Socioeconomic and Kinship Factors in Infant and Child Mortality in Historical Slavonia

Slavonia Aaron Gullickson Columbia University E.A. Hammel University of California, Berkeley Introduction Our prior research has shown that maternal mortality in south central Slavonia was strongly affected by social and political conditions that diminished the amount of male labor available to family farming and by the size and composition of a woman’s kin networks (Hammel and Gullickson 2004, 2005). This paper extends the analysis to test the effect of these and other variables on the survival of offspring. The intent of the work is not only substantive – to explain demographic conditions in the past – but in addition both practical and theoretical. In a practical sense, the insights gained into demographic outcomes by the application of historical and ethnographic knowledge in historical Slavonia are, in the presence of similar information, extensible to modern peasant societies, e.g. in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, especially where extended household structures also exist. In a theoretical sense this work seeks to enrich demographic analysis by showing how ethnographic knowledge of microstructural factors is essential to a close understanding of the demographic behavior of social actors.