| Throughout the developing world, educated women bear fewer children, and start bearing them later, than do uneducated women. But why? This dissertation addresses this question through an analysis of the reproductive practices of educated Beti women in Cameroon. These women enter childbearing an average of three years later than do their uneducated counterparts. I argue that educated Beti women delay their first births because they view motherhood as appropriate only in a limited set of social contexts, contexts that are slow to coalesce. Educated women characterize their rigorous management of motherhood as an expression of their modernity, discipline, and honor: characteristics which they attribute to their schooling. The relationship between schooling and fertility therefore cannot be adequately described either as causal or as classic selectivity; instead, the demographic outcomes are the result of culturally mediated aspirations.;The dissertation argues that educated Beti women primarily seek to manage the timing and circumstances of their entry into the social category of "mother", rather than the biological event of giving birth. Not only conception, but also pregnancy and the postnatal period are subject to social management. In many cases, this management takes the form of delay---delaying a pregnancy, especially through the use of periodic abstinence, delaying giving birth by aborting certain pregnancies, and delaying socially recognized motherhood by abdicating rights in children.;The dissertation builds on this ethnographic case to propose an approach to social organization in diachronic perspective that integrates demographic aggregates with systems of meaning, using a unit of social description that I call the "vital conjuncture". Vital conjunctures are structures of possibility that emerge around specific periods of potential transformation in a life, or lives. Although most social life is conjunctural, in the sense that action is conjoined to a particular, temporary manifestation of social structure, vital conjunctures are particularly critical durations when more than usual is in play, when certain potential futures are galvanized and others made improbable. I suggest that an approach based on vital conjunctures will provide a more adequate understanding both of population statistics and of the social meaning structures that underlie them. |
