Population growth has always been a politically loaded object of inquiry. From the debate sparked by Malthus’s classic Essay to the still present apocalyptic warnings about overpopulation or the declining birth rate, demographers and statisticians have worked in troubled waters, where progressively more sophisticated quantitative techniques have sometimes gone hand in hand with dubious social philosophy. In her recent survey of post-1930 American demography, Susan Greenhalgh (1996: 30–31) argued that the institutionalization and professionalization of this field as an academic discipline required scholars to draw “sharp boundaries between themselves and activists,” such as those involved in the promotion of objectives like birth control, eugenics, or immigration restriction. A detailed inquiry into the origins of the Population Association of America (PAA) has shown that up to the 1930s the study of population attracted more activists than social scientists and that the two types could coexist quite happily within the same organization (Hodgson 1991). Greenhalgh added (1996), however, that despite the efforts expanded in its quest for scientific status, this field of study has remained quite open to ideological influence, fundamentally Eurocentric and devoid of reflexivity. The polemic that stirred the French Institut national d’études démographiques in the early 1990s shows that the demarcation lines can easily get blurred and that the simultaneously cognitive and political dimensions of population study can reappear with utmost clarity (Le Bras 1991).