VARYING EFFECT OF FERTILITY DETERMINANTS AMONG MIGRANT AND INDIGENOUS FEMALES IN THE TRANSITIONAL AGRO-ECOLOGICAL ZONE OF GHANA

The transitional agro‐ecological zone of Ghana, located between the richly endowed south and the impoverished north, has attracted seasonal and permanent farm migrants, mainly from northern Ghana, who now live side by side with the indigenous people. While migrants have higher numbers of Muslims, indigenous people are mainly Christians. Although the majority of the migrants live in migrant quarters with less favourable socio‐economic conditions, they are more successful farmers and therefore wealthier. The objectives are to examine the varying effect of fertility determinants among migrants and indigenous females. This paper uses data collected in 2002 among 194 females aged 15 to 49 years. Multiple regression models are used to assess fertility determinants. Results show that although migrant households were wealthier, migrant females were more traditional. They had more children living in foster care, and a lower proportion of them approved of men participating in household activities. In addition, they were less well educated, recorded higher infant mortality, gave birth earlier and used less contraception. Furthermore, while a female's migration status is statistically significant so far as non‐proximate determinants of fertility are concerned, the same variable is not significant with respect to proximate determinants. In addition, a married female migrant would on average have almost one more child compared to her indigenous counterpart, and migrant females who had experienced the loss of a child would on average have 2.5 more children compared to their indigenous counterparts. Finally, more affluent migrant females have 0.08 fewer children compared to their indigenous counterpart.     

An epidemic on wheels? Road safety,public health and injury politics in Africa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Anthropologists have showed only marginal interest in road safety, despite the loss of some 1.3 million people killed in road crashes every year, the bulk of which occurs in ‘developing’ countries. 2011 marks the beginning of a UN Decade of Action for Road Safety. Its scope is ambitious: to save five million lives and fifty million injuries by the end of the ‘decade’ in 2020. In this article, the author examines the way public health professionals and educators have appropriated the language of epidemiology to argue that road death and injury can be viewed as an ‘epidemic on wheels’ or a ‘disease of development’, to mention two often cited epithets among participants in the global road safety lobby. One major consideration of interest to anthropologists and policy makers is to what extent this effectively essentializes road death in Africa and depoliticises its injury politics. Bearing in mind the historical context of medical interventions in Africa, the article examines the global road safety lobby and its affinity with public health as a form of transnational governance, arguing alternatively that if the UN Decade of Action on Road Safety is to have any significant impact, it must recognize more clearly the political stakes being raised in claims to reduce deaths and injuries caused by automobility.     

Modern observations: new ornithology and the science of ourselves, 1920–1940

The emergence and organisation of amateur networks of observation in Britain in the period between 1920 and 1940 are addressed in this paper. It examines the geographical, organisational and epistemological associations between networks of ornithological observation (traced through the British Trust for Ornithology), which emerged from the 1920s, and amateur ethnography (traced through Mass-Observation) which emerged in the late 1930s. I approach these ‘observational cultures’ as spaces which brought together new concepts of the local, of everyday nature and society, as well as the possibilities of changing the everyday. The paper suggests that popular observation during the period partly constituted a reframing of ways of knowing Britain differentiated through the everyday production of natural and social knowledge and the construction of the active citizen and new communities of practice.