Counting Populations, Understanding Societies by Véronique Petit

Author:Véronique Petit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

5.4 The Institutional, Political and Scientific Context: A Disciplinary Rapprochement

I agree with Kertzer and Fricke (1997a) that the rapprochement between demography and anthropology is the result of the initiative of demographers who were dissatisfied with their own discipline. The dissatisfaction of demographers concerns both the limits of the demographic method (especially the problem of categorisation) and the theoretical weakness of demography. Because of these gaps and the incapacity of demography to generate explanations for the behaviours that it observes, demographers have been compelled to envisage anthropology as a model and source of inspiration for their methodological, theoretical and conceptual frameworks. The result of the rapprochement between demography and anthropology was the birth of a new branch of demography called anthropological demography. The new discipline led to the emergence of a specific form of micro-demography and resulted in a reassessment of the notion of culture and its dynamics in long-term accounts of demographic behaviours. The purpose of the new discipline is to take account of the complexity of social reality and in particular the complexity of the various sociological levels structuring social reality.

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