The Anthropological Demography of Health

The anthropological demography of health, as a field of interdisciplinary population research, has grown from the 1990s, extending to a remarkable range of key human and policy issues, including: genetic disorders; nutrition; mental health; infant, child, and maternal morbidity; malaria; HIV/AIDS; disability and chronic diseases; new reproductive technologies; and population ageing. By observing group formation and change over time, tracking people's networks, and observing variance between what people say and do, anthropological demography goes beyond the characteristically top-down formal methodologies of most mainstream socio-economic demography and population health. This path-breaking volume charts and integrates the growing body of research that combines ethnography with quantitative models and methods in the field of population health. It offers a clear agenda based on important conceptual and methodological advances, and often working in close collaboration with medical and historical research.

Approaches to population that are grounded in sustained ethnographic and historical research provide more than substantive knowledge of how cultural and social formations interact with health. They enable understanding of how local institutions and experience of vital events come to be translated into the demographic and health measures on which survey and clinical programmes rely. This, in turn, makes possible critical evaluation of the empirical adequacy of such translation, reflection on what happens when these models and measures become standardised evaluations of health statuses, and what this implies for governance. The combination of anthropological, demographic, historical, and biological research has gone beyond the initial demographic prioritisation of fertility regulation, to take on an expanded range of key health policy issues, and locate them in the context of the inequalities that so frequently give rise to major health differentials. The Anthropological Demography of Health offers a clear agenda for the application and extension of combined anthropological and demographic thinking in population health, and will provide a point of reference for the field.

Véronique Petit, Professor of Demography, University of Paris,Kaveri Qureshi, Lecturer in Global Health Equity, University of Edinburgh,Yves Charbit, Emeritus Professor of Demography, University of Paris,Philip Kreager, Senior Research Fellow in Human Sciences, Somerville College, Oxford University

Véronique Petit is Professor of Demography at the University of Paris. She is specialist in reproductive health, mental health, and international migration in sub-Saharan Africa.

Kaveri Qureshi is Lecturer in Global Health Equity at the University of Edinburgh. She has an interdisciplinary background in sociology, anthropology, and public health. She works on health and social inequalities in the UK and Pakistan, with a focus on migration, 'race'/ethnicity, gender, and the management of health and illness in families.

Yves Charbit is Emeritus Professor of Demography at the University of Paris and Founding Director of the Centre Population et Développement at Paris Descartes University. He is a specialist in reproductive health and population theory.

Philip Kreager is Senior Research Fellow in Human Sciences, Somerville College and Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group, School of Anthropology, Oxford University. He is a co-editor of Population in the Human Sciences (OUP, 2015).

Introduction, Philip Kreager, Véronique Petit, Kaveri Qureshi, Yves Charbit
Part I: TAKING THE LONGER VIEW: HEALTH INTERVENTIONS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
1. Cultures of Contagion and Containment? The Geography of Smallpox in Britain in the Pre-vaccination Era, Romola Davenport
2. The Prostitute as an Urban Savage, Paris 1830 -1914. French Nineteenth-Century Premises of the Anthropological Demography of Health, Yves Charbit
3. Medical Topography as an Instrument of Colonial Management in French Algeria, 1830-1871, Hugues Moussy
4. Peer Learning and Health-related Interventions: Family Planning and Nutrition in Kenya and Uganda, 1950-2019, Shane Doyle
Part II: HEALTH AS AN OBJECT OF CONTEMPORARY DEMOGRAPHIC GOVERNANCE
5. An Anthropological Demography of Mental Health in Senegal, Véronique Petit
6. 'As list karhayee ke bayad anjame midadam khat khord': Contemporary Reproductive Body Politic in Iran, Soraya Tremayne
7. Beyond the Government Document: Migrant Family Experiences of Birth Registration in East Lombok, Indonesia, Leslie Butt
8. Reporting Statistics on Undernutrition and Obesity, Stanley Ulijaszek
Part III: IMPROVING DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSLATION
9. Making Measures: Processes of Demographic Translation, Jennifer A. Johnson-Hanks
10. The Tensions between Comparability and Locally Meaningful Data, Sara Randall
11. Verbal Autopsy Interview Standardization Study: Report from the Field, Clarissa Surek-Clark
Part IV: COMPOSITIONAL DEMOGRAPHY: LOCATING HUMAN AGENCY IN POPULATION AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES
12. Population Ageing and Conjunctural Action, Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill
13. Incapacity and Debility among Pakistani Migrants and Minorities in the UK, Kaveri Qureshi
14. Family Malaria Management in Africa: At the Crossroads of Social Epidemiology and Health Anthropology, Carine Baxerres and Jean-Yves Le Hesran
Part V: RECONCEPTUALISING REPRODUCTIVE RISK
15. Reproductive Genetics, Risk, and Context, Alison Shaw
16. Sexuality and HIV among Young Urban Congolese, Lucas Tchetgnia, Yves Charbit, and Benoît Libali
17. Body Symbolics, Obstetric Practices, and the Improvement of Maternal Health in Cambodia, Clémence Schantz
18. Concealed Pregnancies and Protected Postpartum Periods: Defining Critical Periods of Maternal Health in Nepal, Jan Brunson
19. 'They Are More Careful': Transnational Care among Chinese Migrant Parents in Italy, Elizabeth L. Krause