Elisha P. Renne is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan.

• TABLE OF CONTENTS; Preface; Acknowledgments; List of figures, tables; Part I. Anthropological and demographic concerns; Chapter 1. Introduction: Paradoxes of progress; Chapter 2. Historical and anthropological aspects of population: Centripetal and centrifugal tendencies; Chapter 3. Demographic dimensions of Itapa-Ekiti; Part II. Bodies, persons, and social relations; Chapter 4. Women's bodies, virginity, and marriage; Chapter 5. Child-fostering, blood ties, and parenthood; Chapter 6. Burial, rebirth, and relations with the dead; Part III. Population, development, and the state; Chapter 7. Personal hygiene, public sanitation, and western education; Chapter 8. Houses, descendants, and land tenure; Chapter 9. Counting bodies: Censuses, vital registration, and the creation of Ekiti State; Chapter 10: Conclusion: Local development, politics, and two funerals; Bibliography; Appendices; Appendix I. Research methods and materials; Appendix II. Important dates in Itapa and Nigerian history; Appendix III. Contraception ever used by Itapa-Ekiti women, based on 1992, 1997 surveys; Index.

A rich and compelling account of the social and cultural processes that underlie the dynamics of fertility in contemporary Nigeria! Rich, important and insightful!Readers with interests in anthropology, demography or Africa all have much to learn from this fine book. -- Daniel Jordan Smith, Department of Anthropology, Brown University A rich and compelling account of the social and cultural processes that underlie the dynamics of fertility in contemporary Nigeria! Rich, important and insightful!Readers with interests in anthropology, demography or Africa all have much to learn from this fine book.