MeST talk by Tyler Zoanni

The Obscure Object of Population: Notes from an Aging, Shrinking Island

Much critical social science scholarship on population politics assumes that populations are all made up, and readily so. Thinking historically and ethnographically about Mauritius, this talk explores some ways that populations often prove obscure, elusive, and unstable. It centers two quite different, but related moments: efforts to control explosive population growth in mid-twentieth century Mauritius and contemporary anxieties about the island nation-state’s shrinking and aging population. The upshot is a call to reconsider how scholars, policymakers, and activists tend to think and act in relation to something self-evidently called “population.”

Tyler Zoanni is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bremen. http://zoanni.com/