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increased. Yet he glosses over the fact that the U.S. Departmentof State supported, and ultimately undermined, the ICO out ofinternational "security" considerations.

There are mechanical problems. The spelling mistakes inSpanish and Portuguese are abundant and go way beyond themere missing accent mark. This would not be such a problem ifthe book were not essentially a review of Brazilian and Colom-bian literature. Geographers will be surprised to learn from Map2.1 that much of Brazil lies at over 2,000 meters above sea level.

The prose is intelligent and clear, but sometimes the authorbullies the reader. Terms, concepts, models, etc. are tossed outwithout explanation, as though any well-read person shouldknow the difference between an arabica and a robusta, should befamiliar with the ideas of Frieden and Rogowski, or should un-derstand various game models. In some cases these terms are soobscure that hardly anyone will know them, or even be able tofind them in standard reference books; for example, few readerswill know that MAMS is coffee from Manizales, Armenia,Medellfn, and Sevilla, or that pasilla and ripio are inferiorgrades of Colombian coffee. In the last example, the terms aremade even more obscure by Bates referring to them incorrectlyand inconsistently as "pasillo y ripio" (p. 118) and as "pasillaand ripia" (p. 171). (For a Colombian coffee glossary, see JoseChalarca, El Cafe en la Vida de Colombia, Federacion NacionaldeCafeterosde Colombia, 1987.)

Politics do matter, but Bates only considers election politics.Colombia's years of village-level political killings known as"La Violencia" are mentioned only once, in passing. Are wesupposed to believe that election campaigns matter, whilewholesale partisan murder does not?

The book begs other questions. The Federacion Nacional deCafeteros de Colombia (the coffee growers' association) isgiven a sympathetic description. Bates emphasizes severallimes how the Federacion is a politically sophisticated organiza-tion that consistently represents the best interests of smallholderfarmers, and its main source of power came from its ability toplay off one national party against the other. We are not told howthe Federacion coped with military rule and other periods whenit was not possible to manipulate party politics. We are sparedthe details of how liberal businessmen, politicians, and peasantfarmers were able to collaborate for 70 years in the coffee trade.

Bates starts his book with the charming notion that he wishesto describe the coffee trade, in order to talk about collaborationinstead of warfare. The International Coffee Organization wasan unusual mix of consumer and producer nations, who set quo-tas that were controlled by the consumer nations, to redistributewealth to smallholder farmers in South America. This book willbe of interest to scholars of the economy and politics of coffee-growing countries, especially Colombia and Brazil. •>

A Concise History of World Population. 2nd edition. Mas-simo Livi-Bacci. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.250 pp.

JAMES W. WOODPennsylvania State University

It has been said that anthropologists have fascinating ques-tions but no reliable methods with which to address them, whereas

demographers have powerful methods but no questions worththe asking. A few researchers have been trying to upgrade themethods of anthropological demography, in part by importingmodels and analyses from statistical demography. In this book,Massimo Livi-Bacci, a distinguished Italian demographer, triesto make demographic questions more interesting, in part by im-porting theoretical perspectives from anthropology. Whether ornot he has been entirely successful in the effort, the mere factthat he is trying makes his book required reading by any anthro-pologist concerned with population problems.

This is demography on a grand scale. Livi-Bacci surveyswhat is known or can reasonably be surmised about fertility,mortality, and migration from the Paleolithic to the present, andhow changes in these demographic forces have been related tochanges in economy and resource availability. He uses the ideasof Robert Malthus (who was nof called Thomas by himself or hisfriends) and Ester Boserup as a kind of theoretical armature onwhich to hang his discussion of population and economy. Al-though Malthus and Boserup are usually viewed as irreconcil-ably opposed, Livi-Bacci wisely suggests that things are not sosimple. The dynamic tension between Malthus andBoserup—between demographic stagnation and economic ex-pansion—is, in his view, a grand unifying theme in populationhistory. He argues the point persuasively.

Livi-Bacci is unquestionably strongest on the early modernperiod (roughly 1520-1780) and the more recent era of thedemographic transition and its aftermath, when data are avail-able that approximate the census and vital registration recordswith which demographers prefer to work. His discussions of theEuropean demographic transition, demographic trends in pre-sent-day poor countries, and historical patterns of European mi-gration are, to my mind, masterful. Some of his conclusions willbe breathtaking to the reader uneducated in matters demo-graphic. For example, if you want to live a long and healthy life,the single best thing you can do is be born in a rich country. But itdoesn't have to be a super-rich one: the gross domestic productof Italy circa 1950 or present-day Venezuela is enough to securevirtually all the increase in life expectancy at birth that has beenachieved by the wealthiest nations. Indeed, the last forty years ofimprovement in medical technology and practice in Western na-tions have increased life expectancy almost not at all. (This is be-cause most of the historical increase in life expectancy at birthhas resulted from a decline in infant and early childhood mortal-ity, not from improvements in the health and survival of the eld-erly.) Nations such as the United States are now spending mas-sive amounts of money on medical research and health-caredelivery systems that have almost no effect on mortality in theaggregate.

Livi-Bacci is, unfortunately, rather less successful in review-ing the anthropological literature on prehistoric populationtrends, perhaps because he is an outsider looking in on the field.In this area he is prone to over-generalization and a somewhatcasual attitude toward the difference between well-establishedfact and ill-founded speculation. Both tendencies can be illus-trated by one particular graph (Fig. 1.8£, p. 22), a bivariate plotof total fertility rates against life expectancy at birth for severalpast populations. Most of the data points have labels such as "It-aly 1862-67" or "Russia 1897." But there are also two points la-beled "Paleolithic" and "Neolithic." Now, presumably Livi-Bacci chose "Russia 1897" (for example) because the data needed

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for formal demographic estimation were available. No such dataexist for the "Paleolithic" or "Neolithic." Any conclusions wedraw about vital rates during those ancient periods must bebased on elaborate, indirect, and error-prone methods. And yetthere is no indication that those two estimates are less reliablethan any of the others. In addition, as large and diverse as "Rus-sia 1897" may have been, it can reasonably be regarded as a sin-gle social or political aggregate for many demographic pur-poses. The same cannot be said for the "Paleolithic" or"Neolithic," both of which encompassed many tens of thou-sands of distinct and differing demes. Surely each of those peri-ods considered separately held more than enough demographicdiversity to defy easy generalization. Finally, the point for the"Neolithic" lies several standard deviations away from the cen-ter of the cloud of remaining points, suggesting that somethingvery odd and unhappy was going on during that epoch. Thisview is based on a plausibility argument about the adversedemographic effects of adopting agriculture that has enjoyedsome popularity in the field of paleopathology but has come un-der increasing criticism in recent years because of its lack oftheoretical coherence and empirical support. I would like tothink that only an outsider would skate over these issues soblithely.

I abuse this one poor figure only because it illustrates a largertendency toward over-generalization. (Anothergross over-gen-eralization is Livi-Bacci's conclusion that nutritional status hasno important influence on the risk of death.) But perhaps thistendency is inevitable in a book that takes such a broad-brush ap-proach to population history. Annoying as anthropologicalover-generalization may be to an anthropologist with a vestedinterest in the debate, it detracts only slightly from the overallvirtues of the book. For the most part, this is a reliable, tough-minded, and readable overview of the major trends in humanpopulation history. It bristles with ideas and findings that everyanthropologist ought to take seriously.

I note in passing that this is the second edition of a book firstpublished in 1992. The new version includes substantial re-writes of several chapters and a new chapter on future popula-tion trends. It represents a significant improvement on a bookthat was already indispensable. •>

Demographic Diversity and Change in the Central AmericanIsthmus. Anne R. Pebley and Luis Rosero-Bixby, eds. SantaMonica, CA: RAND, 1997.736 pp.

GEORGE L. COWGILLArizona State University

The 23 chapters of this volume are a subset of the papers pre-sented at an international conference on the population of theCentral American Isthmus, organized by the Central AmericanPopulation Program at the University of Costa Rica, in collabo-ration with colleagues at RAND. They show not only the ex-pectable variation in quality but a wide diversity in methods,points of view, and topics. Many chapters focus on demographicmatters, as the title suggests, but a number are more concernedwith medical or environmental topics. Some are explicitly con-cerned with issues of politics, ethnicity, and social justice; oth-

ers skirt these issues very gingerly or even seem oblivious ofthem. Some authors are quite clear that conflicting interests areat work, usually in a context of enormous differences in wealthand power; others seem unaware that such differences mighthave any explanatory relevance, and what is left out speaks veryloudly in some chapters.

A more detailed list of topics includes demographic impactsof recent wars, poverty, nutrition, traditional and "modern"medical practices associated with pregnancy and birth, familysize preferences, delivery and use of contraceptive informationand techniques, use of geocoding and CIS, adolescent mother-hood, migration (especially with regard to environmental con-sequences), and perceptions and misperceptions of environ-mental hazards and land uses on the parts of local communitiesand government authorities. The strongest unifying theme is thegeographical focus on a contiguous bloc of land composed ofthe five republics of Central America: Guatemala, Honduras, ElSalvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, plus Belize and Panama.

Anthropologists interested in any of the subjects listed aboveare likely to find useful material in some chapters, but in manycases they will also feel frustrated by what they will perceive asserious limitations in methods, concepts, and interpretations.With a few notable exceptions, ethnographic methods are con-spicuously absent, and explicit theory is in short supply. Any an-thropologist previously skeptical of the methods and prevailingviewpoints of the demographic research community will notfind his or her doubts allayed by most of these chapters. This is agreat pity because, as a few anthropologists and a few demogra-phers clearly recognize, there is an immense amount to begained by a truly effective synthesis of anthropology and de-mography.

Some chapters offer nothing much by way of analysis exceptto verbally and graphically point out the patterns lurking inpages of statistical tables. There is nothing intrinsically wrongwith this. Many anthropologists, as well as people in general, arequite unskillful at extracting information from statistical tables,and this level of discussion and style of analysis are quite useful,as far as they go. However, some chapters scarcely go beyondthis and seem pedestrian even in the tradition of demographicconcepts and practices. Others draw conclusions that explicitlybear on interesting debates, some of which I discuss further below.

The other troubling deficiency, from an anthropologicalviewpoint, is the means by which the numbers in the tables wereobtained. Often they are from government statistics, and con-tributors often bemoan their deficiencies. However, their mainidea about how to improve on this seems to be to design andcarry out their own large-scale surveys. In some cases these haveimportant remedial effects—for example, Danel, Grummer-Strawn, Caceres, and Stupp provide convincing evidence thatmaternal mortality and morbidity tend to be greatly underre-ported by government statistics in El Salvador. Others presentdata that strongly point in directions they do not spell out, per-haps because they operate under political constraints. The chap-ters by Danel et al. and by Moya de Madrigal strongly hint thatdoctors are recommending far more caesarians than are needed(to women who can afford them), yet they avoid saying this di-rectly and they report no surveys of doctors.

In many chapters the data and the viewpoints are firmly exte-rior, at even more than arm's length from actual people—some-times the distance seems nearly extraterrestrial. There is no need