Non-CAS Event
Thursday, October 15, 2015, 5:00 p.m.
Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS), Room 155, CU-Boulder
*IBS is located at the corner of Grandview Ave. and 15th Street
Fabian Drixler
Associate Professor of History, Yale University
This talk engages a central question in the social and demographic history of early modern Japan: why, in a period during which fertility reached notably low levels overall do historians have so little evidence for marital contraception? Further, this puzzle presented itself in a society that, in certain subsections at least, possessed effective contraceptive technology and so strong a desire to limit family size that it practiced infanticide and abortion. This wide-ranging talk will explore these and other issues, principally through evidence from early modern Japan’s extraordinarily rich store of written demographic records.
Fabian Drixler is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. He is the author of the award-winning book Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950 (University of California Press, 2013).
**Sponsored by the Institute of Behavior Science and the Department of History, University of Colorado Boulder**