This is a proposal to examine, using data from Nepal, several important topics in social and demographic theory, including the implications of substantial economic change on family relationships and kin networks and the consequences of these familial changes for reproductive behavior. We hypothesize that supports for high fertility in premarket economies are mediated by family organization through alliance-building and household formation strategies. This system 's stability is undermined when senior family members lose control over primary production through land fragmentation and expansion of educational and wage- labor opportunities. Using combined ethnographic and survey field methods, the co-principal investigators, and anthropologist and a sociologist, have collected data from two villages representing a pretransition, subsistence and a more market-oriented setting inhabited by a single ethnic group. Analysis involving sophisticated multivariate statistical procedures will be combined with detailed ethnographic material and focus on economic comparison across settings, the influence of economic factors on familial and household processes, the effects of family and household on individual life courses, and the cumulative impact of these on household organization and the number and timing of children. Our goals include substantive analysis and development of more general methodology for studying complex relationships in family change. Our two-village comparison builds on ethnographic work in the pretransition setting by on of the co-principal investigators. The design will permit comparisons across villages along the economic dimension plus allow investigation of any change which may have occurred in the pretransition setting since 1981. We will be examining changes occurring at the earliest stages of transformation from familial to market economies, exactly that stage where least is known about the mechanics of family and demographic transition. This project is unique to the extent that it integrates ethnographic and survey methodologies, explores relationships among economy, family, and fertility at an early transition phase, and joins and anthropologist and sociologist through all phases of research.
| Fricke, T; Teachman, J D (1993) Writing the names: marriage style, living arrangements, and first birth interval in a Nepali society. Demography 30:175-88 |
| Axinn, W G (1992) Family organization and fertility limitation in Nepal. Demography 29:503-21 |
