The birthrate drop in Iran

HOMO - Journal of Comparative Human Biology 65 (2014) 240–255

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The birthrate drop in Iran A.G. Loeffler a, Erika Friedl b,∗ a Department of Pathology and Laboratory Sciences, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI 53705-3224, USA b Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 4 August 2013 Accepted 15 December 2013 Keywords: Fertility Qualitative Research Idea Research Iran Ethnography Sociocultural Indicators

a b s t r a c t The recent steep decline in Iran’s birthrate poses methodological and interpretive challenges insofar as statistical information on demographic factors cannot satisfactorily establish causalities or delineate processes of change. Our research suggests that this decline rests on the interplay of socio-cultural “idea” variables that augment factors of the developmental paradigm commonly used in population studies. Especially modernist ideas labeled “progress” in Iran have influenced reproductive behavior. Aiming to demonstrate the usefulness of idea-oriented qualitative research for understanding demographic dynamics represented quantitatively in the literature, we contribute to an explanation of a particular case as well as to demographic research methods. © 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

Issues We address two related issues in this paper: one is the potential use of “idea” features in the form of cultural insights in demographic research on fertility behavior; the other is a demonstration of this qualitative approach in a discussion of the recent fertility drop in Iran, an area we are familiar with through anthropological/medical field research and the literature. Between 1986 and 2006 the birthrate in the Islamic Republic of Iran dropped from very high (about 7.5 children per woman) to below replacement levels, under 2 children per woman (Fig. 1). The sharp drop in fertility in a so-called theocratic, authoritarian country that people in the West associate with traditional outlooks and practices was unexpectedly different from other, similar Muslim countries

∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (E. Friedl). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jchb.2013.12.001 0018-442X/© 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

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Fig. 1. Total fertility rate (TRF) for Iran 1976–2012. Note the steep drop between 1986 and 2001. Source: Index Mundi (accessed 10.29.13). United Nations figures are similar except for 1996: the U. N. figure of 2.96 is 0.44 lower than the Index Mundi figure in this Table, making the decline after 1991 even steeper (United Nation, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Fertility Data, 2008.) World Bank figures overall are lower yet, with a TFR below 2 already in 2000 and 1.67 in 2010.

surrounding Iran (Fig. 2). All these countries went through economic, social and political developments that foster a decline in fertility, but Iran’s abrupt change from high to low fertility was different (Table 1). Demographers called the Iranian case “remarkable” (Erfani and McQuillan, 2008), “phenomenal” (Abbasi-Shavazi et al., 2003), “record pace” (Larsen, 2001) and “Iranian miracle” (Mehryar et al., 2001). These authors and others provide a wealth of statistical data about this brisk drop because it deviates from the decline in fertility rates in other developing countries, but their quantitative presentations of factors do not address with equal thoroughness the socio-cultural background in the Iranian case or other cases of rapid decline of birthrates that are on record. The globally highest fertility rate on record is from the Hutterites in North America, with over 8 children per woman around 1960, followed, as in Iran, by a steep decline within a generation (Tietze, 1957). Curtis White (2003) addresses some ideational factors in this decline, demonstrating how this enriches the statistical evidence. References to history in the Iranian demographers’ publications remain on the quantified socio-political and economic macro-level, providing valuable statistical information but little understanding of how this fertility drop happened, of the causes and the process of this decline. As we know, such “causes” nearly always are rooted in culture, traditions and relationships,

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Fig. 2. With the exception of Pakistan these Muslim countries neighboring Iran have comparable figures for indicators of development. All, except Iran, show a similar decline between the highest and lowest TFR; Iran’s decline was steeper and earlier Sources: United Nation, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Fertility Data (2008). 2012 figures are Index Mundi estimates: (accessed 27.10.2013).

and these, we argue here, need to be clarified and documented to illuminate quantitative information. Harkness et al. (2010) demonstrate the methodological difficulties in empirical demographic research; Casterline (1999:7) discusses the paucity of in-depth qualitative research on causes of fertility decline; Caldararo (2003:463–478) and, for Iran, Hoodfar (2008) and Abbasi-Shavazi et al. (2009) provide examples of inclusion of some ethnographic data and concepts in publications on fertility.

Table 1 Comparison of six developmental indicators in Iran and four adjacent countries. Data type

Iran

Turkey

Iraq

Saudi Arabia

Pakistan

Life expectancy at birth (2010–2015): f/m Sex ratio/100 females (2011) Gross school enrollment, primary and secondary level (2005–2011): f/m/100 Female 3rd level education, per cent of total enrollment (2005–2011) Female labor force participation (2000–2010) TFR (2010–2015)

75.3/71.5 102.9 90.5/93.9

76.6/72 99.5 85.4/90.2

72.6/67.6 100.7 72.6/86.2

75.6/73.2 123.3 101.8/104.8

66.9/64.9 103.3 52.4/65.8

49.5

43.6

36.2

52.4

44.5

16.5

26.1

13.5

17.0

19.2

1.6

2.0

4.5

2.6

3.2

Source: World Statistics Pocketbook, Series V No. 36, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (accessed 27.10.13). Other sources give different numbers but trends and comparative outcomes are similar. All countries have a sex ratio favoring males, with Saudi Arabia the highest and Turkey the lowest discrepancy. Iran shows peculiarities: it has the lowest total fertility rate (TFR) and the next to lowest female labor participation; Iran’s TFR is lower than Turkey’s, although in Turkey more than a quarter of adult women have a job.

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Given the statistical frame of the fertility decline in Iran, we attempt to enlarge its heuristic value by adding an ethnographic dimension. This is derived from extensive fieldwork that generated information through observation of people’s behavior and in discussions with people of issues important to them, such as fertility. We further aim to show interrelationships among variables that facilitate insights beyond statistical correlations. Although the issue of the relative merits of “idea” research and quantitative research is well known, it is understudied, especially for Iran; our contribution aims to demonstrate the usefulness of an inclusive, cooperative approach. As any policy-executive can attest, application of qualitative knowledge is necessary for the success of programs aimed at changing human reproductive behavior. Statistical and ideational data in fertility research in Iran Several observations are relevant here: The first is that, heuristically, statistical data are not well suited to deal with social processes because they tend to document conditions as discreet units on separate time horizons – the “thenit-was-like-this-but-now-it-is-like-that” approach. Yet, these very processes bring about the change from the condition “then” to the one “now.” Furthermore, of necessity, statistical categories in fertility/family research tend to concentrate on only few variables. For Iran (as elsewhere) these are mostly education, marriage age for women, infant mortality, availability of birth control devices, and women’s employment, i.e., they reflect the canon of the developmental model of social change (Table 1). Figures vary in the literature. Statistical data for Iran are problematic (Suzuki, 2011:38–42). Compare, e.g., figures for women in the labor force in Iran: Yount and Rashad (2008a:18) report 20 per cent for 1980 and 27 per cent for 2000; Abbasi-Shavazi et al. (2008:232) report 9 per cent for 1986 and 12 per cent for 1996. Most of our demographic information is from the Iran Statistical Yearbooks 1986, 1996, 2006, and from secondary English-language literature cited in this article. Such limited variables facilitate correlations and comparisons but also restrict insights into people’s motivations for certain behaviors because they subsume various factors, as well as behavioral and cognitive dynamics into large categories. For example, “education” in itself does not “do” anything; as a category it is abstracted from motivations, economics and behaviors, and these are responsible for the change we can measure. We can measure an outcome of education but cannot describe how “education” changes socio-cultural conditions unless we use qualitative methodologies. In the case of fertility research, such interpretive difficulties led to the expansion of the list of factors (including, e.g., “family” – itself a multi-factorial concept) but the methodological problems of why and how these change, remain. For the Middle East, Nauck and Klaus (2008) and Nauck’s (2010) work on Turkey, including cross-cultural comparisons relevant for Iran, show how a holistic approach to fertility and family issues can augment quantified data to afford deeper insights into population dynamics. Guend (2004) included qualitative information in his comparative fertility research of Muslim populations but excluded Iran. For Iran, such studies are missing. Abbasi-Shavazi et al. (2009) include some qualitative components but do not address their interrelationships. A second point regards interrelationships. Most published research on population dynamics neglects relationships among various cultural – “ideational” – variables, especially so for transition phases in fertility behavior. The work of Caldwell (1983) reflects an early appreciation of cultural variables within a cost-benefit approach to children. Recently Abbasi-Shavazi et al. (2012) included some cultural features in a study of the spread of developmental idealism in Yazd, Iran, and it is to be hoped these demographers expand this ethnographic methodology. The importance of one such interrelationship, that between birthrate and family dynamics, is generally accepted now, but the literature shows how difficult it is to document dynamics, i.e., processes and causal factors, by using statistical correlations (Jayakody et al., 2008; Yount and Rashad, 2008b). For Iran, an additional research problem is the authoritarian governmental power that limits where researchers may look and what they may say. For example, in August 2006 a lecturer in psychology at the University of Shiraz told Friedl that female suicide was an “unimportant, private” matter. Thus, discussing the so-called status of women, scholars there use categories such as “education” and “marriage age” as explanatory devices but neglect to examine women’s discontents that may influence fertility behavior: tell-tale signs of

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stress and discontent such as, e.g., wife-initiated divorce and suicide of women are not discussed in fertility research although both are relevant. Iran’s female suicide rate is high. Ordinary people, social workers, physicians and public health officials in Iran acknowledge this but reliable statistics are not available and the topic does not figure in publications on the family or on the status of women. Several articles in PubMed http://ncbi.nim.nih.gov/pubmed/17351450 deal with this, such as, e.g., Lari et al. (2007) and Groohi et al. (2006). Johnson (2005) writes that 75 per cent of all suicides in Iran are by women; Askari (1998) and others suggest family and marital problems as the main reasons for suicide of women and young people. Such family problems influence fertility decisions too. These complex reasons are on the “idea” level and would be especially suited to ethnographic and qualitative social psychological investigation. The third point is that demographers are justly cautious when trying to identify causes for statistically documented conditions. Although they are interested in causes and explanations, most realize that these are located in areas that are difficult to access and to measure. Yet, rather inexplicably, hardly ever does a team of demographers include an anthropologist or social psychologist who could expand the basis for interpretation. Rather, researchers make statements based on common sense or revealing unease. For example, Abbasi-Shavazi and McDonald (2008:233) say about Iran that “. . .there is strong support for the hypothesis that fertility decline has been driven by a desire for economic improvement. . .perhaps with a reduced capacity to achieve this end.” And: “. . .the egalitarian nature of the revolution. . .appears to have engendered economic aspirations. . .” (our italics). The authors do not qualify the causes, do not support them by statistical or ethnographic data, and do not discuss them anywhere else in the article. These causes are “obvious” to anybody familiar with Iran – even journalists and common people talk about them. Neither value-free nor science-based, they imply that anecdotal, subjective information seeps into the empirical literature unexamined. The suggestions would be much more salient were they based on ethnographic research. Combining insights gained by both methodologies would greatly surpass the insights gained by each used separately. A popular, similarly commonsensical, rationalist explanation for rapid fertility decline is based on the economic theory of sustainability: governments wish to lower the birthrate when faced with economic shortages. Caldararo (2003) explained the decline of birthrates in Japan after World War II with a looming food shortage: “. . . the population responded to the crisis by a dramatic population drop. . .” (472f; our italics). How did the authorities accomplish this? Did a concern with the welfare of all motivate the people to curb fertility? This argument is highly relevant for Iran, where scholars explain the rapid decline in fertility mainly with top-down governmental policies meant to ensure that the country’s resources would not be depleted by population pressure. Such economic arguments can shift suddenly, though, showing that they reflect more political and ideological than economic considerations: in August 2012 the Iranian government reversed its population control policies in favor of fast population growth, although neither Iran’s resources nor its overall economy had improved (Roudi, 2012). Furthermore, macro-economic arguments do not address the mechanisms of change on the level of people’s everyday fertility decisions that, we argue, furnish the preconditions for the success of governmental policies (Aghajanian, 1995; Abbasi-Shavazi and McDonald, 2008). We know that such political programs do not always have the intended effect because “culture” mediates between policy and actual behavior in the form of values and motivations. For example, neglecting “ideational” factors, for decades the Austrian government has tried unsuccessfully to increase the birthrate by providing social and monetary incentives for children. Two recent publications (Yount and Rashad, 2008a,b; Jayakody et al., 2008) use “ideational” in the subtitle (“Idea,” “ideology” and “ideational” often are used interchangeably). In the standard demographic literature, ideational data such as “attitudes” or “religion” are based on questionnaires and then quantified, with inconclusive results. Leete (1999) and Yount and Rashad (2008a,b) identified “values” and “cultural factors” as primary determinants of, respectively, fertility and educational outcomes. But what are these “values” and “cultural factors?” And how do they produce measurable results? Again, a lack of ethnographic information demonstrably limits scholarly analyses taking into account only easily quantifiable data (Thornton et al., 2010). Many demographers are unfamiliar with the research methodologies that produce qualitative information, namely, time-consuming fieldwork and small-scale qualitative studies involving, among others, participant observation, open-ended interviews, documenting oral histories, and discussions

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based on personal relationships. Such research is difficult to quantify but furnishes the ideational frame that contains the statistical data. Yet, regrettably, none of the published work we consulted on issues of family/fertility in Iran quotes from the ethnographic literature or has a thorough ethnographic research-component. This is an important reason for us to write this paper. A final point regards developmental idealism. Thornton (2001) identified the developmental paradigm as our shared scholarly bias. It leads to the over-emphasis of a postulated (rather than empirically documented) ethnocentric ladder/stage-model of human socio-economic and cultural development. Thereby we narrow our view of fertility behavior. But it would be a mistake to discard the model because of this bias: most Middle Eastern populations have made it their own, in the form of what Thornton calls “developmental idealism.” This means that modern development – locally somewhat modified by an Islamic ethos – is taken to be the only way out of an implicitly traditionbound, “backward” existence and into a better life. In other words, people within the developmental framework tend to be critical of their own situation. Indeed, the “happiness” factor as universal measurement of contentment with one’s life orients itself toward developmental idealism (Frey, 2008; Abbasi-Shavazi et al., 2012). Piot (2010) talks about a “nostalgia for the future” that includes “a nearly universal wish to emigrate,” and playing the U.S. Department of State’s Green Card lottery as “a national pastime.” Such expressions of discontent are quantifiable but largely missing in published quantitative research on Iran’s fertility drop. Introduced through increasing contacts with “the West” and locally adapted, in Iran developmental idealism gained popularity already in the 19th century. It was welcomed in Iran because it made sense to people whose values and aspirations easily lined up with the postulates of modernism – elite urbanites at first, but not exclusively so. Thus, for example, foreign physicians had seminal influence on the practice of medicine in Iran in the 19th century (Gaechter, 2011). In the 1920s the modernization project was propagated top-down by Reza Shah Pahlavi, following Kemal Atatürk in Turkey. In both places the religious establishment opposed it in a clash of ideologies. Mehryar (2005) shows how “pragmatism” recently influenced fertility politics in the Iranian theocracy, demonstrating the many directions Islamic theology and jurisprudence can take when addressing societal problems. In Iran, to be “modern” became an aspiration, an “idea” in line with the traditional value of living right, well and comfortably in a progressive nation. Thus, for example, secular education, a cornerstone of developmental idealism, in Iran conformed to the traditional high value placed on learnedness that bestowed status on scholars, teachers and students since antiquity. People accepted it easily when it was offered. This high social value has changed only recently, as we will demonstrate, as an unintended consequence of promoting women’s higher education. Developmental idealism engenders the notion of progress. Progress as ideology We suggest that the rapid fertility decline in Iran is no “miracle” but for decades was being prepared by what we gloss as “progress-ideology,” an enthusiastic, even obsessive, adherence to the developmental idealism package local people associate with a good life. (We identify progress here as ideology in the sense that it exerts power over a person’s cognition, guides evaluations and actions, and is logically coherent (Mullins, 1972).) In Iran “progress” (pishraft) is the ubiquitous measurement of worth and success, a motivational force that molds aspirations and strategies for their attainment, including interpersonal behavior and ethics. It is informed by images of luxurious lifestyles in rich nations provided by mass media, movies, television shows and what we call the “Los Angeles cousins,” expatriate relatives who boast of their consumerist success in visits and in videos about their parties, weddings and belongings. Most anybody in Iran has access to such sources despite the government’s attempts to curb these influences by raids on satellite dishes and control of the Internet. This lavish so-called “aspiration lifestyle” is unattainable for most Iranians but people adopt it nevertheless as the modern, “right, good” way to live, as a goal, if not an entitlement. The difference between what ought to be and what is obtainable causes considerable discontent. The pursuit of the happy life requires time, relentless alertness and creative strategies. Success is measured by money: middle class people try to work multiple jobs to be able to afford status goods and to provide their children with whatever they think is needed to make them successful. People

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discuss the financial burdens their aspirations and the competitive lifestyle create, and tell success stories among relatives. One popular theme of these success stories is the progress of one’s children – children have become banner carriers of parental success. Already in the 1960s urban middle class families presented their children’s geographic and social mobility, including emigration and studying abroad, as a sign of success, even if it left the parents alone behind in Iran. Eldercare is increasingly problematic in Iran as fewer children are at hand to care for aged relatives in small nuclear families, yet we found that concern with eldercare rarely was an issue in family planning. Although inspired by the West, the progress ideology for most people is in line with Islamic and political postulates. In other words, one can be wealthy, travel in the non-Islamic world and participate in its customs, have high aspirations for achievement, live hedonistically, and be a good Iranian citizen and Muslim. The mere number of children does not rank high on the value scale in such a consumerist system: Gilbert (2005) found in cross-cultural measurements of happiness that children lower selfreported happiness of parents. This, surely, has an influence on fertility behavior. Our case: background and data After these introductory remarks we will analyze more specifically the cultural/ideational frame of fertility behavior in a town in southwest Iran, augmented by data from the city of Shiraz and observations from other places in Iran. The question of how these observations fit into the wider society cannot be answered firmly – there are no, or too few, case studies for comparison. However, our research is replicable, amply presented in the ethnographic literature, and thus lends itself to social scientific analysis. Furthermore, our insights also conform to national statistical data on fertility factors in Iran generally. In discussing these issues we rely on our own observations in the large city of Shiraz, the town of Sisakht and other places in the province of Kohgiluye/Boir Ahmad. The town and the province had a very steep birthrate decline that make it especially valuable for this research. We used standard qualitative ethnographic research methodologies (see above), including observations in health clinics and discussions with health-care personnel and health-clinic clients, and elicitation of life histories and historical data. Both authors speak vernacular Farsi and Luri. The main research of A. Loeffler, a physician and anthropologist, was on medical topics, 1997–1999 (Loeffler, 2007) after earlier ethnographic research in rural Kohgiluye/Boir Ahmad. Friedl’s longitudinal anthropological study (1965–2006) resulted in a large body of publications (e.g., Friedl, 1991, 1997, 2007, 2014). Local research was augmented by visits in cities (Isfahan, Shiraz, Tehran, Hamadan, Ahwaz) in order to gain comparative insights. Throughout the following discussion we will compare local traits to the wider cultural scene in Iran. Following is a brief ethnographic sketch. For detailed descriptions of the local culture see Loeffler (2002), Friedl (1991); for a socio-economic history see Loeffler (2011); information on similar traditional groups, including on fertility issues, are in Suzuki (2011:84ff.), Shahshahani (1981); for rural Iran see Hegland (2011), and Kian-Thiébaut (2008). The people of the province of Boir Ahmad speak a Persian language (Luri) common in southern Iran, and Farsi, and are well integrated in the national culture, society and economy. Like for other rural areas in Iran, the economy has shifted over the past forty years from an agricultural mode to that of post-agricultural pursuits in a bureaucratic modern state, with most employment provided by governmental organizations, business, and in manual labor. Politically, androcentric, patrilineally organized social structures led by landlords or – as in our case – by tribal chiefs engaging in alliances, competition and warfare, have lost significance in favor of the omnipresent institutions of the state. This integration started in the early 1900s, accelerated in the 1960s under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and continued after 1979 in the Islamic Republic. With the exception of the introduction of Shari’a law after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 the project of integration moved along the lines of modernization throughout Iran. In our main research locality, already in the 1960s the path of “progress” (pishraft) was clearly visible; culture change in Sisakht happened earlier and faster than in the rest of the province mostly because of a direct road to urban areas and early access to education, but it happened in the hinterland, too (Suzuki, 2011). By the 1990s the community of nearly 3000

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people was completely integrated in the modern state and the literate population participated fully in the national culture. This development also happened in most other places in Iran. For example, patrilineality and androcentric hierarchies characterize family structures everywhere: nearly all children in Iran attend schools (see Table 1); the infrastructure, including electricity and roads, extends to the hinterland. “Progress” is a familiar concept everywhere, and this must be emphasized because Iranian social scientists who do not have first-hand knowledge of remote rural areas, with few exceptions tend to dismiss the significance of developments there. In terms of demographic data, Iran, including Sisakht, moved from a pattern of high fertility/high mortality (to the 1960s) to one of high fertility/low mortality (to the 1990s) and to the present pattern of low fertility/low mortality, whereby low mortality is mainly due to low child mortality. In the following we will comment on some standard categories used in demographic fertility research from a qualitative, ethnographic point. Fertility and poverty Like the majority of rural people in Iran, before about 1975 most local people in our research location were poor even by their own low standards. Inadequate food supply and high energy expenditure by men and women working in agriculture and animal husbandry led to generally poor health, as healthclinic personnel reported and we observed at every visit. Women’s health was compromised further by many pregnancies and incessant child care, a heavy work load that included milk production, weaving, hauling water, and, in some areas, the procurement of firewood, and less nutritious food than men because of a social hierarchy that put them below males in access to resources. Endemic infections such as parasites and malaria, and epidemics of dysentery, measles, whooping cough and diphtheria led to high morbidity and mortality of generally undernourished and malnourished children (Friedl, 1997). Infant mortality numbers and economic privation alone do not give the total picture, though. “Culture” strongly interfered. After weaning (when the mother likely was pregnant again) toddlers’ diet and health deteriorated. For example, toddlers were expected to keep adult eating schedules and eat adult food, which left them hungry and weak. (This was expressed in a proverb to the effect that as long as a baby depended on mother’s milk it was well, but when it shifted to father’s bread, it was hungry.) Due to the prevailing androcentric bias girls received less care than boys, mostly through so-called benign neglect. According to the Iran Statistical Yearbook 1385 (2006/7), in the 0-to-1-year cohort females are 95 per cent of males; for those over 65 years of age females are under 90 per cent of males. The imbalance is decreasing but still measurable (Table 1). It is easy to see how modernist knowledge about infant care, together with new resources such as vaccines and food, may quickly change the pattern of morbidity and mortality if it is offered as “progress,” i.e., linked to values that people held already but had not yet applied to toddlers. This change, expectably, had unintended logical consequences: it increased the number of surviving children in a family and made child care more labor intensive for the mother and more expensive for the father. For the people it was a mixed blessing. After about 1960, families just about everywhere in Iran started to grow rapidly. In our research location local people’s resources diminished as land and water became scarce and fragmented in inheritance although daughters did not inherit, in contrast to Islamic inheritance law which allows sisters half of their brothers’ shares. This makes land even more scarce and valuable: increasingly, disputes about land and water involve sisters also. In this process children became more of a liability than an asset, the more so as the government had stopped the internecine warfare in the area after 1965 and jobs outside of subsistence agriculture became available. This weakened the androcentric traditional ideology of heroic violence and the purported necessity for sons’ protection and fighting. It also weakened parental authority, as ideas about manliness and family responsibility shifted. For the next generation fathers tried to cover as many possibilities for advancement as possible: they steered one son to farming, one to a trade, one to teaching, to government employment, toward higher education, but this effort was too expensive to be sustainable. This, too, is a general Iranian pattern: already in 1965 an urban trader explained that he was sending one son to study in Germany “to achieve something”, and another as a trader to Kuwait.

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The scarcity of arable land, low income from agriculture (due to governmental policies throughout the recent history of Iran) and increasing expenditures for providing sons with a livelihood further prepared people for limiting the number of children. It was not poverty per se that made couples wary of many children but the rising aspirations people had for their children in the course of progress. By the 1970s a father who used a son as shepherd was called backward and sinful, while one who pushed sons into teaching was “progressive”. These aspirations implied the perception of the traditional way of life as hard, unprofitable and unappealing. “Poverty” thus becomes a term encompassing not only an economic condition but also existential values and ideas. Education-based jobs at first (after about 1965) provided the only economic resource available for the realization of “progress” for many families. The costs and social implications of education, however, precluded large families. For example, in the absence of high schools in rural areas children had to be sent away for secondary education. This was costly, and, for girls, socially problematic (Loeffler, 2011). Already before the revolution a successful physician in the city of Shiraz made fun of the dilemma between aspiration and economy as it relates to fertility: “I can send one son to Harvard but not four,” he said. Limiting the number of children was taken as indispensable for progress for all social classes, not just the poor.

Fertility, sex and marriage Young people in Boir Ahmad (as elsewhere in Iran) got married mostly through parental arrangements. They expected pregnancies soon after marriage because it nearly always happened as a natural consequence of conjugal sex. People saw marriage as universal, natural and commonsensical, a necessity for an ordered life. Marriage age for girls was low, a structural side effect of the socio/cultural “idea” of patrilineality, i.e., a preference for sons that to a sex-rate imbalance favoring males (Table 1) because parents felt they needed to secure wives for their sons early in order to beat the competition for this rare commodity. Children came as a matter of course: sons were hoped-for and daughters came by themselves, people said. In other words, the absence of children had to be explained by a couple, not their presence. This was so “normal,” people said, that women were defined by fecundity: a married woman had at least one child that identified her as mother; until middle age women rarely were seen without a young child. People pitied childless women and men but also declared “too many” children a heavy burden. Infertility was ascribed to women with the logic that women, not men, bore children, but it rarely to divorce or polygyny in Sisakht. A husband and wife did not need the presence of children to validate their status as a couple. People readily acknowledged that childless couples had a more comfortable and prosperous life than had their siblings with large families, although it was contrary to an expressed belief – an “idea” – in the usefulness of having many children. This contributed further to the ready drop in fertility later: a couple with few or no children was socially accepted and likely better off financially than a couple with many children. Already in 1965 people in villages and towns asked Friedl how to limit pregnancies because, they said, they could not prepare their many children properly for success in the post-agricultural world they already envisioned, and because their own birth control methods were dangerous. (One was for a pregnant woman to jump up and down, for example.) Birth control devices were available then at ¯ health centers (behdari; in Sisakht since 1964) and in cities, there also including abortion (Mehryar and Sajjadi, 1977). In the Islamic Republic abortion is outlawed. Hosseini-Chavoshi et al. (2012) deal with consequences of illegal abortion in Iran. The most recent restrictions on birth control devices are leading to an increase in abortions. Post-revolutionary Iran worked its birth-drop without legal abortion and coercion, and this is one more reason to look into “idea” factors regarding reproduction. Locally, resistance to birth control was weak and mostly came from a belief in adverse health implications for men and women. By the time of the Islamic Revolution (1979) birth control had become a necessity for the kind of life people wanted if not for themselves than for their children. In this attitude Sisakht was ahead of other places, but the logic behind the change was the same as elsewhere. Large families came to be seen as an embarrassment for those whose aspirations were firmly linked to progress. In 1985 a student in Shiraz told her friends that she had two siblings when, in fact, she had six – she was “ashamed” of her

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large family, she told Friedl. We do not need to point out that embarrassment, aspirations, and value judgments such as “backward” belong to the realm of ideas. As rural resources became scarce and the economy cash-based, family structure and intra-family relations changed toward neolocality and the nuclear family, weakening inter-sibling dependencies (Friedl, 2009). In traditional patrilocal households in Iran (not only in rural areas) young couples were integrated in the husband’s father’s house socially and financially. But when young men started to ¯ and hold paying jobs they began to claim their own incomes and to move out, to be “separate” (joda) ¯ “free” (azad), they said. They saw their siblings less as support than as potential financial burden and competitors over family resources. Here again, the interaction of “idea” factors with empirical factors accounts for a social dynamic involving ethics, with consequences for fertility. The attractive “modern” life was possible only with obligations largely confined to the nuclear family, not to aging parents and siblings in need. Indeed, young women in Iran write neolocality into their marriage contracts now; this requirement may seriously delay the cohabitation phase of marriage because the groom has to find an apartment before his wife will join him and has consequences for fertility: for one, sistersin-law sharing a house no longer are in baby-competition with each other. This competition is a feature of fertility behavior we do not see discussed in the literature but is known to local people. For another, a mother no longer can monitor the sexual activities of her sons and daughters-in-law. For a third, young women lack day-to-day assistance with household and childrearing chores. And lastly it contributes to “marriage” becoming a protracted affair with further fertility consequences. This warrants an explanation. In most parts of Iran, verbal contracts for arranged marriages occasioned a small party with some ¯ adi). ¯ gift-exchanges to seal the engagement (namz Once the contractual conditions were met and the bride’s age allowed it (“maturity” meaning mostly housekeeping competency) the writing of the marriage contract proper (aqd) together with the wedding feast (jashn arusi) sealed the pact, immediately followed by the transfer of the bride to her husband’s father’s place. When young people, especially young men, started to look for spouses themselves (by about 1990 it was universal) and had to resume the financial burdens associated with it, the engagement-phase became longer; its onset became a formal affair with a feast scaled to class and income level. The bride and her parents and siblings expected gifts from the groom. The wedding became a display of wealth. No longer able to count on brothers’ financial assistance, the groom had to borrow and save to cover expenses, indebting himself for years to come. The onset of marriage, always a time of social, emotional and economic importance, became a matter of financial stress. The prolonged engagement proved socially awkward as social intercourse was limited and intimacy of any kind was discouraged, for the bride’s sake: if the engagement was broken the girl would be at a great disadvantage on the marriage market if she no longer was a virgin in accordance with “idealized family morality” (Abbasi-Shavazi and McDonald, 2008:178). The sexual liberation described recently especially for urban middle classes in Iran is limited still by traditional family morality as enforced through gossip (Mahdavi, 2008; Afary, 2009). The Islamic Republic’s authorities acknowledged the socio/sexual dilemma: they tried to popularize temporary marriage, i.e., a contract with a stipulated time limit, that would, for example, allow a male and female student to live together away from home and would legalize a child in this union, all without binding the partners for life or until a divorce. Again, for the sake of the young women, this possibility was not adopted in respectable urban and rural circles. People found a less disturbing way to circumvent traditional sexual morality by separating the signing of the contract, the aqd, from the wedding. This means that after the contract is signed the couple is legally bound and can socialize without a chaperone, can travel together, even be intimate, without having to live together. Expenses are borne by the groom. The aqd has to be socially announced with a party, though, requiring additional expenses. Furthermore, between the contract and the eventual wedding there must be enough time for the groom to satisfy the conditions of the contract, such as renting an apartment, buying everything from basic household goods to luxury items – major expenses in all social classes. Meanwhile the bride likely continues to live in her father’s house, studying, working or simply waiting – this, too, depends largely on social class and seems to be universal in Iran. What impact does this recent change in marriage customs have on fertility?

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Wherever the traditional wedding is the start of the fertility phase, as it is in Iran, pregnancies during engagement or the contract phase are awkward because the couple is not prepared for family life: both partners, for example, may be students away from home, or have no income. Such couples likely will defer child bearing, and this demonstrably will decrease the number of future pregnancies. However, we learned that it also weakens the wish to start a family soon after the wedding because the young people get used to be by themselves and to comforts that do not include infants; they like to travel unencumbered, to spend money on leisure and luxuries, to live without demands from others but also without help from live-in female relatives: the nuclear/neolocal family arrangement is not child-friendly. All these factors contribute to fertility decline with rising marriage age. Thus, the factor “marriage age” turns out to be a complex umbrella-term covering interdependent economic factors as well as customs, ideas about propriety, and values that have an impact on reproductive behavior. Only paying attention to these factors gives the term explanatory power. Fertility, health care and education The ubiquitous health care system in Iran started to put health clinics in even remote villages in ¯ the sepahe behdasht (public health-soldiers) program of Mohammad Reza Shah’s White Revolution (1963–1979), staffed with health care workers in military service. They promoted birth control and well-baby programs, and informed about hygiene, diet and care of infants. In Sisakht the program ¯ a conscripted graduate from was successful from the beginning. In 1965 the first physician (Dr. Diba, medical school in Tabriz) said that in one winter he had prevented the death from pertussis of some 40 local children. This program demonstrably contributed to the decline of mortality and morbidity among children and to a decline in pregnancies through propaganda for the two-child family and the distribution of birth control devices. However, the rising survival rates of children alone did not motivate people to aim for small families. It would imply that in the past people produced many children in anticipation of only few surviving. This was never an issue. Rather, already a generation before the revolution it had become “chic” (shik) even in rural areas to talk about the advantages of small families in terms of better health, better education, less work for mothers, and better chances for getting ahead. This talk prepared the way for the fertility drop. The shift in sentiment was further supported in rural areas by the decline of traditional agriculture that had relied on services of children, and by the improvements in infrastructure such as piped water: women in Sisakht said they no longer needed little child-servants to help them with chores, and that this, in turn, made their childcare workload easier, which was just as well. The health clinics provided resources that assisted people who wished to take better care of fewer children. In the decade of pro-natal governmental policies in the Islamic Republic during and after the Iran/Iraq war (1980–1988) the government successfully propagated high fecundity through a political link to patriotism (the war) and to piety (many children as a sign of good Muslimhood). Thus war, patriotism and doctrinal Islam were molded into the opposite of progress. Local people privately joked about their own fecundity (“we make soldiers for the mullahs”) and complained about the burden of raising successful children. Elder children in large families berated their parents for producing children “like cows”; young women remarked on the loss of freedom and beauty through childbearing (both, freedom and pursuit of beauty are part of the progress ideology, labor intensive, expensive and not child-friendly). Fathers were anxious about their ability to provide for their large families in ways that befitted their social status and aspirations. The Islamic Republic’s public health program, like the late Shah’s, became an instrument of developmental idealism when, in 1989, the parliament by a narrow vote decided to curb the rapid population growth to avoid an economic and infrastructural catastrophe, and linked birth control and an assertive well-mother and well-baby programs to progress befitting a modern Islamic state. This turnaround in governmental fertility management demonstrates how a political agenda influences a purportedly immutable doctrinal theology such as “Islam,” and strongly suggests that motifs for fluctuations in fertility behavior come from the socio-political and cultural sphere. In the Islamic population-control mode after 1989 local public health care workers throughout Iran guided mothers through pregnancy and children’s early years, provided vaccines and vitamins, and constantly urged

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couples to space and limit pregnancies for the “sake of the children”. Salehi-Isfahani et al. (2010) examined the impact of such a rural health clinic from a demographic/economic point of view. The government’s birth control policies accorded with people’s own wishes. In Sisakht their success was no surprise and, we argue, not in other places either. Since 2012 fertility-control programs are shrinking again, though, and it remains to be seen how the latest (August 2012) governmental pro-natal policies will be rationalized and advertised, and to what extent they will be successful. Health care professionals in Iran report that illegal abortions are increasing but there are no statistics available. ¯ ¯ danesh, Formal education in Iran got a boost in the late Shah’s Literacy Corps program (sepah 1963–1979) that sent literate conscripts to schools in underserved communities to teach boys and girls. By the time the Islamic Republic took over education, the importance of girls’ literacy for “progress” of family and country was well established in people’s opinions. In our focus, town formal secular education had started already under Reza Shah Pahlavi in the 1920s, when villagers asked for a government teacher. This means that several generations ago people saw literacy as necessary for modern development and the attainment of a better life, better agriculture and husbandry. By 1971 nearly all able-bodied boys and most girls attended at least primary school. Elsewhere the educational process was slower but it was ubiquitous by the time of the Revolution in 1979 (Suzuki, 2011:98). The Islamic leadership educated girls because it too subscribed to developmental idealism: an “advanced, modern” state has an educated population, officials told us; through education Iran would strengthen its intellectual and economic presence in the world. Women had to be knowledgeable, if for no other reason than to bring up bright, healthy children who would be good Muslims. In contrast to this, the girls’ and their parents’ educational aspirations were rooted in status and wellbeing: only with a high school or university diploma could a girl hope for a paying job (Mehran, 2003). Her income was considered important for these reasons: it helped her and her family to a better and healthier life, gave her higher status, and empowered her vis-à-vis her husband, people said. This implies a criticism by women of their social position.

Fertility and women’s discontent – a neglected variable Women we met in Iran talked freely about the liberating aspects of earning and controlling money, implicitly criticizing their social position and, it stands to reason, influencing fertility behavior. The more children a woman has, the less likely will she be able to hold a job or to study, and the more dependent she will be on a husband who may or may not take care of her reliably. We heard this sentiment everywhere. A professional woman in Shiraz in 1997 said she married only after her husband agreed to a childless marriage that allowed her to continue her career. In 2004 a village woman expressed regrets over having persuaded her daughter to get married young, thus “ruining her health and her career” as a teacher. In 2006 a married female student from the city of Bushehr said that the case of a friend whose husband had abandoned her and two children made her think twice about having children at all. In 2013 a young Iranian mother on vacation in Turkey criticized her husband for their “shabby” apartment in Isfahan. Such opinions ought to be counted in fertility research, but we have not found a single reference to this variable in the literature. People expressed this sentiment even in the face of the dire job market in Iran. This widespread opinion also explains the recent reversal of governmental policies regarding women and education: since 2008 they make access to higher education easier for men than women. Imoughari (2012) calls this “a significant rollback for women’s rights and educational goals”. The Science Minister in Iran called it a protection of morality: evidently, the state wants more mothers and housekeepers. ¯ adi ¯ is a popular term among Iran’s young people) The women’s longing for jobs and freedom (az is rooted in the ideology of progress. This aspect is not addressed in the fertility/family literature on Iran although it has implications for fertility behavior: the government’s goal of well-educated mothers does not require a small number of children; a woman’s aspiration for “freedom,” individuation, education and financial independence, does. Thus, the government expects that an increase in fertility will change women’s aspirations.

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Women in Iran talk and write about their discontents, but unfortunately scholars of literature neglect the insights into the cognitive and emotional aspects of fertility behavior and family dynamics contained in scores of semi-autobiographical books women publish in Iran. Women also fight for divorce and child custody; they attempt and commit suicide, surely an act of protest; they demand self-determination; they emigrate, take their own brothers to court over inheritance, refuse to marry young and to have many children. “Young women have become very choosy and headstrong,” say the mothers of sons who are unsuccessful in the marriage game. As young women (and their parents) in all social classes now insist on as good a financial footing of the groom as possible in order to secure a comfortable life and good treatment by the husband, marriage becomes no longer a matter of course. In the age of progress founding and maintaining a family has become like a luxury – coveted and intrinsically valuable but not absolutely necessary, an expensive choice. In the professional middle class the one-child-family has become the ideal, people say, because of overwork of the mother who has to carry the double burden of work and housekeeping, and because of lack of adequate childcare. Sociological data may support this, but as most women in Iran do not work outside the home yet have only few children, the “cause” must be more complex. As the economic situation in Iran worsens and the aspirations of Iranians rise, people become disappointed and dissatisfied with both, the economy and the dim outlook for fulfilling aspirations. “Progress” slows. Unemployment runs high even among the educated. Governmental figures indicating that unemployment in Iran fell between 2003 and 2011 from over 16 per cent to about 14.5 per cent (Index Mundi, 2011) are unrealistic. In Sisakht the unemployment rate in 2006 was nearly 50 per cent. Salehi-Isfahani (2010, 2011) addresses the fertility decline in Iran from the perspective of the bad economic situation in Iran. People say that only business backed by good start-up capital brings economic success. This is a marked shift from earlier attitudes toward education, when scientists, teachers and intellectuals were held in high esteem even when living modestly. Young, capable men, thus, are moving away from education that does not promise good incomes. But for women, whose access to jobs and wealth was always much more limited than was their brothers’, education now is seen as the only way to some financial independence and a consumer-oriented good life: even work as a nurse or a teacher, i.e., in underpaid jobs their brothers do not aspire to, will elevate their status and their financial power. Quite understandably, more women than men attended university until recently, with consequences for their fertility behavior. By 2008 they outnumbered men at universities about 60 per cent to 40 per cent, and the government lowered admission standards for male students to keep women under 50 per cent of the student population (Salehi-Isfahani, 2008). Unintentionally, the policy to educate women resulted in increasingly well educated, underemployed women who are critical about their situation. Older people call them demanding and defiant as they try to assert themselves vis-à-vis the men in their families, including husbands; Panahi (2006) illustrates such sentiments. Young men and women say they want companionate marriages but define this “modern” ideal differently: women want a partner who shares chores, grants freedom of movement and is a good provider; men want wives who provide comfort, beauty, companionship, housekeeping and an additional income. These expectations lead to conflicts and to family dynamics that influence the couples’ aspirations for the number of children, the more so as under Shari’a law fathers are responsible for the financial costs of childcare, and mothers likely loose their children in case of divorce. In Iran people talk about a marriage crisis that makes them hesitant to raise children (Yong, 2010). For some, deferring children even amounts to a form of protest: “first we’ll find a way to emigrate to Europe, then we’ll have children”, a college-educated couple told us in 2006. Until recently, with governmental approval, propaganda and liberal provision of birth control devices, it was both easy and attractive for women and men to manage their fertility, given these widespread misgivings. The radically different new goal of Iran’s leaders to increase the population to over 100 million, and the concomitant changes in health care policies and women’s education are not in accordance with the popular progress-ideology and the values and customs it engenders. To be successful, the politicians will have to change the developmental paradigm and re-interpret the Islamic foundations of its population policy.

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Conclusion and outlook The Iranian Islamic government’s 1989 decision to slow down population growth, although passed only narrowly in parliament, led to rapidly successful strategies and programs. The decline was faster and deeper than in any other Muslim country in the area. This success is well documented in the quantitative demographic literature but not satisfactorily explained. Our ethnographic, qualitative research on fertility behavior in Iran augments these data by tracing fertility behavior to its roots in the “idea” sphere of cultural values and practices, thereby demonstrating that quantitative demographic fertility research can greatly profit from an ethnographic, qualitative component. Our research suggests that people’s customs, values and economic aspirations that encourage small family size had evolved within Iran’s brand of developmental idealism for several generations under the influence of modernist institutions and programs and, lately, the global preference for consumerist aspiration lifestyles. The government’s programs were successful because they concurred with people’s expectations of “progress.” Looking closely at some variables from the developmental canon (poverty, marriage, health care and education) and at women’s discontent, we demonstrate how ‘packed’ these concepts are with ideational/cultural features that are best accessed through qualitative research. The Islamic government’s latest return to pro-natal policies (2012) again shows the rift between “modern” and “traditional-Islamic” ideologues in the legislature that were obvious in 1989, this time with the conservatives winning. It remains to be seen if and how the strong progress-orientation of Iranian people and their well developed aspiration lifestyle will modify the new policy changes that aim to alter profoundly the social position of women, family life and fertility behavior in Iran. Acknowledgments For support of our research over the years we thank especially the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Western Michigan University and the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. References Abbasi-Shavazi, M.J., McDonald, P., 2008. Family change in Iran: religion, revolution, and the state. In: Jayakody, R., Thornton, A., Axinn, W. (Eds.), International Family Change: Ideational Perspectives. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New York, pp. 177–198. Abbasi-Shavazi, M.J., McDonald, P., Hossein-Chavoshi, M., 2003. Changes in family, fertility behavior and attitudes in Iran. Working Papers in Demography (88). The Australian University, Canberra. Abbasi-Shavazi, M.J., McDonald, P., Hossein-Chavoshi, M., 2008. The family and social change in post-revolutionary Iran. In: Yount, K.M., Rashad, H. (Eds.), Family in the Middle East: Ideational Change in Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia. Routledge, Oxford/New York, pp. 217–235. Abbasi-Shavazi, M.J., McDonald, P., Hossein-Chavoshi, M., 2009. The Fertility Transition in Iran: Revolution and Reproduction. Springer, Dordrecht. Abbasi-Shavazi, M.J., Askari Nodoushan, A., Thornton, A., 2012. Family life and developmental idealism in Yazd, Iran. Demogr. Res. 26, 207–238. Afary, J., 2009. Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Aghajanian, A., 1995. A new direction in population policy and family planning in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Asia-Pac. Popul. J. 10, 3–20. Askari, S., 1998. Women, main victims of suicide in Iran. Farhang-e Tose’e, February., pp. 37–42, Reprinted in Pars Times. http://parstimes.com/women/womens suicide.html (viewed 01.01.11). Caldararo, N., 2003. The concept of the sustainable economy and the promise of Japan’s transformation. Anthropol. Quart. 76, 463–478. Caldwell, J.C., 1983. Direct economic costs and benefits of children. In: Bulato, R.A., Lee, R.D. (Eds.), Determinants of Fertility in Developing Countries, vol. 1. Academic Press, New York, pp. 458–493. Casterline, J.B., 1999. The Onset and Pace of Fertility Transition: National Patterns in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. The Population Council, New York. Curtis White, K., 2003. Declining fertility rate among North American Hutterites: the use of birth control within a Dariusleut Colony. Soc. Biol. 49, 58–73. Erfani, A., McQuillan, K., 2008. Rapid fertility decline in Iran: analysis of intermediate variables. J. Biosoc. Sci. 40, 459–478. Frey, B.S., 2008. Happiness: A Revolution in Economics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Friedl, E., 1991. Women of Deh Koh. Penguin, New York.

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