Abstract
Data from two rural Chinese settings suggest that an ecological variable — the reliability of food supply — may exert a more decisive influence on birth seasonality than time of marriage or attributes of temperature, rainfall, or workload. First births seem to be especially important for patterns of seasonality; comparison between villages suggests that a periodic but reliable source of food may encourage a seasonal distribution of first births, the effect of which might be to protect the mother and/or her newborn infant. It is the periodicity of first births that may give aggregate birth figures the appearance of seasonality.
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This paper is based on fieldwork conducted by Myron L. Cohen (Columbia) and myself and is part of a larger, continuing study of the social and economic attributes of a particular Chinese regional system. Fieldwork and initial data analysis were funded by the National Science Foundation with supplementary support for further data analysis provided by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. A debt of gratitude is due the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (Taiwan) for encouragement and sponsorship in the field. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues Carol R. and Melvin Ember, and Gregory Johnson for the generous statistical and critical assistance they provided during analysis of the data from Meinung. I am also indebted to Arthur Wolf (Stanford) and to Margery Wolf for suggestions and criticisms offered after reading an early version of the present paper.
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Pasternak, B. Seasons of birth and marriage in two Chinese localities. Hum Ecol 6, 299–323 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00889028
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00889028