Microdemographic variation and family composition in four Thai villages

"Examination of Thai ethnographic materials highlights several problems in comparative analysis of social processes that are population linked. Marked differences in family composition among four Central Thai villages are shown to arise primarily from a common family system operating on different underlying sociocultural and demographic processes. Satisfactory analysis requires detailed demographic data, information on other sociocultural processes, and a formal model of family dynamics relating the demographic to the other kinds of data. Lack of even one of these three components may make comparison meaningless. Demographic anthropology and historical demography provide complementary data well suited to anthropological studies of social organization."