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III Demography
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11
Demography
In this part an analysis is made of demographic data of a pre-industrial tribal society which is partly dependent on the traditional horticultural system of shifting cultivation but is now undergoing rapid change. One of the most significant manifestations of this change is the exodus of Matawai villagers to the coast of Suriname. As a result of migration, which started in the late 1950s, many Matawai men now work in regular jobs and have consequently developed a new life-style. The demographic implications of the migration process will be the subject of chapter while the process of adaptation to city life will be the subject of chapter 16. We will shortly consider the relation between migration and fertility.
Archival data and published sources were used to reconstruct the growth of the Matawai population since the middle of the 18th century. We will analyse the available historical data in relation to data we collected in contemporary Matawai society.
The Davis and Blake classification of factors affecting fertility (1956) will be used to analyse specific social and cultural factors which determine Matawai fertility. In the next section characteristics of Matawai demography, such as the regular and increasing growth, moderate to low birth rates and high child mortality in the recent past, are linked with some general aspects of the demographic transition model. In a next chapter some hypotheses are developed in order to explain the particular pattern of seasonal variation of births. A part of this section has been published before (de Beet and Sterman 1978).
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The collection of demographic data in a tribal society
Although such a classic handbook of anthropological data gathering techniques as ‘Notes and Queries on Anthropology’ (first edition 1874, 1967) points to the need for systematic counts in order to determine population density, sex ratios, fertility rates and other demographic indices, until recently anthropologists have tended to neglect the possibilities of collecting vital statistics in a systematic way. As exceptions we may mention the British explorer and anthropologist Rivers, who was the first to recognize the possibility of using extensive genealogical material for the compilation of vital statistics in primitive societies (Rivers 1900; 1906; 1910). Another early contribution was Audrey Richards' technique of the village census. Richards was confronted with problems of social and cultural change among African tribal societies before the second World War. Her village census technique was aimed at providing a base line for the study of cultural change, but it could also furnish a useful framework for collecting and analysing demographic data (Richards 1935). After World War II a number of other anthropologists showed interest in the development of quantitative approaches, among whom Firth, Fortes, Barnes and Mitchell were the most prominent. A review of this development can be found in Epstein's edited book ‘The Craft of Social Anthropology’ (1967).
The American anthropologist Hackenberg has contributed to the renewed interest in Rivers' approach and has elaborated this approach in what he has called structural demography (1967; 1973). According to Hackenberg:
Structural demography incorporates inductive discovery procedures, based on accumulation of individual demographic and social data through time, for the purpose of charting stability and change in institutions and communities at various levels of social structure (1973: 314-5).
The analysis of elaborate and complex data sets as those obtained from genealogies has been facilitated by the use of new technical aids such as computers. Illustrations of this work which Hackenberg and his team members have done with the genealogical inquiry of the Papago tribe -
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North American Indians residing mainly on a reservation in the state Arizona - have been presented in Hackenberg (1972). The genealogies provide, in these studies, the basic framework for the collection of data on the ‘whole’ tribe and facilitate careful comparisons in time and space of such diverse aspects as marriage choice, fertility, mortality, and economic and medical characteristics.
We may mention some reasons for the emergence of a new subfield of demographic anthropology or as some prefer to call it ‘population anthropology’. The first reason is a practical one. Processes of detribalization and incorporation of isolated tribal societies in national states caused increasing bureaucratization, which also implied the registration of these populations. However, most of these registration systems are incomplete and often can not be used for demographic analysis. For this reason numerous new techniques have been developed to acquire demographic information or to make demographic estimates, for instance the multi-round samples, the Brass technique and the use of model life tables (see Coale and Demeny 1966; United Nations 1967. Brass and Coale 1968; Weiss 1973). In accordance with these developments, anthropologists have extended their research domains to the level of the nation state and to urban and complex societies.
A second reason is the concomitant development of some related fields, such as historical demography and ecological anthropology which recognizes the importance of demographic processes for the study of the relationship between a population and its man-made as well as its natural environment (see for instance, Vayda and Rappaport 1968; Bennett 1976: 113).
While the demographer mainly works with aggregate census figures to analyse data of large populations and to derive general tendencies, the demographic anthropologist's focus is on macro-evolutionary processes with estimates of the population density as a major variable; on the other hand he is interested in micro-processes which occur on the level of the local community. With the microscopic perspective he may discover relevant variables and relationships in the study of social and cultural factors which affect demographic processes. He may also acquire a better control over these variables in comparative analysis. A major handicap is, however, that the smallness of the
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populations which he uses implies possible distortion by radom factors. In this context it must be noted that random factors may play an important role in processes of survival and extinction of small communities.
Instead of using standard demographic concepts of de jure and de facto population, the anthropologist will often opt for the concept of ‘ethnic population’. The boundaries of an ethnic population are not primarily determined by time and space criteria, but by the criterion of membership to the community as defined by the community itself. These criteria are often based on kinship principles, marital relations or relations of clientship. People who have been away from the village for years may be included in the ethnic population (see Carroll 1978 for an elaboration of the ethnic population concept).
In a unilineal society, as that of the Matawai, the lineage organization provides the basic rule for the determination of membership of the ethnic population. In fact, every person who can trace his descent in the female or matri-line to a Matawai ancestor belongs to the ‘ethnic’ Matawai population. Actually, this means that any person with a Matawai mother belongs to the Matawai group.
Our fieldwork was aimed at combining the intensive study of a single village community with a more quantitative approach to anchor the village study to a wider perspective of Matawai society as a whole. The quantitative approach made comparisons possible between several Matawai villages and clusters of villages in order to discover variations within the tribal area. To achieve these goals we collected basic demographic data for almost the whole Matawai population. These data included place of residence, migration histories, marital and reproductive histories, age, number of births, etc. In fact, we covered 17 out of the 19 Matawai villages. Data on the two downstream villages of Makakiiki and Asanwai were not complete and are excluded in this work. Also excluded are data from the two Kwinti villages Paka Paka and Pikin Paka Paka, which are located between the Matawai villages along the Saramacca river. Genealogies which were collected for all lineages provided the basic data for the compilation of lists of the Matawai adult population. A major problem, in the use of genealogies in demographic research, is to determine the point at which the genealogy is complete for at least the few most recent generations. In our Matawai research many cross-checks
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became possible due to both the small-scale of this society and to the endogamous character of the marriage system. In other words, the number of marriages with non-Matawai was restricted. There were some other ways we used to extend the reliability and comprehensiveness of our data. We applied, for instance, a number of external checks. The names of ancestors that could be heard frequently in prayers or in oral history accounts were used to control the completeness of the genealogies. In cases of particular accidents, when someone was bitten by a snake or died in the river, it was possible to record similar cases occuring in the past and to write down the names of the people involved. Another source for names were the working histories which were collected for 25 men. Some of the older men were able to remember the composition of work groups in which they had participated in their youth some 30 years earlier. In addition to genealogical data we used all available written material, such as the incomplete registration systems of both the Anti-Malaria Campaign and the Moravian church. The church registers were particularly helpful, because they provided us with exact birth data on the majority of the Matawai. Many of the missing data were found in the registers of the Roman Catholic church in Paramaribo. The major handicap of the Moravian church's registration system was that the baptismal- or membership cards were usually destroyed some time after death. However, the available data provided a useful basis to estimate birth and death rates over the past decade. Also, by combining male and female reproductive histories, the further refinement of estimates was possible. The collection of genealogical data was facilitated by the fairly strict principle of unilineal descent and the principle of uxorilocal residence. In this way we obtained for every village a list of adults, who according to genealogical principles, belonged to that village. The lists served
as a basis for a more extended census conducted among both females and males and among migrants as well as among the resident population. The demographer's ideal to carry out the census work in a short limited period, is not possible in a tribal society with high mobility of individual members and with villages several days traveling distance from each other. Moreover, the migrant population which we included in our census, lived dispersed in and around Paramaribo, while many of the men temporarily stayed elsewhere on working places in Suriname's large tropical forests. After having completed
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geneaolgies, more than a year was needed to finish census work. This work was partly done in the second half of 1973 and in 1974. It was possible to reconstruct Matawai population at one particular date, January 1, 1974. For this aim all vital events were recorded which took place after census was taken. For census work done after January 1, 1974, it was easy to reconstruct the situation at that date.
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Population growth
‘To think of population today is to think of growth’, is the opening phrase in the forword of a textbook on demography, which appeared a decade ago (Keyfitz and Flieger 1971). In fact, population growth, its causes and effects became important issues of debate among historians, politicians, demographers and social scientists since the publication of Malthus' classic ‘An Essay on the principle of population, as it affects the future improvement of society’ (1798). Malthus was aware of the great growth potential in human populations and he postulated a differential development of food production and population growth. Populations were, according to Malthus, growing faster than the production of food. Malthus' ideas were severely criticized by Marx and Engels (see, for instance, Meek 1953). New stimuli for the discussion about population growth were provided by the theory of the demographic transition and by the work of the Danish geographer Ester Boserup (1965). The latter's work reverses Malthus' original thesis, arguing that population growth works an an independent variable, being a prime cause in the development of agriculture. She proposes a number of successive agricultural stages 1) forest fallow cropping, 2) bush fallow cultivation, 3) short fallow, 4) annual cropping, 5) multi-cropping.
The development of these increasingly intensive agricultural forms are explained by an exogenous variable; population density is seen as the most important factor. A large population density provides, in Boserup's view, the extra labour needed for technological innovations. In the same year that ‘The conditions of Agricultural growth’ was published, a similar argument was put forward by Dumond (1965) (1). While Boserup's theory is restricted to agricultural societies, the theory of the demographic transition also accounts for the industrial
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revolution. Also in this theory, population growth is seen as an independent variable. The idea of demographic transition was first postulated by the American demographer Thompson (1929) and has been elaborated by a large number of demographers among whom Davis and Notestein are the most notable (Davis 1945 and 1963; Notestein 1945; Caldwell 1976).
The model of the demographic transition can best be summarized by its three successive phases. The first phase is characteristic for pre-industrial and agrarian societies; birth and mortality rates are relatively high while the possibilities of controlling or regulating these variables are restricted. In the second phase mortality begins to fall as a result of improvements in living conditions while birth rates continue to be high. The growing difference between mortality and fertility, as observed in the second phase, causes a rapid population growth. The increase may be so rapid that some demographers speak of a population explosion or, even worse, of a population bomb. In the third phase mortality and fertility reach a new equilibrium of a more or less stationary population, that is a population with a constant rate of growth. The idea of demographic transition is related to the industrial revolution and to processes of modernization involving more rational life-styles. Consequently it is assumed that it begins in urban areas and spreads out slowly to rural areas. On another level we witness the so-called ‘export’ of the demographic transition to developing countries. Here mortality levels are declining rapidly due to improvements of medical care and the control of parasitic diseases. However, fertility tends to remain at a high level.
The concept of the demographic transition is accepted by most demographers, while its theoretical implications are criticized. A contribution which anthropologists have made to the discussion is their criticism of the assumption that most pre-industrial societies are characterized by uniform high birth and mortality levels. In a cross-cultural study, Nag (1962) shows that this assumption has no empirical basis and that mortality as well as fertility rates are highly variable.
In the following case we will point out that a pre-industrial society may show rapid population growth long before processes of modernization could play a role. We will also show that the recent
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increased growth in the Matawai population was not caused by high levels of fertility but by increasing life expectancies to which the decline of child mortality had greatly contributed.
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