The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming

James W. Wood is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University and a Senior Scientist in Penn State's Graduate Program on Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment, USA. His previous book, The Dynamics of Human Reproduction: Biology, Biometry, Demography (1994) won the 1995 W. W. Howells Prize for best book in biological anthropology awarded by the American Anthropological Association. He conducted several years' worth of fieldwork on the demography and ecology of subsistence farming in highland New Guinea and in the northern Orkney Islands of Scotland, and retired in 2017.

• Part I. Introductory Concepts: 1. Thinking about population and traditional farmers; 2. Farmers, farms and farming resources; 3. Limits; Part II. Macro-Demographic Approaches to Population and Subsistence Farming: 4. A modicum of demography; 5. Malthus and Boserup; 6. The intensification debate after Boserup; Part III. Micro-Demographic Approaches to Population and Subsistence Farming: 7. The farming household as a fundamental unit of analysis; 8. Under-nutrition and the household demographic enterprise; 9. The nature of traditional farm work and the household labor force; 10. The economics of the household demographic life cycle; 11. Seasonality and the household demographic enterprise; 12. Beyond the household; Appendix. A bibliographic essay on subsistence farming; References; Index.

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