While demography has made many valuable contributions to the analysis of contemporary
demographic reversals, the discipline seems as far as ever from explaining
the dynamics of fertility change. Commentaries on “populations” routinely link fertility
control and small families with progress, modernity, and western values; in
“traditional” societies, fertility regulation is left to chance, God, and custom. However,
countries such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy, which score relatively
high on various indicators of “tradition”, have recently registered fertility rates far
below the level of their more “advanced” neighbours. The same appears to be true
of Italian immigrants in Australia. Italians are often depicted as traditional people
recently confronted by modernity and painfully coming to terms with its liberating
potential. In conducting detailed studies of specific communities, however, anthropologists,
historians, and other scholars provide what are arguably more empirically
accurate explanations of procreative behaviour: ones based on discontinuities,
alternative strategies, mutual dependencies and exploitations, and diverse rationalities
and traditions, cultures, and economies.
