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Special Issue: Population and Development: Comparative Anthropological Perspectives

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Abstract

In this introduction, we do five things. First, we briefly review some of the contributions that anthropology has made in recent decades to the study of development. Second, we discuss the overall importance of population processes in development. Third, we provide an introduction to the field of anthropological demography. While each of these sections is necessarily brief, they are meant to situate the articles in this issue, placing them in a broad framework that suggests the contributions that anthropology can make to the study of comparative international development in general, and to the relationship between population and development in particular. To this end, the fourth aim of this introduction is to consider how anthropology approaches the social science task of comparison. Familiarizing readers with this engagement will, we hope, help in thinking about the contributions of the papers in this issue. The final section provides a brief introduction to each article, suggesting some of the ways they intersect with and illuminate themes we have raised here.

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Notes

  1. We are focused here on the intersection of demography with socio-cultural anthropology. There is also an extensive history of interaction between biological anthropology and demography, around topics such as evolutionary life history theory and small-area estimation. However, those issues constitute a quite different set of conversations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brown University, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Daniel Jordan Smith

  2. University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Jennifer A. Johnson-Hanks

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  1. Daniel Jordan Smith
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  2. Jennifer A. Johnson-Hanks
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Correspondence to Daniel Jordan Smith.

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Smith, D.J., Johnson-Hanks, J.A. Special Issue: Population and Development: Comparative Anthropological Perspectives. St Comp Int Dev 50, 433–454 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9199-x

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