A01=Caroline H. Bledsoe
african
age
ageism
aging
anthropologists
anthropology
Author_Caroline H. Bledsoe
birth control
Category=JBSL
Category=JHBD
Category=JHMC
child spacing
contraception
cultural studies
culture
demography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
family
fertility
gambia
gender
gerontology
healthcare
human behavior
humanity
humans
medicine
morality
morals
motherhood
offspring
parenthood
pregnancy
public health
reproduction
retirement
society
time
trauma
west africa
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780226058511
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jul 2002
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Most women in the West use contraceptives in order to avoid having children. But in rural Gambia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women use contraceptives for the opposite reason - to have as many children as possible. Using ethnographic and demographic data from a three-year study in rural Gambia, Contingent Lives explains this seemingly counterintuitive fact by juxtaposing two very different understandings of the life course: one is a linear, Western model that equates aging and the ability to reproduce with the passage of time, the other a Gambian model that views aging as contingent on the cumulative physical, social, and spiritual hardships of personal history, especially obstetric trauma. Viewing each of these two models from the perspective of the other, Caroline Bledsoe produces fresh understandings of the classical anthropological subjects of reproduction, time, and aging as culturally shaped within women's conjugal lives. Her insights will be welcomed by scholars of anthropology and demography as well as by those working in public health, development studies, gerontology, and the history of medicine.
Caroline H. Bledsoe, professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, is the author of Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society and is the coeditor of several books, most recently Fertility and the Male Life Cycle in the Era of Fertility Decline.
