PERVASIVE MUSLIM-HINDU FERTILITY DIFFERENCES IN INDIA*

A primary sociological insight is that group membership and social position are primary determinants of individual behavior. Nevertheless, in demography, and in sociology more generally, the past decade and a half has witnessed a growing dissatisfaction with broad categories that were the mainstay of traditional social demography, "black boxes" such as country, race, religion, class, and gender (see Hammel 1990). As a result, researchers have directed increased attention to understanding the processes that lie behind these static categories and their changing or stable effects (see, e.g., Szreter, Sholkamy, and Dharmalingam 2004). To do so, much social demography has moved to local studies of particular sites where these processes can be observed in their richness (i.e., "on the ground"). More geographically focused studies have frequently allowed for an appealing "thick description" of the impacts of social structure and the influence of powerful but distant forces on local communities (e.g., Axinn, Fricke, and Thornton 1991; Watkins 2000).