ترجمه و نگارش مقاله علوم اجتماعی - جمعیت شناسی

۲مقاله 

۲- قوم شناسی مردم نگری ۲۷ صفحه

This essay highlights the profundity of recent demographic change in

Morocco, and explores its implications in a selection of ethnographic studies. The rural/urban

divide is an especially important backdrop to this issue because of the distinct economic costs

and benefits that children represent in subsistence versus capitalist contexts. Obviously, in

subsistence-oriented agriculture, children are the main source of labor, and thus a necessary

economic asset, while in capitalist contexts children are a net economic expense. Though

not simply ascribable to this, in the areas of Morocco where the primary survival strategy

remains household agricultural labor, high fertility rates continue. Everywhere else, things

have changed dramatically. New ethnographic work attends to this significantly transformed

demographic reality and how Moroccans understand it, and sheds light on some of the classic

debates in Moroccan ethnography.

There have been dramatic global transformations in women’s status around the world in

recent history. One particularly striking transformation has been global changes in

women’s labor force participation, which has increased around the world over the last

century (ILO 2018a).3

 Globally, women make up about 40% of the world’s workforce,

including an increasing number of women in low- and middle-income countries,

especially in agriculture, manufacturing, and service sectors (ILO 2015). Over a similar

time period, there have also been important changes in global fertility patterns,

including falls in total fertility rates (TFRs) in most major regions of the world (de Silva

and Tenreyro Forthcoming; Dorius 2008; Morgan 2003; Wilson 2001). Estimates

suggest that global TFR fell from about 5 in 1960 to just under 2.5 in 2015,

representing a staggering transformation in global fertility trends (de Silva and

Tenreyro Forthcoming).

Given that both employment and fertility are intimately tied to women’s economic

and social statuses in families and societies, there has been enormous interest in the

correlation between women’s employment and fertility. In high-income countries, the

negative correlation between women’s wage employment and fertility has been well

documented (Ahn and Mira 2002; Bernhardt 1993; Brewster and Rindfuss 2000; Moen

1991; Waite 1980), although there has been some evidence of a reversal in these trends

in some contexts in recent decades due to adoption of policies that reconcile

employment and family conflict (Brewster and Rindfuss 2000; Rindfuss and Brewster

1996). There has been less research overall on the employment–fertility correlation in

low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries, perhaps due to the

enormous heterogeneity in prevalence and type of employment across these contexts. In

one notable exception, Bongaarts and colleagues document a negative association

between having children at home and women’s employment in low- and middle-income

countries, albeit with heterogeneity by region and type of employment (Bongaarts,

Blanc, and McCarthy 2019). For example, employment in agriculture has close to a null

relationship with having children at home, but employment in transitional sectors (e.g.,

household/domestic service) or modern sectors (e.g., professional, managerial, clerical)

is negatively associated with the number of children at home