ABSTRACT
Practically all of the world's underdeveloped areas, embracing something like three-fourths of the world's population, still have high birth rates, that is, more than 30 births per 1000 inhabitants annually and more than 4 births per woman during her reproductive life. To push the inquiry further, people must try to understand the particular institutional patterns which, in agrarian societies, give rise to this high but dysfunctional fertility. In analyzing the institutional factors responsible for fertility, one finds the main key in the family, for human society accomplishes the function of bearing, nourishing, and socializing children primarily through the universal instrumentality of the nuclear family. It is through the relations of the nuclear family to the rest of society, then, that we can expect to find the social factors controlling the level of fertility. In sociological terms, the nuclear family of procreation tends in agrarian societies to be controlled by other kinship groups, notably by the two families of orientation.
