Ethnic intermarriage as a reflection of ethnic residential mixing

Abstract

It may seem unexpected to find a geographer writing on the topic of ethnic segregation and ethnic intermarriage for a symposium of the Biosocial Society. Social geographers have, in fact, been actively working on ecological models of urban structure since the 1960s, but the development of this field dates back to the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s and 1930s. Geographers have become interested in both the spatial organization of society and in the social organization of space. Geographers have measured the ways in which social attitudes of groups manifest themselves in their residential choices of neighbourhood: groups which perceive themselves as socially distant from others are also spatially segregated from such groups. Residential location in neighbourhoods also affects the interactions between individuals in a fairly mechanical way. This field of social geography overlaps the spatial or ecological side of sociology so that practitioners of both schools often have more in common with each other than they have with others working in the fields from which they have evolved.