Anthropology's contribution to the study of population processes has crossed many watersheds in the years since John Caldwell's pioneering development of micro-demography. No longer is it unusual to find village studies on the graduate reading lists of our population training centers. The issues of familial context, intergenerational relations, and, to a slightly lesser extent, relationships between household and family groups give entry to discussions in which anthropologists and more sociologically trained demographers share common ground. At the same time, the mutually reinforcing strengths of community studies and larger representative efforts are well recognized. Examples of the best of this work by non-anthropologists are found in Caldwell's research in Africa and South India where attention to local sociocultural contexts provide greater explanatory texture (Caldwell 1982; Caldwell et al. 1988). Related work by other non-anthropologists also hints at the explanatory possibilities of relatively localized studies (Cain 1982).

In spite of these developments, however, direct borrowing from anthropology has centered mostly on the methodological innovations in micro-demographic data collection (Caldwell et al. 1988; Axinn et al. 1991) or a small range of theoretical contributions from British social anthropology most amenable to stressing intergenerational relationships. Powerful as these innovations have been, this chapter shows how more recent attention to political economy may bring additional value to the merger of anthropology and the understanding of demographic events in pre-transition settings.