massey, what i don’t know about my field but wish i did

8/10/2019 Massey, What I Dont Know About My Field but Wish I Did

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What I Don't Know about My Field but Wish I DidAuthor(s): Douglas S. MasseySource: Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26 (2000), pp. 699-701Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/223464.

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Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2000. 26:699-701

Copyright

?

2000

by

AnnualReviews. All

rights

reserved

WHAT

I DON'T KNOWABOUTMY FIELD

BUTWISH

I DID

Douglas

S.

Massey

Department

of

Sociology,

University of Pennsylvania,

Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania

19104

As a young college student n the early 1970s, I was veryindecisive. I hadalways

been attracted o academia

but,

having

come of

age during

he

1960s,

I

was deter-

mined

to

do

something

relevant with

my

life.

Earning

a decent

living

was the

last

thing

on

my

mind. Like most of

my contemporaries,

assumed that

a

good

job

with a

high salary

was a

birthright.My duty

was to find a

higher calling.

The search or moral ulfillment

brought

me first o

medicine,

the

most

obvious

of

relevant

rofessions.

As a

premed

student took a full load of courses

n

math,

chemistry,biology, anatomy,

and

physics.

But

I

really

hated

premed

students,

who

were

generally

self-serving, competitive,

and

arrogant.

Who

wants

to be like

that?

Although

I had

already

completed

a

chemistry

minor,

I

gave up

the idea of

helping

people

through

medicine andturned

decisively away

from the natural ciences.

My

search for relevance

brought

me next to the

social sciences.

I

began

in

psychology,

to which I

was attracted

by

its

elegant

experimentaldesigns,

com-

plex

theoretical

models,

and

rigorous

statistical

analyses.

Although

I

eventually

completed

a

psychology major

and took most of the

courses needed for a master's

degree,

running

rats

through

mazes

in

a

laboratory

ost its allure and I

once

again

began looking

for

something

more relevant.

My

search

led me then to

anthropology.

After an

early

fascinationwith

phys-

ical

anthropology

and hominid

evolution,

I

became

intriguedby

the

concept

of

culturalrelativismandeagerlyreadethnography fterethnography f nonwestern

cultures.

Eventually,

however,

I

suffered anothercrisis of faith. If

all

judgments

were

culturally

relative,

and all cultures

were

equally

valid,

then

the

possibility

of

knowing anything

at all

seemed to

disappear

before

my

eyes

as a

solipsism.

I

retreated

back into the

study

of

Spanish

literature,

where

professors

made no

pretense

of

offering

cumulative

knowledge.

At

least

I

could

indulge

my

love of the

language by

reading my

way through

he

new

genre

of

magical

realism that

was

then

taking

Latin

America

by

storm.

Suddenly

I

found

myself

in

my

fourth

year

of

undergraduate

tudies

having

completed

three

majors

and a

chemistry

minor,

but still

having

no clear idea of

who I was or what I wantedto do in life. At thismoment,I stumbledupon demog-

raphy,

which

to

my

mind

combined

the

rigor

of

psychology

with the relevanceof

0360-0572/00/0815-0699$14.00

699

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3/4

700 MASSEY

anthropology,

while

offering

some

hope

of

intellectual

advance.

I thus

resolved

to

become a

demographer,

nd toward hat end

began takingevery sociology

course

I could find.Eventually stayedonfortwo extraquarterso boneupontheoryand

methods,

to steel

myself

for what

I

imagined

to be

my

dim

prospects

for success

in

graduate

chool.

The

rest,

as

they say,

is

history:

I went

on to finish a

PhD in

sociology

at

Princeton,

where

I

was trained

in classical

demographic

methods but

actually

worked

in the heterodox

fields

(for

Princeton)

of

migration

and human

ecology.

This is a

long-winded

way

of

coming

to what

I

don't

know about

my

field

but

wish

that

I

did.

Although

my

various intellectual

ourneys

have

given

me a

relatively

broad

ntellectual

ormation,

nonetheless

ind

myself

wishing

I had a

better

grasp

of

human

beings

as

biological

organisms.

Indeed,I have come to the reluctant onclusionthatsociologists havegone too

far

in

privileging

he

social over the

biological,

a fact thathaunts

me now

as

I

try

to

comprehend

he

signal

event that has occurred

n

my

own fields

of

migration

and

human

ecology:

the

urbanization f the human

population.

The urban ndustrialism

in the

nineteenth

century

ulled

sociologists

into the false

belief that

society

could

be

understood

by studying

social structures

alone,

without

considering

human

beings

as

organisms

with

biological

traitsand

predispositions.

Although

we don't

like to admit

it,

we

are

primates

who

share

99%

of our

genetic

endowment

with

chimpanzees.

Humansemergedfrom the savannahsof East Africa

7 million

years ago.

In

adapting

o this

niche,

we evolved as

upright,

ool-using

hominids

who survived

through

collective

strategies

implementedby

small

groups.

Over

the

course

of

millions of

years,

the

reptilian

brain

governing

our instinctual

and emotional

re-

sponses

was

supplemented

with

a newer

and thicker

mass of cerebral

cortex.

The

expansion

of

brain

size

enabled

the

perfection

of collective

strategies

of survival

involving

language,

culture,

and

technology.

These innovations

ultimately

ed

to

larger

and more

complex

forms of social

organization,

but 99.9%

of

human ex-

perience

has nonetheless

transpired

n the

hunting

and

gathering

state.

Thus,

the

delicate

balance

between

the rational

and emotional

brain,

which

largely

defines

us as humanbeings, must be oriented oward he needsof smallgroupsurvival.

It was

only

about

six thousand

years

ago

that

we settled down

as a

species

and

began

farming,

hus

enabling

the first

semi-permanent

uman

habitations.

t was

only

about

three thousand

years

ago

that

our

technology

advanced

sufficiently

o

allow

some

of

these settlements

o become

cities;

and

t was

only

in

the last

century

that our

capabilities

matured

o the

point

where

a

majority

of us

can

now

live in

cities.

In

evolutionary

erms,

our

experience

n urban

settings

has occurred

n

the

blink

of an

eye.

It

is

clear,

however,

that

early

in

the

next

century

the

human

population

will

finally

and

decisively

urbanize.

All

demographic

projections

how

that

for the first

time in

history

a

majority

of the world's human

beings

will soon live in cities,

and

increasingly

n

large

ones

at that.

The

social

world

to

which

we have

adapted

over

millions

of

years

will

recede

into

memory

and cease

to exist. Small

bands



4/4

FUTUREOFDEMOGRAPHY

701

of huntersand

gatherers, arger

nomadic

tribes,

isolated rural

villages,

and small

semi-independent

owns-all will

ultimately

disappear.

In

the next

century,

the

modal humanexperiencewill be one of intense concentrations f people,with all

their

vices and virtues.

A

central

question

is

how

we,

as a

biological species

adapted

o life in small

groups,

will fare in

this new environment.The

beginning

point

in

coming

to terms

with our situationmust be the realization

hatwe are indeed

biological organisms.

I

and other

sociologists

thus

need to

understand etter he fundamentals f

human

physiology

and

psychology

at both the

systemic

and molecular evels. We need

to educate ourselves

in

the

exciting

work now

being

done on brain

functioning,

cognition,

the

regulation

of

emotion,

and the

biological

bases of behavior.We

need

to

give

up

our historical

resistence to the idea that

social behaviorhas

biological

roots andacceptthe fact thatwe, as humanbeings,haveinheritedcertainpredis-

positions

to

thought

and behavior hat

nfluenceand

constrain he social

structures

thatwe

unconsciously

evolve and

rationally

elect. At

this

point,

therefore,

really

wish I

knew more about

human

beings

as

biological

rather han

social

organisms,

and

I

have

begun reading

to catch

up.

Visit the

Annual Reviews

home

page

at

www.AnnualReviews.org


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