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Culture and Demography: From Reluctant Bedfellows to Committed Partners

Demography volume 51, pages 3–25 (2014)Cite this article

Abstract

Demography and culture have had a long but ambivalent relationship. Cultural influences are widely recognized as important for demographic outcomes but are often “backgrounded” in demographic research. I argue that progress toward a more successful integration is feasible and suggest a network model of culture as a potential tool. The network model bridges both traditional (holistic and institutional) and contemporary (tool kit) models of culture used in the social sciences and offers a simple vocabulary for a diverse set of cultural concepts, such as attitudes, beliefs, and norms, as well as quantitative measures of how culture is organized. The proposed model conceptualizes culture as a nested network of meanings represented by schemas that range in complexity from simple concepts to multifaceted cultural models. I illustrate the potential value of a model using accounts of the cultural changes underpinning the transformation of marriage in the United States and point to developments in the social, cognitive, and computational sciences that could facilitate the application of the model in empirical demographic research.

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Notes

  1. The term “structure” is used in this context to refer to patterned material and social arrangements, such as economic systems and status hierarchies. This departs from Sewell’s (1992) concept of structure as the dual product of material and ideational elements but is consistent with common usage in demography.

  2. Some demographers have also used other, less useful, definitions (Hammel 1990): for example, equating culture with a country, region, or group, or the hodge-podge of “fuzzy, not clearly rational, or not readily amenable to inclusion in statistical models” causes of unexplained variance in our models (Obermeyer 1997:817).

  3. For example, the norm of bringing a small gift to a host or hostess rests on a shared interpretation—that the gift is an act of thanks rather than an implication that the hostess is apt to lack some important item the visitor wants. The norm itself—the idea that this is something you should do—is the result not only of the shared interpretation but also the widespread enactment of the script and the social processes that assign it value.

  4. As an example, Ridgeway (2011) noted that people are more likely to draw on gender beliefs in situations closely associated with gender (e.g., weddings) than in those less closely associated (e.g., work settings).

  5. Notestein was so sure of the power of economic structures when he wrote in 1945 that he predicted that it would take totalitarian measures to force U.S. fertility to rise again.

  6. In an example provided by Cherlin (2009), individuals in an unhappy marriage can base a decision to remain married on the cultural belief that marriage should be enduring or choose to divorce following the belief that marriage should be fulfilling.

  7. This claim is based on a scan of a 1-in-8 sample of the 229 articles with abstracts that referenced “culture” or “cultural” in JSTOR’s population domain with publication dates since 2002.

  8. Norms need not be linked to institutions (Mason 1983) but may arise out of group processes; much current research invokes norms without explicit attention to their possible relation to institutions.

  9. Most studies measure individual attitudes rather than shared norms. Some studies have attempted to use attitude data from surveys to measure norms at the neighborhood or group level (e.g., Musick et al. 2008; Warner et al. 2011); earlier work relied on neighborhood structural characteristics as proxies for normative climates (e.g., Brewster 1994; Browning et al. 2008).

  10. We are wired to do this. Neurons have evolved to connect in durable patterns that represent the patterns of features and associations that we repeatedly encounter as we experience objects and events in the world (Damasio 2010).

  11. Using the concept of schema to encompass such a broad range of phenomena raises the question of whether different terms are needed to differentiate schemas of different kinds. In fact, we do have such terms: we have concepts, scripts, models, values, prototypes, worldviews, beliefs, and many other terms useful to cultural analysis. Schema is not a substitute for these terms but a basic element underpinning all of these. A second answer is that simple and complex schemas share a common name because they arise and become organized through a common set of mechanisms and serve a common function of representing meaning. There is no clear boundary between a simple schema and a complex one, and thus there is no logic to guide a distinction on the basis of size or complexity.

  12. As Basu (2006) argued, emotions play a basic role in demographic behaviors, such as condom use in sexual relationships, marriage, and childbearing. They do so through embodied emotional responses linked to schemas in the brain.

  13. This new model is now being transformed in new ways. With the framing of gay marriage as an issue of rights and equality, the solid association of heterosexuality with marriage in traditional marriage models was challenged and is being progressively undermined (Baunach 2011). At the same time, many aspects of traditional marriage models—for example, mutual support, love, exclusivity, child rearing, and commitment—are adopted in same-sex relationships.

  14. Distance is defined as the minimum number of ties required to connect two particular nodes in a network; centrality is a measure of the importance or influence of a particular node within a network. A simple measure of centrality is the number of ties a node has.

  15. Moody (2013) conducted a similar analysis using essays on personal beliefs posted to the This I Believe website (http://thisibelieve.org/).

  16. The validity of these measures has yet to be carefully established, and many lessons remain to be learned about their use in context of theoretically informed demographic studies. Bringing demographic perspectives to bear on these issues is vitally important.

  17. Cultural variables are not uniquely subject to the problem of endogeneity, but because cultural schemas and their material expressions are interdependent, the threat of endogeneity is more commonly perceived in this domain. That is not to say that cultural variables cannot act in exogenous ways, as in the exportation of new ideas from one culture to another.

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Acknowledgments

A previous version of this article was presented as the presidential address at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, New Orleans, April 12, 2013. I am grateful to the Maryland Population Research Center (R24HD41041) for support. I thank Andrew Cherlin, Dan Lichter, and Arland Thornton for helpful comments as reviewers for Demography. For comments on previous versions, I thank Peter Bearman, Feinian Chen, William Fennie, John Haaga, Kathie Harris, Sandy Hofferth, Jenna Johnson-Hanks, Patricio Korzeniewicz, Sangeetha Madhavan, Jim Moody, Phil Morgan, Alice Nixon, Michael Rendall, Duncan Thomas, Reeve Vanneman, Susan Watkins; seminar participants at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Michigan; and especially Naomi Quinn, who mentored me as I explored the linkages between brain science and culture.

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    Christine A. Bachrach

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Bachrach, C.A. Culture and Demography: From Reluctant Bedfellows to Committed Partners. Demography 51, 3–25 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0257-6

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Keywords

  • Culture
  • Demography
  • Network
  • Marriage