[1] We are especially obliged to Anthony Carter, Philip Kreager, Robert Netting, and Nicholas Townsend for their comments on the original and revised versions of this paper. They are not responsible for any residual errors of fact or interpretation. The title of this paper bears an uncanny resemblance to that by Pollak and Watkins (1993), testimony to the power of independent but shared metaphor in social life.
[2] See also the treatment of the subject by V. Rao at the conference and Caldwell, Caldwell and Caldwell 1987.
[3] McNicoll (1992) divides the history a bit differently, but the general argument is the same.
[4] References to other papers at the 1994 conference are to the papers as there presented, not necessarily as here published.
[5] Of course, in the Notesteinian tradition, one might only have to achieve "modernization" (whatever that is) and let social actors mysteriously adapt, without our understanding just what they adapted to.
[6] This is not to say that the postmodernists have raised no issues of importance. The difficulties of achieving objective observation, if objective observation can be reached other than in the limit, are serious. The question is whether to move doggedly and critically ahead in the face of such obstacles or to succumb to the paralysis of self-analysis. Similarly, feminist theory has made extraordinary contributions to our view of demographic behavior and of social history, but that contribution does not imply that gender is the only worthwhile subject. For discussion of the scientific and humanistic aspects of anthropology see for example Hammel 1995, D'Andrade 1995a, and other comments in the 1995-1996 Anthropology Newsletter.
[7] Perhaps the first discovery of this problem lay in the inability of Latin grammar to account for the structure of indigenous languages outside Europe. Indeed, it has taken quite some time to appreciate that Latin grammar cannot account for the structure of modern European languages, although most such languages continue to be taught as though the grammatical categories of Latin still had explanatory force.
[8] In the strict sense, cultural relativism means that cultural phenomena foreign to the observer should be analyzed in their own terms without the imposition of Western categories and evaluations. In a looser and infinitely problematic sense, cultural relativism means that one culture is as morally as acceptable as any other. See for example Edgerton 1992; Gellner 1985; Hammel 1994; Herskovits 1972; James 1994; Kopelman 1994; Schweder 1990; Shore 1990a, 1990b; Spiro 1992.
[9] The export of "development" by institutions such as the World Bank, and the eager acceptance of such concepts by elites in LDCs, are particularly troubling to many ethnographers who have seen the effects of development programs at the bottom of the social structures, where ethnographers customarily do their work. Anthropologists are often not just the students of such societies but their vehement defenders. See, for contrasting views, D'Andrade 1995b, Scheper-Hughes 1995.
[10] For a discussion of the potential meanings of culture see Carter 1988, 1995a, 1995b; Hammel 1990; Keesing 1974, 1990; Kreager 1982, 1986.
[11] We might note in passing that the dispute about agency is just a warmed up version of the debate about determinism and free will, and we cannot resist quoting the sarcastic observation that economics is about how people make choices, while sociology is about how they have no choices to make (Duesenberry 1960:233).
[12] There is a history of discussion on these issues in formal semantic analysis in anthropology. See for example Burling 1964a; 1964b; Frake 1964; Hymes 1964; Hammel 1964. For discussion of similar issues in demography and especially attempts to use cultural concepts see Blake 1961; Caldwell 1977; Caldwell and Hull 1988; Caldwell, Reddy and Caldwell 1982; Carter 1988, 1995a, 1995b; Cicourel 1974; Clark 1988; Cleland and Wilson 1987; Coale and Watkins 1986; Dyson and Moore 1983; Beckman 1983; Galloway et al. 1994; Greenhalgh 1988; Hammel 1981, 1985, 1995; Handwerker 1988; Hull 1983; Knodel et al. 1987; Kreager 1982, 1986; Lee et al. 1994; Lesthaeghe 1977, 1983; Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988; Levine and Scrimshaw 1983; McNicoll 1980; Nag 1962, 1980; Nag 1983; Pollak and Watkins; Watkins 1983;,1986, 1987, 1991.
[13] We are indebted to Sudha Shreeniwas for her comments on this situation in India.
[14] American males with military service may recall a series of graphic films sometimes called derisively the "venereal serial." These were shown to military personnel to caution them to avoid contact with prostitutes and to use condoms or other post-coital prophylactic means to avoid infection. The American male co-author of this paper can recall no instructions about subsequent behaviors with wives or even "nice girls', although in the then prevailing culture, one need not have worried at all about nice girls.
[15] Deep cultural knowledge, only some of which is shared by American readers, is required to understand this remark. M and m are the coefficients of a well known analytic method that estimates the level of fertility and the degree to which parity specific control is being practiced. Readers who have not been exposed to American advertising might just as well forget this phrase.
[16] See especially Townsend's treatment of parenthood in this volume, a concept superior to that of fertility for analysis because it allows more rigorous analysis of the costs and benefits of child-bearing and is more reflective of the desire to have children when having children is primarily a way to be a parent.
[17] There are several reasons for these omissions. The larger issues raised by ecological adaptation and evolutionary theory focus often on the development of social institutions rather than the behavior of individuals in the presence of those institutions. We are not here concerned with the development of institutions. Where evolutionary theory and particularly sociobiology use concepts of selection and adaptation to explain individual behavior they often seem thoroughly teleological and not mindful of the fundamental contributions of Darwin and later Huxley. Finally, while biological anthropology has an important role to play in the understanding of many demographic processes, especially in the collection of information such as hormonal assays in anthropological populations, those contributions form a kind of underpinning to the issues we discuss here.