Tradition, modernity and Italian babies

While demography has made many valuable contributions to the analysis of contemporary demographic reversals, the discipline seems as far as ever from explaining the dynamics of fertility change. Commentaries on "populations" routinely link fertility control and small families with progress, modernity, and western values; in "traditional" societies, fertility regulation is left to chance, God, and custom. However, countries such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy, which score relatively high on various indicators of "tradition", have recently registered fertility rates far below the level of their more "advanced" neighbours. The same appears to be true of Italian immigrants in Australia. Italians are often depicted as traditional people recently confronted by modernity and painfully coming to terms with its liberating potential. In conducting detailed studies of specific communities, however, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars provide what are arguably more empirically accurate explanations of procreative behaviour: ones based on discontinuities, alternative strategies, mutual dependencies and exploitations, and diverse rationalities and traditions, cultures, and economies