Tom Fricke

Social change and the family: Comparative perspectives from the west, China, and South Asia

This paper examines the influence of social and economic change on family structure and relationships: How do such economic and social transformations as industrialization, urbanization, demographic change, the expansion of education, and the long-term growth of income influence the family? We take a comparative and historical approach, reviewing the experiences of three major sociocultural regions: the West, China, and South Asia. Many of the changes that have occurred in family life have been remarkably similar in the three settings—the separation of the workplace from the home, increased training of children in nonfamilial institutions, the development of living arrangements outside the family household, increased access of children to financial and other productive resources, and increased participation by children in the selection of a mate. While the similarities of family change in diverse cultural settings are striking, specific aspects of change have varied across settings because of significant pre-existing differences in family structure, residential patterns of marriage, autonomy of children, and the role of marriage within kinship systems.

Anthropological demography : toward a new synthesis

The chapters in this volume are substantially revised versions of papers originally presented at the Brown University Conference on Anthropological Demography November 3-5 1994.... This volume is motivated by a sense that the time is ripe for a reconsideration and renewal of past achievements together with the development of a new synthesis in the relationship between anthropology and demography.... The contributions take various and not always reconcilable points of view. The opening chapters for example illustrate that the foundations of demographic engagement with anthropology in issues of kinship social organization and the formation of domestic groups are as alive and valid today as in the past. Subsequent chapters expand on standard demographic concepts by demonstrating the role of anthropology in rethinking their cross-cultural validity. Some chapters more critically evaluate the relationship between demography and anthropology with reference to their epistemological roots while others apply specific frameworks from the general anthropological and theoretical literature to demographic issues. (EXCERPT)

Himalayan households : Tamang demography and domestic processes

A comprehensive study of the cultural ecology, demography, and domestic organization of one village undergoing socioeconomic changes, the Tamang community of Timling.

The Microdemographic Community-Study Approach

Survey methods have been criticized for producing unreliable, invalid data and for failing to provide contextual information to test complex causal hypotheses. We discuss a technique that combines survey and ethnographic methods at every stage of the data collection process to overcome these shortcomings. We use ethnographic and survey evidence to show how the combined approach reduces coverage errors, nonresponse errors and measurement errors arising from the interviewer, the questionnaire, and the respondent. Complete integration of the two methods during data collection can uncover information that a survey alone would have missed. Ethnographic data can also be used to understand the meaning behind relationships among survey variables that would have otherwise been unclear. Finally, although the combined approach is intensive, it is flexible enough to be used in a variety of settings to study many different research questions.

Writing the Names: Marriage Style, Living Arrangements, and First Birth Interval In a Nepali Society*

Using data from a Nepali population, this analysis argues that marriage style and postmarital living arrangements affect coital frequency to produce variations in the timing of first birth after marriage. Event history analysis of the first birth interval for 149 women suggests that women’s autonomy in marriage decisions and marriage to cross-cousins accelerate the pace of entry into first birth. Extended-household residence with reduced natal kin contact, on the other hand, significantly lengthens the first birth interval. These findings are consistent with previous arguments in the literature while offering new evidence for the impact of extended-family residence on fertility.

The Uses of Culture in Demographic Research: A Continuing Place for Community Studies

FOR A CULTURAL anthropologist, one of the most promising developments in demography over the last 20 years has been the demise of its once guiding paradigm, classic demographic transition theory. Wielding the hammers that drove the nails into its coffin were demographers themselves, writing in the summary volume of the Princeton study of European fertility transitions. Comments on that study by John Knodel and Etienne van de Walle, Susan Watkins, and Barbara Anderson (Coale and Watkins 1986) all referred to the failure of the supposed predictors-urbanization, literacy, infant and child mortality, and industrialization-to account for the pattern of decline in the various regions of Europe. All of these authors noted the impact of a theretofore little understood variable, cultural setting, on the rates and shape of transition. Their striking candor, along with the parallel developments in John Caldwells work in other geographic areas (Caldwell 1982; Caldwell, Reddy, and Caldwell 1988), opened a new era in demographic research. The new era, which we are still in, is marked by a self-conscious search for methodologies that will allow demographers to incorporate cultural meanings into their explanations of demographic processes. All of us have benefited from the resulting openness to methodological experiment and, especially, from the welcome extended to anthropologists interested in demographic issues. That welcome has provided me with the opportunity to engage in a series of ongoing collaborations that have been among the most satisfying and intellectually exciting of my career as an anthropologist and a demographer. Nevertheless, I see the current state of our discipline as posing some danger for the continued exploration of ways to introduce culture and meaning into our explanations and interpretations of demographic phenomena. I once raised the hackles of some of my demographic colleagues by suggesting that demography was in the midst of what some philosophers

Darwinian Transitions? A Comment

This note contrasts John Caldwells wealth flows theory of fertility decline with an alternative approach to explaining the demographic transition advanced by Paul Turke based on the assumptions of work in sociobiology. Caldwells general theory fits quite well with known empirical patterns whereas Turkes model is contradicted by empirical studies. Moreover while sociobiological considerations of demographic transition are valuable in drawing attention to kinship support networks they are limited by their tendency to define these networks solely in biological terms at the expense of social definitions of proximate interest. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA) (EXCERPT)

Family organization and the wage labor transition in a Tamang community of Nepal

This paper explores familial contexts of transition to a wage labor economy using ethnographic and survey data from Tamang communities at the northern edge of Nepals Kathmandu Valley. Historically agro-pastoralist, the Tamang of this area have experienced social watersheds drawing them into ever closer relationships with Kathmandu. The earliest was their nineteenth century induction into corvée labor for national elites; more recent has been the accelerating monetization of the twentieth century. This analysis demonstrates trends and frames hypotheses about the social structuring of this latest process, testing them at the individual level with combined ethnographic and survey data from 1028 respondents. Multivariate analyses explore the effects of birth cohort, education, domestic group status, and settlement location on participation in non-family organized wage work. Substantive findings are related to the broader historical literature on household and family with special attention to varieties of subsistence to monetized transition.

The family contexts of marriage timing in Nepal

Marriage in most societies constitutes one of the primary transitions in a persons life course. Its significance is heightened by including the interests of networks beyond the couple in societies organized by kinship. Because marriage can carry multivalent meanings for individuals and groups joined by it in these settings, it has been identified as a key moment in the reproduction of social relations incorporating hierarchy, exchange, and domestic group activities in its web of significance (Barnard and Good 1984; Collier 1988). From a somewhat different perspective, demographers have investigated the timing of marriage and drawn out its implications for other population processes in those settings where marriage initiates childbearing (Smith 198 3). Trained in predominantly Euro-American social science. traditions to study predominantly Euro-American people, demographers have focused mainly on the individual determinants of marriage processes. While often acknowledging the wider familial interests brought to bear on marriage timing, they seldom go beyond immediate family members for contextualizing their analyses of these processes. Recent statements by anthropologically sensitive demographers and others point to a union of these traditions (Macfarlane 1986; Caldwell et al. 1988; Greenhalgh 1990). Marriage as just one instance of social action should be subject to the same analytic frameworks found to be productive in other social analysis. If particular marriage forms are evidence of wider strategies of social reproduction (Bourdieu 1976), then the timing of marriage should itself be seen as a part of that process. Thus marriage timing is no less the proper study of anthropology than any other element of marriage behavior. At the same time, marriage timing should be seen to have implications beyond the merely demographic. Here we draw on these two traditions of analysis to explore the differential timing of marriage among the women of Timling, a central Himalayan village in Nepal inhabited by the Tamang and Ghale descendants of migrants from Tibet. We explore the family politics of marriage timing in one setting of the Tamang Family Research Project, a microdemographic study of changing life course experience, family relationships, and fertility behavior in two Nepali communities (Axinn et al.1991 The project involved ethnographic and survey data collection in 1987-88 and 1991, building on earlier fieldwork in Timling in 1981. Our analysis begins with the anthropological insight expressed recently by Jane Collier (1988), that in societies organized by kinship, marriage processes are instrumental to structuring social reproduction. We pursue our argument in light of this principle. Our methodological approach, on the other hand, makes use of quantitative tools of event history analysis which, while well established among demographers as essential methods for analyzing dynamic processes quantitatively (Allison 1984; Teachman 1982; Yamaguchi 1991), are used by only a tiny number of anthropologists (Jones 1989; Kertzer and Hogan 1989; Fricke and Teachman 1993; Hill, in press).(2) DETERMINANTS OF MARRIAGE TIMING Alan Macfarlane (1986), writing in the tradition linking the culture and organization of families to demographic events, has suggested that societies lie along a continuum from those in which familial interests dominate to those in which the interests of individuals prevail. Following on the work of Caldwell (1982), he argues that marriage systems are tied to various other elements of domestic economy and demographic regime. In cross-societal comparisons, high familial levels of organization are generally associated with wealth flows from children to senior kin, relatively early ages at marriage, and higher fertility levels (Thornton and Fricke 1987). Widespread transformations toward individuation in these family-organized societies has occupied the attention of social demographers and family sociologists since the early 1960s (Goode 1970; Caldwell 1982; Caldwell et al. …

Netting in Nepal: social change the life course and brideservice in Sangila.

The links among family characteristics, pre-marital experiences organized outside the family, and participation in choice of spouse are now well established for historical transformations in a range of social settings. Less examined are the consequences of these changes for subsequent inter-familial relationships in societies where marriage organizes kin alliances and interfamilial labor obligations. Using survey and ethnographic data gathered in Nepal, this paper examines the implications of change in work, living experiences, and the marriage process for subsequent inter-familial relationships exemplified by crosscousin marriage and the provision of brideservice. Hypotheses are developed which consider the impact of community context on these behaviors; these are tested in logistic regression analyses for the first marriages of all 430 ever-married women in the community. Cross-cousin marriage and brideservice are shown to be related to prior familial characteristics, life-course experience, and elements of the marriage process in ways that are significantly conditioned by community history and proximity to urban centers.