Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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Movement, Migration and Orientalism At the Institute of Pacific Relations' first meeting in Hawaii, Roderick McKenzie presented his initial findings from research conducted during the Survey of Race Relations. As he continued to study "Orientals" in the United States in the next few years, he produced a series of papers which indicated that the sociologists were ready to talk about more than just the place of Asians in America; they were ready to define the relationship of 'Orientals' and 'Occidentals' worldwide. Roderick McKenzie was enamoured of the modern world and its capacity for migration and contact. “Life differs from death in the matter of movement,” McKenzie wrote, “And the scope of life is defined by the facilities used for overcoming distance.” 45 Movement and change were the great constants in his study of sociology, in particular their expression in space: the history of a location had to be tied to its changing spatial relations with other places. McKenzie might look at the history of a city, for instance, by considering how the ‘time-distance’ of transportation technologies connecting it to other cities had changed. Seattle may have been eighty days away from Hong Kong by clipper in 1849, but only twenty-one days by steamer in 1880. This might be contrasted with the fact that at the same times, Seattle had been nearly one-hundred-twenty days by wagon train away from the East Coast in 1849 and fourteen by train in 1880. McKenzie elaborated his conceptions of the global interconnections between places and regions in a series of articles dealing with ‘spatial distance,’ and his great accomplishment was to outline the dynamic relationship between structural relationships and change brought about by movement and 45 From “Movement and the Ability to Live,” Proceedings of Institute of International Relations, 1926. Reprinted in Roderick McKenzie, On Human Ecology: Selected Writings, edited by Amos Hawley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 134. 32
communication. 46 Like Park, McKenzie was enthralled by the ability to move and to conquer distance which modernity had unleashed upon the world, and he saw it as the genie which had allowed world dominance by Western societies. “The secret of environmental control lies in the ability to conquer distance,” he wrote, and it was the West, particularly the United States, which had conquered distance the best. The great difference between the East and the West at the present time is in the matter of movement. In comparison with the West, the East is sluggish, stagnant, immobile. Although Asia possesses over half the world’s population, nevertheless, she has less than nine per cent of the world’s motor cars, less than three per cent of the world’s telephone instruments, and sends about one per cent per year of the world’s telegraph messages. 47 McKenzie’s musings upon the differences between East and West were common among the Chicago sociologists, and they often made large scale generalizations about the Orient and the Occident. Fifteen years earlier, William I. Thomas had held a forum in the American Journal of Sociology on “The Significance of the Orient for the Occident,” and his conclusions still structured the way many of the Chicago social scientists saw the 46 “Spatial Distance and Community Organization Pattern,” Social Forces 5 (June 1927):623-638; “The Concept of Dominance and World-Organization,” American Journal of Sociology 33 (July 1927):28-42; “Spatial Distance,” Sociology and Social Research 13 (July 1929):536-544. All reprinted in Hawley’s edition of McKenzie’s writings, On Human Ecology, cited above. 47 “Movement and the Ability to Live,” 135. 33
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