Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

378 Jean Bourgeois-Pichat
rate, the fluctuations of the latter also have their influence on the economy.
Something resembling a perpetual series of oscillations could even result,
economy and fertility rate varying indefinitely, changes in the one giving rise to
variations in the other. A whole new behavioural science lies here ready to be
created in which sociology, political economy and demography should help
each other.
IV. DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH AND HUMAN ECOLOGY
74. In order to exercise his functions as a consumer and producer, and to pre-
pare himself for the same, to start a family, have children, make arrangements
for his old age, and finally, die, man settles down in his outer environment
through a process of mutual adaptation, modifying the environment and at the
same time accepting certain aspects of it. Human ecology is the study of these
relations between man and his environment.
Migrations
75. We have already referred to the importance of migratory movements, and
they traditionally form part of demographic research. The researcher aims at
getting to know their scope, direction and motivation, but these aims, it must
be admitted, have remained very far ahead of the results so far achieved. We can
learn a lot from population censuses about the distribution of population in a
given territory and the growth of the various localities, but they tell us nothing
about the inner dynamics of such movements. All these localities appear to be
the scene of powerful going and comingmovements. Annual intake and exit rates
of around 40 per 1,000 are by no means uncommon, and the positive or negative
balance of 4 to 5 per 1,000 revealed by the census seems to leave out of account
the essential aspect of the matter. From the point of view of the inhabitants of a
locality, there is not much difference between a situation in which the arrival
rate is 40 per 1,000 and the departure rate 30 per 1,000 and the reverse situation:
arrival rate 30 per 1,000 and departure rate 40 per 1,000. In each case the local-
ity witnesses the departure of an important section of its inhabitants and has to
extend a welcome to about the same number of new arrivals. One can hardly
believe that the newcomers take the place of the leavers.
In fact, such movements are invariably accompanied by changes in the
demographic, economic, social and cultural structure, and if a town with a
surplus of leavers has a little less difficulty in absorbing arrivals than has one with
a surplus of arrivals, the two problems do not differ essentially. What can be
described as the ‘floating population’, composed of those who decided to go and
of those who came to stay, represents just about the same number in each case.
The importance of such going and coming movements is obvious. That new
science concerned with ‘the organization of the territory’ (aminagement du
territoire) requires that we should know about them if we want to be able to
channel them. Research in this connexion has been begun in a good many
places. The processing of data collected by population censuses with the aid of