In Chapter 1 I outlined the analytic moves by which this book has sought to remake demographic analysis to incorporate the roles of culture and history, gender and power in reproductive life. In this brief afterword I turn to anthropology, suggesting how the discipline might be stretched, and thereby enriched, through closer attention to demographic and reproductive matters. I do so in two ways: by looking backward to review what has been accomplished here, and by looking forward to sketch out domains for future research.

Old themes and new

During most of this century anthropological interest in reproductive issues has been muted, depressed perhaps by the demographic construction of them as matters of modernization and mathematics. Nevertheless, anthropologists have not neglected these issues entirely. A close look at the history of our field indicates that reproduction was not a consistent theme in anthropology, but it attracted the attention of a good number of individual anthropologists, including leading practitioners of our craft. For reasons that cannot be pursued here, the interest in fertility was stronger among British than American anthropologists, at least in the early and middle decades of this century. Bronislaw Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages (1987 [1929]), Raymond Firth's We, The Tikopia (1936), and Meyer Fortes's The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi (1949) come readily to mind.