Toward a Political Economy of Fertility: Anthropological Contributions

THREE DECADES AGO, THERE WAS WIDE CONSENSUS on why fertility falls. Now, however, it seems that the closer we get to understanding specific fertility declines, the further we move from a general theory of fertility transition. In the late 1960s the European Fertility Project began to chip away at the foundations of classical transition theory-that part-theory, part-explanation which embodied the collective wisdom of the 1950s and 1960s (Notestein, 1953; Davis, 1963; for the critique, see Coale, 1969, 1973). Using aggregate-level historical data from over 700 European districts, demographers collaborating on the Princeton-based project found that in many parts of the continent the pattern of demographic change failed to follow the threestage path enshrined in demographic transition theory. In the critical transitional stage, fertility decline actually preceded mortality decline in some localities. The project also established that fertility decline occurred at varying levels of socioeconomic and demographic development, undercutting the central tenet of transition theory (Knodel and van de Walle, 1979; Watkins, 1986). The most recent blow to received wisdom comes in a new study of fertility decline in northern Italy (Kertzer and Hogan, 1989). Drawing on a wealth of individual-level historical data from the town of Casalecchio, David Kertzer, an anthropologist, and Dennis Hogan, a sociologist, show that macrolevel social and economic changes affected members of different classes living in the same community differently. In Casalecchio there occurred not one, but four, temporally discontinuous fertility transitions, a finding that challenges the image fostered by the European Project of whole regions undergoing demographic transition together. Kertzer and Hogan corroborate the European Project's finding that fertility decline does not follow changes