3 - The essentials of demography

Summary

[Demographers] are the inheritors of nineteenth century positivism.

(Caldwell 1996: 311)

In this chapter, we examine demography in the context of the modernist and postmodernist perspectives described in Chapter 2. Here, then, we begin a critical assessment of demography. We focus on the current state of the field, in particular its epistemology and methodology. In our assessment, we draw heavily on the writings of people widely acknowledged to be leading demographers. We are fortunate that in recent years two major demographic journals, Demography (1993) and Population Studies (1996), commemorated publishing anniversaries by commissioning articles that summarized both the contents of those journals and the entire field of demography and thus constitute a valuable history, not only of these journals, but also of the entire field. Most of the articles in these two issues are written by well-known and centrally placed demographers who have been working in the field for decades and we draw extensively from these articles. In this chapter, our purpose is primarily to describe the field, and we do so through the use of materials such as these from the center of demography, although the framework we use is often quite different from that used by the writers themselves; we wait until the following chapters to discuss demography's strengths and weaknesses. Our goal in this chapter is to show that when we examine the field through the eyes of its practitioners, it is particularly clear that demography sits solidly in the modernist mode.