Book Review

Canada and the United States

The occasional mourning of the decline of the influence of sociology voiced by some of its practitioners in recent years serves as a reminder of the prominence and dominance of the Chicago School of Sociology in its heyday early in the twentieth century. Unabated scholarly interest in the Chicago School, especially its ideological and intellectual impact, has generated numerous studies. Henry Yu has given us another study of this important historical subject. While members of the Chicago School highly valued empiricism and strove to develop sociological research methodology, it is their ideas about race and race relations that represent their most important legacy, ideologically and intellectually speaking. Trying to comprehend the trajectory of those ideas in broader historical settings, Yu's book focuses on exploring the role that Robert Park and his fellow Chicago sociologists played in defining Orientals and formulating American Orientalism. It is a provocative, ambitious, and theoretically insightful intellectual history of theories about race and culture in twentieth-century America.

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Yu's discussions of the Chicago sociologists are centered on his analysis of the Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast in the 1920s. Conducted by a team of sociologists, headed by Park, who were recruited and assisted by Christian missionaries, the survey revealed the two groups' shared interest in America's "Oriental problem." Together, Yu argues, "they created a body of theories about the differences between Oriental and Occidental" (p. 20). A central argument that emerges out of his thorough critique of the sociologists' thinking about race and culture is that physical differences matter. In developing that critique, he devotes considerable space to assessing their fundamental theory, that is, race is tied to cultural consciousness, "not to biological differences between human bodies." "In the end, however, these cultural differences were often associated with the foreign origins of certain human bodies" (p. 47), he notes.

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