A comparative study of fertility declines occurring in India and Brazil. It consists of 11 papers by well-known scholars from various disciplines, among them demographers, anthropologists, and economists.

The central theme of this volume is the notion of "irrational reproduction": the ways in which women’s and couples’ reproductive choices and practices are deemed "irrational" or "irresponsible" because they result in the "wrong number" of children. In a global context of declining fertility, population policies have shifted to a neoliberal register, which, despite local differences, includes both the deepening of economic and social inequalities and the intensification of rights discourses applied to the unborn. Inspired by Foucault’s theories on biopolitics and biopower and by a long tradition of feminist anthropological studies on reproduction, the ethnographically based papers collected in this volume address the following crucial questions: How does the notion of "irrational" reproduction emerge and play out in diverse socio-political contexts and what forms of subjectivities and resistance does it generate? How does the "threat" of too few or too many children, itself constructed through expert knowledge of statistics and political concerns over the size of different ethnic populations or classes, justify and support different biopolitical projects? And how do the increasing privatization of healthcare and the dismantling of welfare states affect reproductive practices and decisions on the ground in the global North and South? This book was originally published as a special issue of Anthropology and Medicine.

As a consequence of the politicization of religion in India, the study of Islam in fertility is a highly sensitive issue. How do Muslim women make decisions relating to their fertility and practice of contraception? How do factors as socio-cultural norms, socioeconomic constraints, national family planning policies, and Islamic legal tenets affect women's reproductive health behavior? This ethnographic study answers these questions by analyzing the local context, in which the lives of these low-income Muslim women are embedded. Theories and concepts of demography are also explored and critically reflected on.

This book explores new forms of popular organisation that emerged from strikes in India and Brazil between 2011 and 2014. Based on four case studies, the author traces the alliances and relations that strikers developed during their mobilisations with other popular actors such as students, indigenous peoples, and people displaced by dam projects. The study locates the mass strikes in Brazil’s construction industry and India’s automobile industry in a global conjuncture of protest movements, and develops a new theory of strikes that can take account of the manifold ways in which labour unrest is embedded in local communities and regional networks. “Jörg Nowak has written an ambitious, wide-ranging and very important book. Based on extensive empirical research in Brazil and India and a thorough analysis of the secondary literature, Nowak reveals that numerous labour conflicts develop in the absence of trade unions, but with the support of kinship networks, local communities, social movements and other types of associations. This impressive work may well become a major building block for a new interpretation of global workers’ struggles.” —Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands “Nowak’s book meticulously details the trajectory of strikes and its resultant new forms of organisations in India and Brazil. The central focus of this analytically rich and thought provoking book is to search for a new political alternative model of organising workers. A very good deed indeed!” —Nandita Mondal, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India “Jörg Nowak analyses with critical sense forms of popular organization that often remain invisible. It is an indispensable book for all those who are looking for more effective analytical resources to better understand the present situation and the future promises of the workers’ movements.” —Roberto Véras de Oliveira, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil “In this timely and important study, Nowak convincingly challenges the dominant Eurocentric approach to labour conflict and calls for a new theory of strikes. He stresses the need to engage in a wider perspective that includes social reproduction, neighbourhood mobilisations, and the specific traditions of struggles in the Global South.” —Edward Webster, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

This book presents and describes Northeast Brazilian women's motives for accepting and often actively seeking sterilization. It centers on individual subjects and their life-worlds but shows, too, that immersion in lived phenomenological worlds does not preclude the study of political economy. The book is written in a lucid and accessible language and will be of interest to a wide and varied audience, including both graduate and undergraduate students. This book merited an Honorable Mention in the competition for the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize in Gender and Health 2004

This is the third in an essential series of Springer handbooks that explore key aspects of the nexus between demography and social science. With an inclusive international perspective, and founded on the principles of social demography, this handbook shows how the rural population, which recently dropped below 50 per cent of the world total, remains a vital segment of society living in proximity to much-needed developmental and amenity resources. The rich diversity of rural areas shapes the capacity of resident communities to address far-reaching social, environmental and economic challenges. Some will survive, become sustainable and even thrive, while others will suffer rapid depopulation. This handbook demonstrates how these future development trajectories will vary according to local characteristics including, but not limited to, population composition. The growing complexity of rural society is in part a product of significant international variations in population trends, making this comparative and comprehensive study of rural demography all the more relevant. Collating the latest research on international rural demography, the handbook will be an invaluable aid to policy makers as they try to understand how demographic dynamics depend on the economic, social and environmental characteristics of rural areas. It will also aid researchers assessing the unique factors at play in the rural context and endeavoring to produce meaningful results that will advance policy and scholarship. Finally, the handbook is an ideal text for graduate students in a spread of disciplines from sociology to international development.

The overall focus of this book is the ways humans deal with life conditions, with destiny, uncertainty and misfortune - how we try to control the risks of living through medicines, technologies and magic. When dealing with questions of health and illness rational solutions and meaningful explanations may be hard to find, and treatment efforts are often guided just as much by hope as by rational choice. Evaluating the risks of illness is just one of a number of ways in which human beings attempt to exert some sense of control over their lives. New methods of testing for ills and new developments in, for example, genetic screening and in vitro fertilisation combined with the growing demands of well-informed patients seem to have turned concern from the actual problems of specific diseases toward controlling life and the risks of living in general. The chapters of this book reflect a common effort to transgress the limits of the medical by drawing on a fundamental concern with the logic of social and cultural practice. The book represents a de-medicalization of medical anthropology and a return to some of the classic themes in anthropology but with a different approach, emphasizing subjectivity, intentionality and agency.