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- Title
Modernization and Fertility: The Case of the James Bay Indians.
- Authors
Romaniuk, A.
- Abstract
This article presents information on modernization and fertility in James Bay Indians. The theory that modernization at its initial stage may result in an increase in fertility through the relaxation of restrictive customs governing procreative behaviours of premodern societies has often been postulated, but little empirical evidence has been provided to support it. Data collected on fertility for Indians living in the James Bay area of Canada tend to confirm the validity of this theory. They reveal, for this population, that intervals between successive births tend to become shorter among younger as compared to older generations of mothers, and this is attributed to three factors related to modernization, changes in lactation habits whereby an increasingly larger proportion of mothers either do not breast-feed at all, or do so for shorter periods of time than did the older generations, reduction in the level of pregnancy wastage resulting both from medical progress and from the fact that hardship and pregnancy accidents to which the pregnant mothers were formerly exposed probably have diminished as James Bay Indians have shifted from a nomadic to a sedentary society.
- Subjects
JAMES Bay Region; FERTILITY; INDIGENOUS peoples of the Americas; POPULATION; COMMUNITY development; BREASTFEEDING
- Publication
Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, 1974, Vol 11, Issue 4, p344
- ISSN
0008-4948
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1755-618X.1974.tb02469.x