Anthropologist to give Morgan Lecture

The lecture, which is sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, is free and open to the public. Bledsoe also will participate at an invitation-only conference on campus on Friday, October 22, with specialists in the fields of population, pregnancy loss, and family planning.

Her work blends the cultural interpretation of an anthropologist with the statistical analyses of a demographer. Like other anthropologists studying birth and death in human populations, Bledsoe, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, focuses on the human lives behind the numbers. Her theory of "the contingent life course" grows out of her work with an interdisciplinary team studying child spacing and Western contraceptive use in rural Gambia, West Africa, a region in which many people value large families and in which fertility is very high.

Anthony Carter, professor of anthropology and editor of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, notes that Bledsoe's work has aroused considerable interest among policy makers concerned with international family planning and reproductive health programs.

The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures were established in 1963 by the Department of Anthropology to honor a founder of American anthropology and a major benefactor of the University. Morgan (1818-1881) was a distinguished Rochester attorney and the author of The League of the Iroquois, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, and Ancient Society.

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