Population chatter for clearer and broader thinking about fertility

This paper examines reproductive vulnerability in Balaka, Malawi by prioritizing population chatter – how ordinary people perceive, narrate, and debate the fertility, mortality, and migration conditions around them. The authors, a cultural anthropologist and a demographer, discuss the translation of the concept of vulnerability in Malawi, identify the common metaphors and predicaments used to express it, and identify articulations of vulnerability in everyday conversation that show how young adults perceive and cope with vulnerabilities during an especially eventful stage of life. Drawing upon 600 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes written in 2015, the analysis is organized around the following question: What we would know about sexual and reproductive health if we privileged ordinary women’s exchanges with one another in everyday conversation over the entrenched measures (i.e., ideal family size, desired time to next birth, unmet need, contraceptive discontinuation rates) that have come to define sample surveys? Results are organized around three key themes: 1) the moral nature of population chatter; 2) widespread discontent with the predominant contraceptive method; and 3) food insecurity as a vulnerability that has relevance for contraceptive behaviors.