Introduction to the Science of SociologyPark, Robert Ezra
General
Introduction to the Science of Sociology
Park, Robert Ezra
Sociology
Far from it; for Saxony is its culminating center; and Saxony, as we
know, is really half-Slavic at heart, as is also eastern Prussia.
Suicide should be most frequent in Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover, if
racial causes were appreciably operative. The argument, in fact, falls
to pieces of its own weight, as Durkheim has shown. His conclusion is
thus stated:
"If the Germans are more addicted to suicide, it is not because of the
blood in their veins, but of the civilization in which they have been
raised."
A summary view of the class of social phenomena seemingly characteristic
of the distinct races in France, if we extend our field of vision to
cover all Europe, suggests an explanation for the curious coincidences
and parallelisms noted above, which is the exact opposite of the racial
one.
Our theory, then, is this: that most of the social phenomena we have
noted as peculiar to the areas occupied by the Alpine type are the
necessary outcome, not of racial proclivities but rather of the
geographical and social isolation characteristic of the habitat of this
race. The ethnic type is still pure for the very same reason that social
phenomena are primitive. Wooden ploughs pointed with stone, blood
revenge, an undiminished birth-rate, and relative purity of physical
type are all alike derivatives from a common cause, isolation, directly
physical and coincidently social. We discover, primarily, an influence
of environment where others perceive phenomena of ethnic inheritance.
4. Natural versus Vicinal Location in National Development[115]
In contradistinction to continental and intercontinental location,
anthropogeography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term.
The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal
food-quest and increase of numbers, leads a people to spread out over a
territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet
the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their
specific geographic location is thus defined by natural features of
mountain, desert, and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to
displace, or more often by both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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