Walters Sarah
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, U.K.
Demogr Res. 2016 Jan 15;34:63-108. doi: 10.4054/DemRes.2016.34.3.
Little is known about even the relatively recent demographic history of Africa, because of the lack of data. Elsewhere, historical demographic trends have been reconstructed by applying family reconstitution to church records. Such data also exist throughout Africa from the late 19th century. For the Counting Souls Project, nearly one million records from the oldest Catholic parishes in East and Central Africa have been digitised. These data are currently being processed into a relational database. The aim of this paper is to describe their potential for demographic reconstruction in the region, and to outline how their provenance defines the analytical approach.
Empirically, religion is correlated with population patterns in contemporary Africa, and, historically, reproduction and family formation were central to Christian mission in the region. Measuring change using sources created by agents of change raises questions of epistemology, causation, and selection bias. This paper describes how these concerns are balanced by missionary determination to follow the intimate lives of their parishioners, to monitor their 'souls', and to measure their morality, fidelity, and faith. This intimate recording means that the African parish registers, together with related sources such as missionary diaries and letters and oral histories, describe qualitatively and quantitatively what happens to individual agency (reproductive decision-making) when the moral hegemony shifts (via evangelisation and colonisation), and how the two interact in a reciprocal process of change.
Reconstructing long-term demographic trends using parish registers in Africa is therefore more than simply generating rates and testing their reliability. It is a bigger description of how 'decision rules' are structured and re-structured, unpicking the cognitive seam between individual and culture by exploring dynamic micro-interactions between reproduction, honour, hope, and modernity over the long term. With such a mixed-methods approach, parish registers offer real potential for historical demography in Africa.
由于缺乏数据，即使是相对较近的非洲人口统计历史也鲜为人知。在其他地方，通过将家庭重构应用于教会记录来重建历史人口趋势。19世纪末以来，非洲各地也存在此类数据。对于“清点灵魂计划”，东非和中非最古老的天主教教区的近100万条记录已被数字化。这些数据目前正在被处理成一个关系数据库。本文旨在描述这些数据在该地区进行人口统计重建的潜力，并概述其来源如何决定分析方法。
从经验来看，宗教与当代非洲的人口模式相关，从历史角度看，生育和家庭形成是该地区基督教传教活动的核心。使用由变革推动者创建的资料来源来衡量变化会引发认识论、因果关系和选择偏差等问题。本文描述了传教士决心追踪教区居民的私密生活、监测他们的“灵魂”并衡量他们的道德、忠诚和信仰，从而平衡了这些担忧。这种细致入微的记录意味着，非洲教区登记册连同传教士日记、信件和口述历史等相关资料来源，定性和定量地描述了道德霸权转移（通过传教和殖民）时个体能动性（生殖决策）所发生的情况，以及两者如何在相互作用的变化过程中相互影响。
因此，利用非洲教区登记册重建长期人口趋势不仅仅是简单地生成比率并检验其可靠性。这是对“决策规则”如何构建和重新构建的更全面描述，通过长期探索生殖、荣誉、希望和现代性之间动态的微观互动，解开个体与文化之间的认知脉络。通过这种混合方法，教区登记册为非洲历史人口学提供了真正的潜力。
