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Perspectives on Tropical African Demography1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2012

D. I. Pool
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Extract

In June 1968, in Calgary, a small meeting of Canadian Africanists discussed two papers related to the fields of demography, sociology, and anthropology. This brought together persons from a number of fields—history, anthropology, sociology, statistics, politics—forcing those of us who were demographers to review our objectives and to rephrase them in such a way that we could communicate them to our associates from other disciplines. I had this discussion still very much in mind when I was preparing a review of a book which, although fundamental to the entire understanding of African demographic trends, may be passed over as ‘too technical’ by non-demographers. And this is merely one book to appear in 1968, a fruitful year which has seen a number of major publications in African demography. Yet it seemed possible that our enthusiasm for progress had not been shared by our colleagues, either, as had appeared the case in Calgary, because our aims were not readily apparent to other Africanists, or because little is known among these others of advances in our field. Thus, in this review-article I intend to go beyond a discussion of the books themselves, and to outline some of the problems demographers are studying, our progress to date, and some of our research strategies. In a sense this may appear to be a reiteration of the excellent survey of the field by Lorimer, Brass, and van de Walle in Lystads encyclopaedic volume, The African World. However, such has been the development of demographic studies in the last few years that some sections of their essay are now out of date.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , April 1969 , pp. 167 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1969

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References

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