Proximate and Distal Variables in the Demography of Rendille Pastoralists

Following the widespread application and success of Bongaarts' proximate fertility framework in the 1980s, anthropologists and demographers have shown increased interest in the delineation of distal fertility variables, alternatively called higher-order by cultural ecologists or ultimate variables by evolutionary ecologists. This shift in focus raises at least four immediate issues: (1) confusion over the role and effect of culture on individual members' behavior, (2) whether the individual or the group forms the basic unit of analysis, (3) discordance between external and internal perspectives of demographic regimes, and (4) difficulty comparing and evaluating quantitative survey-based data with qualitative information derived from focus groups or key informants. This paper presents one approach to dealing with these problems, featuring the assessment of anthropological and demographic data collected for Rendille pastoralists of northern Kenya, a group long cited in both anthropological and demographic literature as regulating their fertility in relation to ecological factors.