"Reproductive Relativity: Time, Space and Western Contraception in Rural Gambia"‪.‬

This article and the book on which it is based (Bledsoe, 2004) grew out of my involvement in a 1992-95 anthropological demography study in rural Gambia of fertility, Western contraception, and birth intervals: the temporal durations that separate the births of children. These topics have compelled demographic attention because of their implications for population increase or decline. The results of the study, however, departed sharply from conventional wisdom that contemporary Western science has come to accept. At the outset the project seemed to be a straightforward story of the use by a very small number of women of contraceptives in rural Gambia, the slice of land that borders the River Gambia, on the west coast of Africa. It ended up, however, almost literally all over the geographical and temporal map, including Chicago, my own back yard, a hundred years ago. Since then, a theme inspired by the study has moved again, this time directly north: to Europe. I will describe the Gambian project, which proved so transformative for me, then turn to some ideas about time in biological and social life that I began to see so differently, and will end on some new ideas about space. Despite its odd starting point--modern contraceptive use among a tiny number of women in rural Gambia--the study draws inspiration from what remains, arguably, the finest ethnography ever produced: The Nuer (1940), by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. This classic work on relativities of time, space and social relations in the Sudan has brought generations of students and scholars to anthropology. I am fortunate that this article, a revision of the Melville J. Herskovits Inaugural Lecture at Northwestern University, can appear in a leading journal that arose in the country that so inspired Evans-Pritchard. I also draw attention to Evans-Pritchard as a source of inspiration to underscore the culturally and socially constructed nature of even the most "scientific" and technologized products of Western society.