities and societies. With the story of a child who is the last child in his remote Italian village, the author illustrates the critical importance of children to each other and to their communities. After introducing demographic concepts such as birth rate and replacement rate, total fertility rate and replacement rate fertility, the book discusses the low birth rate crisis in Italy where the population is declining at an unsustainable rate. It examines factors affecting birth rates, including adolescent fertility rate, mother’s marital status, percentage of women in the workforce, and gendered division of domestic labour. In comparison with Italy, US birth rates have been relatively robust; however, after the Great Recession US birth rates declined steadily and are now well below replacement rate. The chapter closes with discussion of the interplay between politics and demographics, including rules on birth right citizenship, the role of immigration in rejuvenating populations, and the misuse of demographic data to fuel anti-immigrant, sectarian, and racial conflict.

The post-Second World War period saw major fluctuations in fertility in both Scotland and England and Wales, but the oscillations decreasingly moved in tandem, though, as elsewhere in western Europe, the general tendency of family sizes was downward from the 1980s. This was accompanied by major changes in the ages at which women were most likely to bear a child and, in Scotland, significant alterations in the spatial distribution of the highest and lowest fertility areas. Many possible explanations have been offered for these changes and some specifically Scottish features which may have affected the scale and timing of changes north of the border are briefly reviewed, including access to efficient contraception; immigration and religion; council housing and house purchase patterns; living standards, expectations and insecurity; women’s education, employment and household division of labour; and wider value changes.

This chapter presents a model for the understanding of the “traditional” societies of the Slave Coast and, in fact, of most of West Africa. It explores concepts which are not prevalent in the anthropological literature, and much less so in historical literature: “owners of the land” in the ritual sense; earth-priests; water priests; “ritual control of the land”; “contrapuntal paramountcy” (very central for our purpose and explained later); “sacred kingship”; stranger-kings; ancestor worship; fertility cults, etc. These all have marked religious connotations, implying that these were so-called sacred kinship societies, and that everything had to be explained and legitimized in religious or supranatural terms.