Naturalizations and Reifications

As a discipline, demography is a late emanation of the liberal division of intellectual work (Szreter 1993; Livi Bacci et al. 1994) and like the other disciplines derived from this division, it is limited in its perspectives and politically oriented in a conservative sense (Wallerstein et al. 1996). Barbara Duden (1993) denounced the intellectual creation of a dehumanized population-object by this discipline.

The word “demography” appeared in European dictionaries in the midnineteenth century, and demographers looked to Thomas Robert Malthus as their founding father. As discussed earlier, the English economist thought that the excessive procreation of the poor is the cause of the perpetuation of their misery, a theoretical position that at his time had very strong political repercussions, and is still politically used today (Section 8.2).

Demography often regards its concepts and laws as natural. Malthus himself claimed that instinct is the cause of procreation, and the social dynamic that keeps it in check is its confinement to marriage giving children legitimacy. Undoubtedly, the power of marriage to regulate births through a lower or higher age at which the bride enters it, is based on the social norms that punish women who become pregnant without being married. As Harris and Ross (1987, 88) wrote, “Age at marriage, however, regulated population growth only because it was embedded in a distinctive complex of sexual taboos, marital exchanges, family organization, wealth inheritance, celibate orders, and infant death control.”

Following Malthus's footsteps, demographers also tend to ignore class analysis and reify the variables they work with. Marriage rates, intervals between children, the use of contraceptives in the modern era are all considered as causes of social phenomena, while instead these variables must in turn be explained. Demographers are inclined to ignore the role of practices that in the past represented the functional equivalent of contraception: abstinence, prolonged breastfeeding, procured abortions, relinquishment of newborn babies and infanticides. For example, Richard Easterlin, an economist who applied his disciplinary tools to demography, presented the concept of Mortality Revolution, pointing out that decreasing mortality spreads faster than economic growth. He thus deduced that the Mortality Revolution was independent from the Industrial Revolution.