Damn autocorrect! It is meant to be "nuptiality." I will go back to correct that, thank you.
There was a lot of pearl-clutching and classism in the English language literature on "development theory." I think at one point Smith mentions that infanticide was portrayed as the desperate choice of poor, desperate people when it was mentioned at all; the theory for Japan's flat birth rate was Malthusian mortality rates. It was very common for a while--until about the late 1970s/early 1980s--to portray the Edo period as an authoritarian dystopia (the better to be saved from by the Meiji oligarchs, my dear!). So Smith concluding that infanticide was not a desperate choice and that it was widespread was pretty huge.
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sarken
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-21 17:39 (UTC)There was a lot of pearl-clutching and classism in the English language literature on "development theory." I think at one point Smith mentions that infanticide was portrayed as the desperate choice of poor, desperate people when it was mentioned at all; the theory for Japan's flat birth rate was Malthusian mortality rates. It was very common for a while--until about the late 1970s/early 1980s--to portray the Edo period as an authoritarian dystopia (the better to be saved from by the Meiji oligarchs, my dear!). So Smith concluding that infanticide was not a desperate choice and that it was widespread was pretty huge.