Human Ecological Approaches to Reproduction and Fertility
In 1922, W.H.R. Rivers wrote of his concern about the dramatic post-colonial population decline in Melanesia . Although he saw a strong possibility for total population demise in this region, over 80 years later, this has not transpired. This project builds on the Fertility and Reproduction Study Group Seminar Series “Fertility and Reproduction in Melanesia ”, and updates what is known of population size and process since that time. Given that much has changed in the time since Rivers' publication, a primary focus for both the seminar series and the edited volume that will come from it, was, and is, historical demography: the decline and subsequent population resurgence in Melanesia . While population processes reveal the relative biological success or failure of a society, an examination of ideas on reproduction from the perspectives of local communities leads to quite different understandings about this term.
The question of exactly what is being reproduced, and how, is the second theme of the volume: how is social life reproduced, and how are cultural influences uncoupled from biological ones in various societies in this region? The third issue pertains to local understandings of fertility, and is an evaluation by various authors of the now-extensive literature concerning human life cycles and how they are structured culturally. Thus the project is an evaluation of past population processes, a “bringing up-to-date” of population processes across the twentieth century, and a survey of local understandings about fertility and reproduction in broader social and biological contexts.
Another project on this theme is concerned with human reproduction in comparative and evolutionary contexts. This project involves the examination of long-term relationships between biological, social and economic factors on fertility schedules and offspring survivorship, using life-history approaches. Work in human fertility and reproduction involves analyses of biological and behavioural factors, including seasonality and subsistence change, which influence birth spacing, birthrate, birth weight, and offspring survivorship in the context of maternal nutrition.
Comparative and evolutionary reproductive ecology focuses on analyses of fieldwork-based research on the endocrine regulation of the pubertal growth spurt in the female rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta), and of the development of body fatness across growth and development. Modeling of comparative energetics of primate fetal growth involves examinations of comparative primate body fatness at birth. This project involves the collaboration of Prof Stanley Ulijaszek with colleagues at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.