Eugenic Concerns, Population Policies and Puericulture in Interwar Greece

Reviewed by: Strengthening Bodies, Building a Nation: The Social History of Child Health and Welfare in Greece (1890–1940) by Vassiliki Theodorou and Despina Karakatsani Sevasti Trubeta Strengthening Bodies, Building a Nation: The Social History of Child Health and Welfare in Greece (1890–1940). By Vassiliki Theodorou and Despina Karakatsani. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019. vi + 374 pp. Cloth $60. children's protection, health, and welfare have been the focus of diverse academic disciplines that examine their attention to social control through institutions such as schooling, boarding homes, health centers, child observation centers, or facilities for children and childcare. Medicine, the "queen" of academic disciplines in Michel Foucault's words, has contributed a great deal to establishing disciplinary and regulatory power and also to constituting modern social subjects. The notion of medicalization refers to medicine's power in designing society and—as power operates—to be internalized by social subjects, including the "child." In situating the medicalization of childhood as the focus of their book, Theodorou and Karakatsani address a topic that has attracted increasing scholarly interest in the last few decades. Their book also familiarizes the international audience with the peculiar case of Greece. The authors pursue the key aim of advancing an "understanding of the historical context of the medicalization of childhood attempted in Greece in the early twentieth century" (5) and, more specifically, during the period from the 1890s until 1940. A particular interest of this book is to explore increasing state control over children's health and the circumstances under which children's health and care emerged as a scientific issue. The analysis is based on the argument that children's health care in Greece contributed to "the institutionalized medicalization of child health on a mass scale, mainly through school" (6). In the introduction, the authors provide a historiographical overview of international scholarly debates about the medicalization of childhood and medicine as an institution of social control. They especially point to a trend in scholarship that explores children's health and the rise of childcare in the southeastern European countries as an integral part of national policies and the national community. Both the title of the book as well as the analysis demonstrate that the authors embrace this very approach and put at the heart of their analysis the significance of children's health and care for the national idea and community. Following a chronological approach, the book is divided into three main parts. The first covers the period from 1890 to 1929 (placing emphasis on the [End Page 172] last decade of the nineteenth century); it addresses the interweaving of medicine, medical ideas, and social policies concerning children in both Europe and Greece. The authors argue that in this period, public health policies facilitated the establishment of "school hygiene institutions to Greece" in 1920 (6). Along with detailing the ministries, the authors also consider the cooperation of a women's organization with state institutions in advancing institutional frames for children's health and care. The second part of the book covers the interwar period, which is framed by two key years and historical events: from 1922, when almost 1.5 million new people arrived to Greek state-territory (known as "refugees from Asia Minor"), to the establishment of the military dictatorship in 1936. The authors stress two developments that marked this period: the rise of professionals and experts in child welfare and the entanglement of scientists and practitioners. The focus of the third section addresses the youth and child policies of the dictatorship from 1936 up to Greece's entry in the Second World War (1940). In this part, the authors reflect on possible continuities and ruptures in child health care with previous governments. Given that the book is based on Greek historical events and developments, an appendix with short explanations about names, historical dates, and terms would have been helpful for the broader audience. A connoisseur of Greece may be familiar with (indeed, partially contested) terms such as "Asia Minor Disaster," "Asia Minor Refugees," or "4th August," but this may not necessarily be the case for a broader audience. In terms of bibliographical sources, this volume lags behind the present state of research...

There are few more challenging tests of fascist core-periphery topographies than the case of interwar Greece. Greece can claim no significant fascist movement in the interwar years; no significant fascist political party; and no dictatorial regime inspired by a genuinely revolutionary ultranationalist vision. In the last category, the only possible candidate, the 4th of August dictatorial regime headed by the retired general Ioannis Metaxas, was established late (1936) and lasted only for a few short years until the death of the dictator (January 1941). The contributions to this special issue on interwar Greece feature not only diverse aspects of the Metaxas regime but also offer broader perspectives on the ideological and political dynamics of fascism across the 1920s and 1930s. This special issue intends to build bridges between historical and sociological approaches; between the study of ideas and the analysis of policies; between contextual specificities and international trends; and, in the end, between recent historiographies of generic fascism and of modern Greek history. Collectively, the contributions also evince a plea to take the fascist experience and the potential for radical ruptures in interwar Greece more seriously.

Population should be in the central focus of local community institutions and the local community may constitute its population policy which will supplement state population policy measures, considering the local specific various traditions, values and models of living. The paper's basic goal is to critically perceive the characteristics, significance and role of local self-governments in the current population policy of Serbia. Social situation and social policy characteristics in Serbia are analyzed in the context of the population policy. It is pointed out that poverty, unemployment, the economic crisis, the process of privatization, the issue of system decentralization and social expectations of the population, as current expressions of transition, all have a consequence on the demographic development and population policy. A critical estimation of the activities in the field of population policies which are carried out by local and provincial self-governments in Serbia in the last decade are brought into focus, with a special review to the activities of provincial and local governments in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. As a result of the analysis it is pointed out that the population and social policy measures have been separated since the year 2000 and that they have been directed only to stimulating births and not child raising and that solutions regarding maternity leave brought improvements, however shortened maternity leave for the third child. The new conception of the population policy brought a whole series of restrictions such as: suspension of aid for newborn essentials; discontinuance of the right to maternity allowance; abolishing of compensation for preschool expenses for the third child; children?s allowance lost its population measures character along with considerable tightening of the census and decreasing of amount; the activities of preschool facilities have been reduced only to an educational function, and the terms for realizing rights to preschool education for children without parents and children with special needs have been tightened. The authors point out to the values and principles on which a contemporary population policy of local self-governments in Serbia should be established, such as: stability of established measures, a clear message on the needs of society, compatibility and not uniformity with measures of other bodies, compassion and uniformity with aspirations of couples and individuals, respect for the rights and freedom of man, information availability, equality of birth and raising children in measures. The establishment of population policy municipality funds is suggested and that local population policy measures are both material and non-material type, as well as in the form of organizational measures which could use the existing resources in a better way. The municipal assembly should create organizational suppositions by appointing a Population Policy Commission as its permanent body. The Commission would propose to the Municipal Assembly to adopt a strategic document - the Population Policy Strategy in the municipality. The Municipality Assembly should adopt the Action Plan for carrying out of the population policy every year, which would define the measures, bearers, terms and methods of evaluating measures with a plan for the following year. The population policy of the local self-government should be a constant process which manages, follows and evaluates, which is public and which understands the engagement of competent people, participation of citizens-volunteers and civil organizations.

Toward a post‐neoliberal social citizenship?

Population Policies:An Integrated Approach (Preface to the 2009 Quetelet Symposium on Population Policies) Ester L. Rizzi, Catherine Gourbin, and Pau Baizán Background In November 2009 the Research Center on Demography and Societies (Centre de Recherche en Démographie et Societies, Louvain-la-Neuve) organized its 35th Quetelet seminar. The main theme was "Population Policies in Europe and North America." It is in the tradition of Chaire Quetelet seminars to address emerging topics in demography. Of course, the theme of population policies is not new, but it seemed to us and to the colleagues of the Research Center in Louvain that a reformulation of the topic was in progress, and that reflections and propositions were needed. The main theme of the seminar was split into four sub-themes, which were explored and developed over the course of the three-day seminar: 1) the evolution and definition of population policies, 2) migration policies and policies for the integration of migrants, 3) family policies and policies that support fertility, and 4) policies for ageing. Many participants attempted to answer the following critical questions: What are the aims of population policies? How do population policies differ from social policies? Is the efficacy of these policies supported by empirical results? What is the theoretical and ethical background behind these policies? In this paper we summarize and discuss some of the best contributions presented at the 35th Quetelet seminar and stress their contribution to answering the above-mentioned questions. The papers that are summarized below are now part of a special collection1 of papers published in Population Review. Population policies: definitions and ethics When trying to define population policies, one possible "preliminary" definition could be the following: population policies are those policies that affect demographic phenomena such as fertility, migration and ageing or that attempt to adapt societies to their consequences. This definition implies that policies can be active or adaptive. Active population policies can be direct or indirect. In the concluding paper of the special collection, Nico van Nimwegen speaks about how the focus of population policies has shifted over time and argues that population policies in the past that directly attempted to change the course of demographic phenomena, are now, in essence, population-related policies that have socio-economic aims. The new focus becomes particularly evident when referring to the implementation of population policies in the past. At the Chaire Quetelet seminar two contributions, now presented in the special collection, went in this direction: Arianna Caporali and Antonio Golini's paper "Births and Fertility in Interwar Italy: Trends, Images, Policies and Perception" and Frédéric Sandron's study "Réunion in the 1960s and 1970s: A Population Policy Against the Current?" Caporali and Golini point out that the Italian interwar period population policy was part of Mussolini's nationalist objectives and that it took several forms, from financial incentives to penalties for bachelors and emigration. But Mussolini's attempts failed and fertility continued to decline. We could compare the Italian case with France, a well known historical example of pronatalist policies. In France, a persuasive approach was used to convince people that high natality improves the wealth of the nation. This contrasted with the authoritarian approach of the Italian fascist regime presented in Caporali and Golini's paper. In addition, while in Italy population policies were associated with misogyny and racial discrimination, in France the pronatalist argument was combined with a social one: by compensating the cost of children, the policymakers tried to prevent family poverty (Chesnais, 2006). Today, because of the relatively high fertility rate in France, which in 2006 reached two children per woman, France is recognized as an a country that has implemented successful pronatalist policies. The second paper of the special collection, Frédéric Sandron's, "Réunion in the 1960s and 1970s: A Population Policy Against the Current?", also involves direct population policies. Réunion Island's population policy is a peculiar case. Réunion is part of France's territory, but, contrary to metropolitan France, an anti-natalist policy was implemented there. The author explains how debates and charismatic figures led to the conclusion that demographic control was necessary for the socioeconomic...

������ ��� Populist political forces have played significant roles in Indian politics, and have varied in their vision of political community, in the social groups they targeted, in the policies they pursued, and in their impact on democracy. The Indian National Congress had populist aspects in the interwar period, and then again under Indira Gandhi’s leadership from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. Movements and parties that represented particular language and caste groups also employed populist rhetoric and methods of mobilization, and pursued populist policies. The nature of the populist organizations influenced the effect of populism on democracy. While Indira Gandhi’s populism weakened Indian democracy, leading to a period of authoritarian rule, the populism of many of India’s language and caste parties strengthened democracy. Populism is likely to continue in Indian politics, and is particularly significant currently in the mobilization of the lower castes. T wo conflicting claims periodically surface in discussions of mass politics and policymaking: one claim is that the era of populism is over and the other claim is that populist discourses, populist patterns of mobilization, and populist policies are once again resurgent. Populism was declared dead in American politics after the decline of the agrarian populist movement in the early twentieth century, in East European politics after peasant populism declined in the interwar period, in Latin American politics after the shift from import substitution industrialization in the 1960s and the 1970s, and in much of Asia and Africa after postcolonial regimes consolidated from the 1950s to the 1970s. However, populism returned to these regions, as demonstrated in the politics of figures such as Huey Long in Louisiana, Andreas Papandreou in Greece, Alan Garcia and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Carlos Menem in Argentina, Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, Mujib-ur-Rehman in Bangladesh, Indira Gandhi in India, and Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada in the Philippines. If populism lives, the claim that populism has ended must rest on some misunderstandings.

The rise and victory of Italian Fascism in the first half of the 1920s passed Greece by. Yet soon afterwards the international experience of ‘fascism’ found more receptive audiences within the prodigious dissident ‘third spaces’ where more and more mainstream Greek political actors chose to operate in the interwar period. This article explores the dynamics of the ideological and political formation of ‘third ways’ in interwar Greece, paying attention to the interplay between international stimuli and local contextual singularities. In these thirding spaces ‘fascism’ was understood and operationalised in very different, subjective, and ever-shifting ways by each of these actors. It was regarded mostly as a potential component of diverse thirding processes/solutions and rarely as the desired outcome thereof. This explains why fascism came to inform a range of very different thirding projects in interwar Greece—from pursuing rupture and renewal to aspiring to status quo-affirmation; from liberal to conservative to authoritarian visions; from searching for a short-term ‘remedy’ to envisioning a long-term radical transformation.

Video Abstract: http://bit.ly/ocGEkd

In Memoriam: Mats Morell

The revolutionary rhythm of tango – as well as the simplicity of its dancing steps – contributed to the expansion of its popularity in Greece during the interwar period (1922-1940). The purpose of this paper is to explore the socio-cultural reasons for which tango became a popular dance in Greece during that era. More particularly, the research study had two aims: to present through an experiential description of the practice of tango during the interwar period, as well as to explore the emotional experience of nostalgia, triggered by popular Greek tango-songs from the interwar period. Although the Greek tango has not been prominent in Greece as a form of music or dance expression since the 1960s, I carried out a two-year ethnographic research in two homes for the elderly in and outside Athens. By adopting an interactive musical approach followed by discussions with the home residents, I was able to gain information regarding their cultural and social relationship to tango. A total of 30 narratives were collected from the residents. Historical and literary texts (e.g. press articles of that era and music magazines featuring commentaries on the music and dance trends of that age) were used as secondary narrative voices.

The aim of the research, presented in the paper is the analysis for the formation and development of the basic theory of population policies in the scientific school of Professor Dmitry I.Valentey (Lomonosov Moscow State University). The research was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Population Chair of Economics Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The graduates of the Chair worked and continue to work actively in the field of fundamental and applied research in demography, demographic education, ministries and departments of the socio-economic unit. The works of the 1960s – early 90s (monographs, collections of scientific articles, tutorials), which dealt with the concepts and their interrelationships, approaches to understanding the ratio of social policy, population and demographic policies, the structure of these important components of social policy served as the basis for the analysis. In the study the comparative analysis of the positions of different authors has been made, including other research schools, discussion issues are highlighted, relating to the implementation of the population policies. This article shows the realization of the idea of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of problems of population management in practice, including the studies and discussions of representatives of different sciences (demographers, sociologists, historians, economists, geographers, lawyers, etc.). In the final part of the paper the practical steps are considered to enhance the population policy in the USSR in the early 80s, regional peculiarities of the phased introduction of new measures to provide state support for families with children in 1981–1983, as well as approaches to development of regional programmes of population policies in the late 70’s and 80’s. The research has received a new analytical material that reveals the attitude on the definition and content of the basic concepts (demographic policy and population policy), the formulation of goals, objectives, principles and approaches to assessment of the effectiveness of demographic policy. This study shows the difficulties facing the practical implementation of theoretical notions about population policy, the dependence of the population policies on specific historical and socio-economic conditions. The collapse of the Soviet Union has put the issue of developing conceptual frameworks and mechanisms for the implementation of demographic policies in the new economic and socio-political conditions. At the same time, theoretical and applied researches in the field of population policy during the USSR epoch largely retained their relevance, including the field of new support measures for families with children, the development of criteria and indexes for assessing the impact of demographic policies, improving the implementation methods of demographic programmes with regional peculiarities of the demographic situation. We still, as 50 years ago, are looking for the ways to increase fertility, to counter the threats of depopulation, and the ways to reduce the backlog in the life expectancy and optimize migration. Critical thinking on the theory and practice of population policies will help today in searching the opportunities to intensify the demographic policy and enhance its effectiveness, at both the federal and regional levels.

Review Essays The Ambivalence of Agency: Women, Families, and Social Policy in France, Britain, and the United States1 Molly Ladd-Taylor. Mother-Work, Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 18901930 . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. χ + 211 pp. Susan Pedersen. Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State, Britain and France 1914-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xv + 478. Seth Koven In 1906, Josephine Conger-Kaneko published an essay in World's Work exploring how "the dominant influence of women" in charity and welfare , education, and culture contributed to "The 'Effeminization' of the United States." "Feminine rule in America" made the U.S. a more democratic country, she conceded. But it also promoted a "less coherent" and less centralized state compared to its European counterparts, one handicapped by extreme "individuatism" and the influence of pubtic opinion whose variabüity reflected the "fickleness of femininity." Far from extolling the achievement of American women, she ended on a note of caution: American men were being consumed and emasculated by their singleminded pursuit of business. American society was "weak" and "unstable ," "a soul without a body." The very strength of American women's social movements, she suggested, was a paradoxical liability in women's pursuit of emancipation because it lent urgency to the mobilization of thefr opponents.2 Conger-Kaneko's quirky essay underscores the connections between issues that historians have begun to explore: the growing power and influence of women in pubtic life in the early twentieth century, the links between gender relations and the state, and the ways in which some women and many more men were alarmed by the prospect of "feminine rule." Her arguments echoed widely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as many asked themselves what would be the impact of women's emancipatory movements on relations between the sexes, fam- üy life, citizenship, social politics, and motherhood. Molly Ladd-Taylor's Mother-Work, Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 and Susan Pedersen's Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State, Britain and France 1914-1945 intelligently explore these issues. They assess the historical relationship of feminism and maternal- © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. ι (Spring) 1997 Review Essay: Seth Koven 165 ism in relationship to the emergence of social welfare programs and policies for children and farrtilies. Ladd-Taylor's work focuses on women's contributions to the provision of welfare for mothers and children through private benevolence, public programs for maternal education, and state-level schemes of mothers' pensions. She probes differences among women activists and analyzes their triumphs as weU as failures in shaping social poticies according to their own tights. Pedersen, by contrast , places family policy within a much broader comparative framework , encompassing detailed but lucid analysis of an astonishingly wide range of factors that affected social poticy: the gendered character of the labor market and wage structures; the influence of trade unionism , socialism and women's movements; the shifting goals and imperatives of parliamentary politics and state bureaucracies; relations between the state and large-scale industry; and the interplay of competing rhetorics and cultural representations of masculinity and motherliness with policy-making. By so doing, Pedersen not only explains the divergent paths of the French and British welfare states but boldly charts the intersecting histories of state and gender formation in modern France and Britain. Recovering women's agency in welfare state formation is fraught with ambivalence for both Ladd-Taylor and Pedersen. On the one hand, they demonstrate that many women developed complex and compassionate visions of their own roles and that of the state in caring for families , mothers, and chüdren that remain cogent today. On the other hand, they demonstrate the ways in which some women's acceptance of prevailing ideas about work, motherhood and manliness, and race and class relations helped to undermine their own emancipatory ambitions. LaddTaylor shows how some white middle-class women exercised their authority as experts in mothercraft and child weUare to promote unabashedly racist and class-based norms of family life and weUare. Mothers' pensions, widely implemented on the state level, provided new employment opportunities for educated middle-class white women...

Reviewed by: Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century by Mary McAvoy Paige A. McGinley REHEARSING REVOLUTIONS: THE LABOR DRAMA EXPERIMENT AND RADICAL ACTIVISM IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY. By Mary McAvoy. Studies in Theatre History and Culture series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019; pp. 266. For decades, a politically and pedagogically innovative theatrical form flourished in the United States, although far from any urban center. Thousands of actors, writers, and designers participated, although few had any training to speak of. Numerous plays, skits, scenes, and musical numbers were written, but many of these scripts and scores are now lost. Mary McAvoy’s detailed and thoughtful study, Rehearsing Revolutions, offers both an accounting and a careful assessment of the work of labor drama as it was practiced in labor colleges (adult-education institutions designed to help build the labor movement) around the country during the interwar period. All too often this theatrical tradition has fallen through the cracks, but McAvoy’s timely and important book is a bulwark against forgetting. As she underscores, makers of labor drama often emphasized process over product; whether or not the staged works demonstrated aesthetic “merit” was beside the point. McAvoy is careful to distinguish this understudied labor drama from the “adjacent” and more robustly analyzed workers’ theatre of the same period, emphasizing the “production-oriented” quality of the latter (3). As a pedagogical activity popularized in workers’ education institutions during the interwar period, labor drama invited workers to stage the social and economic problems they faced in their lives, generating a shared sense of struggle and an opportunity for problem-solving and collective action. Courses and recreational activities in dramatics functioned alternately as entertainment, community-building exercises, political training ground, and mode of knowledge production. McAvoy adeptly demonstrates the evolution of labor drama from its union-building functions in the Progressive era to its “radically politicized projects” of the 1930s (ibid.). In its careful delineation of these transformations, Rehearsing Revolutions argues against painting all of interwar drama with one broad brush, showing how the relationships among art, activism, pedagogy, and politics were made and remade during a consequential period. Another important implication of McAvoy’s research is one for the field: labor dramatics’ cultivation of embodied knowledge (an approach informed by John Dewey’s theories of art and experiential education) prefigures the framing of “performance” as both object and method. Following an orienting first chapter, McAvoy dedicates each subsequent chapter to the practice of labor drama at a single institution for workers’ education and along the way trains the reader’s attention on key figures and innovators of the form. Chapter 2 looks at labor drama’s beginnings under the leadership of Doris Smith at Portland Labor College. Brookwood Labor College, the focus of chapter 3, was the most prominent labor college of its time, thanks in part to its geographic location just outside of New York City. Labor drama there was led by Hazel MacKaye, who was the daughter of actor-director-impresario Steele MacKaye and who, McAvoy demonstrates, had a remarkable career as a theatre artist and suffrage activist. McAvoy next makes a regional shift, turning her attention to labor dramatics in Southern workers’ education programs, including Hollace Ransdell’s curriculum at the women’s Southern Summer School (chapter 4), Zilphia Horton at the Highlander Folk School (chapter 5), and Lee Hays at Commonwealth College (chapter 6). Because white supremacist fears of interracial contact and of communist influence were mutually reinforcing, surveillance of workers’ education in these Southern institutions was enhanced. How enthusiastically could dramatics advance a radical agenda before attracting negative attention from the conservative AFL or from the FBI? These were not hypothetical questions: both Highlander and Commonwealth were targeted by local community members as well as by FBI investigations that temporarily shuttered the former and permanently closed the latter. This intimidation continues: in March 2019, the main building of the Highlander Center (reconstituted in a new site after the original school’s 1957 closure) was destroyed by fire, with a white power symbol found amid the rubble. The fact that most of these programs thrived under woman leaders is, McAvoy...

This paper explores the implications of Foucault's perspective of liberal government for approaches to the practical history of anthropology. It also draws on assemblage theory to consider the changing relations between field, museum and university in relation to a range of early twentieth-century anthropological practices. These focus mainly on the development of the Boasian paradigm in the USA during the inter-war years and on the anthropological practices clustered around the Musée de l'Homme in the 1930s. Key steps in the argument focus on the role of what Foucault called “transactional realities” in mediating the practical applications of anthropology in colonial contexts and in “anthropology at home” projects. Special consideration is also given to the increasingly archival properties of anthropological collections in the early twentieth century and the consequences of this for anthropology's relations to practices of governing.

This volume includes papers presented at a conference dealing with population policy perspectives in developing countries and held during December 1981. The conference theme was to incorporate the important aspects of population related matters from the aspect of governmental policy and community participation and to suggest a course of action for the future. The conference focused on population policy perspectives relating to socioeconomic systems and population policy; fertility influencing policies; mortality influencing policies; and migration influencing policies. The papers in the 1st section discuss some of the problems arising from disparities in population trends social structure and policy implications. The common issue is the need for a policy for integrated development with population policy forming a part of such an integrated development policy. The following were among the issues emerging from the social economic and ecological systems analysis: the causal mechanism relating development efforts with motivation to regulate fertility as percevied at the individual level is viewed as a necessary link in the interrelations between development and population policy makers must recognize that in a heterogeneous society this level of motivation is concomitantly and synergistically raised in response to a variety of development policies and it is no longer considered adequate or useful to say that general development reduces fertility. The 2nd group of papers point out that there has been a desire on the part of most governments of the developing countries to reduce the present levels of population growth. Family planning programs are implemented more vigorously and monitored more closely. The 3rd group of papers covered 2 studies based on sample surveys. The paper Fertility Differentials Among Migrants and Nonmigrants in Bombay found that the migrants wives had significantly higher fertility than nonmigrant wives. The other paper examined the impact of social structure on fertility of a small fishing community. The following were among the common issues arising from the papers on mortality influencing policies: there has been a spectacular reduction in general mortality levels in this region but the levels are still high as reflected in the expectation of life; and progress in the reduction of mortality has slowed down in some populous countries like India in the past few years. The control of human reproduction has become accepted as legitimate for public and private agency policy and programming national and international assistance in controlling fertility has increased. There is comparable awareness of the problems generated by the population explosion urbanization and its attendant growth but there are no comparable policies and programs to deal with the problems stemming from rapid urbanization migration and maldistribution of population.