ABSTRACT
Most young women and men in Gopalapalli consider having only a few children as desirable. However, stressing only the number of children is misleading. No one in Gopalapalli needs offspring, but everyone needs sons and daughters – gendered offspring. Man and woman are conceptualized and socially experienced as essentially so different that the one cannot replace the other. When asking a woman how many children she has, she will answer, for example, ‘two daughters and a son’, instead of ‘three children’. Gender asymmetry has crucial effects on the desirability of daughters and sons; generally speaking, sons are granted higher prestige and thus preferred to daughters.
