Mattias Larsen

Intergenerational Interests, Uncertainty and Discrimination -I. Conceptualising the Process of Declining Child Sex Ratios in India

The article attempts to conceptualise the problem of Indias declining child sex ratios as a result of an ongoing process of societal change, with particular attention to the dynamic aspect of the problem. The rapid transformation of Indias social and economic fabric has been altering the institution ofthe family, as the young become disembedded from customary social relations. It is argued here that placing the uncertainty that this generates - understood as a fundamental inability to predict outcomes - at the centre of the conceptualisation puts the parental decision-making in its context of intergenerational interests. At the same time, it enables a dynamic analysis of how that structure changes as society transforms, thus creating circumstances in which there is little space for daughters.

Intergenerational Interests, Uncertainty and Discrimination -II: An Empirical Analysis of the Process of Declining Child Sex Ratios in India

This article is an empirical analysis of the problem of declining child sex ratios in India. The rapid transformation of the social and economic fabric in India is altering the institution of the family, as the young become increasingly disembedded from customary social relations. Case studies in Karnataka and Uttaranchal show how this transformation has lead to differing intergenerationai interests, thereby increasing parental uncertainty about the future. The uncertainty experienced by the older generation concerns apprehensions about future socioeconomic obligations and the younger generation becoming disembedded from those intergenerational interests. It is in the face of this uncertainty that the situational context of the social devices transmitted through centuries of gendered prescriptions is fallen back upon and receives renewed importance. This context is constituted by highly gendered norms wherein daughter discrimination is legitimised and rationalised.