Parlez Vous Démographie?

I recently received a note from Laurent Chalard, a French population geographer, letting me know of the magazine Population & Avenir : www.population-demographie.org. He thought I might be interested in this and he was right. This is a classic twofer--you learn about demographic issues in France and other areas of the world while improving your French reading comprehension at the same time. Dr. Chalard also contributes columns to Les Echos that are related to population geography.

What's in a Name? Your Roots, Perhaps

Who can forget the way that Henry Higgins, in "My Fair Lady," could pinpoint the origins in England of anyone by listening to them speak. Your accent was the guide to the place from which you came. On a global scale, names tend to serve that function. A large database of names and their geographic locations can be found in the UK at the Public Profiler website. Here I find that, consistent with my own family history information, someone with the surname of Weeks is likely to have roots in southern England. But it is not so easy if your ancestors were Africans brought as slaves to the Americas. According to the Associated Press, a new project just announced at Emory University is trying to help with that.

"The whole point of the project is to ask the African diaspora, people with any African background, to help us identify the names because the names are so ethno-linguistically specific, we can actually locate the region in Africa to which the individual belonged on the basis of the name," said David Eltis, an Emory University history professor who heads the database research team.

There are some problems, however:

Most of the millions of Africans enslaved before 1807 were known only by numbers, said James Walvin, an expert on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Once bought by slave owners, the Africans' names were lost. Africans captured by the Portuguese were baptized and given "Christian" names aboard the ships that were taking them into slavery.
But original African names — surnames were uncommon for Africans in the 19th century — are rich with information. Some reveal the day of the week an individual was born or whether that individual was the oldest, youngest or middle child or a twin. They can also reveal ethnic or linguistic groups.

Christmas Not a Time of Peace in Nigeria

For a long time Nigeria has been divided demographically between the largely Muslim north and the largely Christian south. This divide led the predominantly Christian Igbo to leave Nigeria between 1967 and 1970 in the so-called Biafran War (because the Ibgo wanted to set up a separate Republic of Biafra) that was actually a civil war costing the lives of three million Nigerians before the Igbo rejoined the country. Tensions have remained over the years, punctuated most recently by bombings on Christmas Day in which Christians were targeted by Muslims. Reuters reports on the story:

Northern Nigerian Christians said on Tuesday they feared that a spate of Christmas Day bombings by Islamist militants that killed over two dozen people could lead to a religious war in Africa's most populous country.The Boko Haram Islamist sect, which aims to impose sharia Islamic law across Nigeria, claimed responsibility for the blasts, the second Christmas in a row it has caused carnage at Christian churches.Saidu Dogo, secretary general for the CAN [Christian Association of Nigeria] in Nigeria's 19 northern provinces called on Muslim leaders to control their faithful, saying Christians will be forced to defend themselves against further attacks.
"We fear that the situation may degenerate to a religious war and Nigeria may not be able to survive one. Once again, 'enough is enough!'," Dogo said.
The attacks risk reviving tit-for-tat sectarian violence between the mostly Muslim north and the largely Christian south, which has claimed thousands of lives in the past decade.

You will recall that religion is so sensitive an issue in Nigeria that the question is not asked in the census. Other surveys, however, such as the Demographic and Health Surveys, do ask about religion and help us estimate that the country is still roughly evenly split between Muslims and Christians.

Enlightenment Thinking About Population

I think that I can safely say that most people would not expect a connection between Catherine the Great of Russia and demography. Yet there is one and it came to my attention in Robert Massie's new book, "Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman." Catherine ruled Russia throughout most of the second half of the 18th century (1762-1796) and turned out to be a financial supporter of the Enlightenment through her purchase of the library of Denis Diderot, who was a friend of Rousseau and Voltaire--major intellectual contributors to the Enlightenment. Diderot is most famous for the Encyclopedia, through which many of the ideas of the Enlightenment came to public attention and for which Diderot had the aim of changing the way people think about the world. It accomplished that goal and in the process made a lot of enemies, which is why Diderot wound up needing the outside financial support that Catherine provided.

Among many other things, Diderot was fascinated by the stories published by the French Admiral and explorer Bougainville of the very open sexuality and high birth rate among the Tahitians. This contrasted with the very secretive sex lives and relatively low birth rate among the elite of France. In Diderot's treatise on the Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville he considers the relationship between population growth and resources in ways that clearly presaged and may well have influenced the debate between Malthus and Godwin that still rages to this day in various ways.

The Demographics of Christmas

Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ and so is an obviously important day on the Christian religious calendar. To be sure, it has been somewhat hijacked by the gift-giving Santa Claus, but people are amazingly clever at wrapping (pun intended) Santa up with the birth of Christ--witness the story from Reuters that:

Thousands of foreign pilgrims and Palestinian Christians, some in Santa hats, gathered at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity Saturday to pray for peace at the place where Jesus was born.

How many people would show up if everyone who considered themselves to be Christian were to descend upon Bethlehem? The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that you would need to set up 2.18 billion seats, thus accommodating 31 percent of all humans.

Taken as a whole, Christians are by far the world’s largest religious group. Muslims, the second-largest group, make up a little less than a quarter of the world’s population, according to previous studies by the Pew Forum.

Christians are also geographically widespread – so far-flung, in fact, that no single continent or region can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity.
A century ago, this was not the case. In 1910, about two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe, where the bulk of Christians had been for a millennium, according to historical estimates by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. Today, only about a quarter of all Christians live in Europe (26%). A plurality – more than a third – now are in the Americas (37%). About one in every four Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa (24%), and about one-in-eight is found in Asia and the Pacific (13%).

I suspect that Santa is pretty tired--talk about traveling at Christmas...