The prostitute as an urban savage, Paris 1830–1914

This chapter explores the nineteenth-century premises of the anthropological demography of health, especially the category of ‘urban savages’, which is proposed as a proxy to the reality of prostitution as perceived by the dominant social groups of the time. The chapter first delineates the concept of urban savages and discusses to what extent period writings on the prostitute as an archetypal figure anticipate later anthropological demography. It then turns to the issue of sexuality and public health. At the beginning of the period under study, prostitutes were blamed for propagating venereal epidemics. Later on, when the ‘venereal peril’ reached alarming proportions, public health specialists developed a different argument. It is argued that throughout the nineteenth century, the perception of the urban savage as a radically distinct out-group did not remain static, reflecting changes in social, economic, political, and ideological contexts. Moreover, as the sexual behaviour of the in-group evolved, barriers weakened and boundaries between in- and out-groups became porous. Present theoretical themes often seen as directly relevant to prostitution, notably Foucault’s notion of bio-power, prove inadequate. Finally, ideology and anthropology converged, with the body of the prostitute being the locus of intertwined threats to nineteenth-century French patriarchal bourgeois society.

Afterword

The extent to which health interventions actually improve people’s lives, and the extent to which interventions may become objects of widespread fear and mistrust, are issues that have recurred many times throughout modern history. A dynamic arises at the conjunction of three formidable forces—local experience, institutional interventions, and scientific research—that is a compound of the fit, both good and bad, between them. Understanding this dynamism requires us not to privilege science, nor intervention programmes, nor local cultures—whether as the source of strengths, or weaknesses, in the collective effort to improve health. The Afterword reviews this dynamic, in two steps. First, it steps back from the conceptual and methodological detail of chapters in this book, giving a general view of the obstacles and challenges that remain. Historical prejudices, continuing limitations of data systems in monitoring migration and the spread of disease, the challenges posed for conventional demographics by climate change, and the longstanding demographic tendency to predefine implications of elementary fertility measurement, provide examples. Second, in the concluding sections, the chapter draws on the many case studies in the book to propose a preliminary typology of blockages that have arisen where there is a mismatch between research methods and the societies and cultures to which methods have been addressed. The anthropological demography of health, in the five-part structure of this book, provides an integrative framework which co-ordinates demography, epidemiology, history, linguistics, and other disciplines within a bottom-up, combined qualitative and quantitative approach to societies and their variation.

The Anthropological Demography of Health

This book provides an integrative framework for the anthropological demography of health, a field of interdisciplinary population research grounded in ethnography and in critical examination of the social, political, and economic histories that have shaped relations between peoples. The field has grown from the 1990s, extending to a remarkable range of key human and policy issues, including: genetic disorders; nutrition; mental health; infant, child and maternal morbidity; malaria; HIV/AIDS; disability and chronic diseases; new reproductive technologies; and population ageing. Collaboration with social, medical, and demographic historians enables these issues to be situated in the evolution of institutional structures and inequalities that shape health and care access. Understanding fertility levels and trends has widened beyond parity and contraception to the many life course risks and alternative healing systems that shape reproductive health. By going beyond conventional demographic and epidemiological methods, and idealised macro/micro-level units, the anthropological demography of health places people’s health-seeking behaviour in a compositional demography based on ethnographic observation of group formation and change over time, and of variance between what people say and do. It tracks family and community networks; class, linguistic, and religious groups; sectoral labour and market distributions; health and healing specialisms; and relations between these bodies and with groups controlling local and national governments. The approach enables examination of how local cultures and experience are translated formally into measures on which survey and clinical programmes rely, thus testing the empirical adequacy of such translations, and leading to revision of concepts of risk and governance.

Predicaments, Presumptions, and Procedures

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of educational migration and foreshadows its consequences through the case of a mother who struggles to subsist alone in the village while her only son lives far away in a monastery. Following a brief description of Nubri, the fieldwork area in the highlands of Nepal, the chapter outlines a theoretical framework that includes migration as a means to manage family size and composition, social networks that facilitate migration, and cumulative causation that increases the intensity of migration. It concludes by discussing the methods of anthropological demography utilized in this study and the rational for adopting the household as the main unit of analysis.

9. Sub-disciplines arise

While most of the social science disciplines deal with people, some have developed a specific interest in demographic analysis and demographic theories, and these have been formalized into sub-disciplines of demography. In many cases they represent a merging of an area within the main discipline of demography. ‘Sub-disciplines arise’ looks at several of these sub-disciplines in turn: anthropological demography, bio-demography, economic demography (or population economics), family demography, historical demography, mathematical demography, palaeodemography, population geography (or spatial demography), population studies, and social demography. These all now form part of a broad field of population studies that analyse the relationships between economic, social, cultural, and biological processes influencing a population.