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World system demography: Studying the African family
Abstract
This dissertation generates grounded theory by qualitatively analyzing background documents from three large-scale 1973 fertility research projects carried out among the Yoruba, Nigeria, with a total fertility rate of 6.5. The three research projects, collectively termed the Changing African Family-Nigeria (CAFN) projects, were directed by Australian demographer John C. Caldwell and funded by a United States organization, the Population Council. My analysis treated documents from that research--interview schedules, training manuals, supervisory memos to fieldworkers, and interviewers' written accounts of field experiences--as social products. I examined the interaction between researchers and respondents as evidenced in those documents. I was interested in what the data reveal about First World/Third World social scientific interaction. The result was the concept World System Demography, an original concept, unique to this dissertation. The term refers to the fact that (like other sciences in varying degrees) demography is global, bureaucratically administered, and controlled by elites within core nations. This dissertation examines World System Demography as an agent in cultural imperialism, or First World-directed cultural imposition. The authority of First World scientists to penetrate Third World areas for information gathering is a carry-over from the "right-to-invade" established since the fifteenth century by musket-bearing Europeans. CAFN was within this historical tradition. The right-to-invade became with contemporary times a right to bureaucratic surveillance, of which World System Demography is one agent.
Subject Area
Social structure|Social research|Demographics|African history
Recommended Citation
Riedmann, Agnes Czerwinski, "World system demography: Studying the African family" (1990). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9108238.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9108238