our mobile world

My first research interest was how health can be affected by moving from one country and culture to another. I got seriously interested in this when I was a family doctor in Adelaide in the late 1950s, and saw many patients who came from cultural backgrounds very different from mine. Among the scientific domains I became acquainted with at that time was demography, including its offshoot, social demography. I suppose that includes cultural demography, although I don't recall seeing this identified as a distinct discipline. Nonetheless, many published works under the librarians' rubric of social demography deal with the influence of cultural factors like language,customs, traditions, religious beliefs, on health and illness. My brother recently described the peregrinations of a family he calls Cossacks -- a word that to me means ethnic Slavs in the region of the lower Dnieper and Don Rivers that embraces parts of modern Ukraine, Poland and Russia. The one to two million Canadians with this heritage describe themselves as Ukrainian. I don't recall ever hearing one confess to being Cossack - the Cossacks were the brutal, bullying oppressors who rode horses, used whips and swords to suppress the aspirations of the first generation of Ukrainian Canadians who migrated to Canada to escape persecution akin to the pogroms to which Jews were subjected. Ukrainian Canadians were technically citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and often spoke German as a second or third language, so a great many of them were interned as enemy aliens in Canada in the Great War of 1914-1918. Then many more Ukrainians came to Canada after the ascendancy of the Bolsheviks and the formation of the Soviet Union. I haven't seen recent census data but last time I looked there were about 1.5 million Canadians who identified their heritage as Ukrainian. Most are Eastern Orthodox Christians, some are Mennonites, some are Jews. My Ukrainian Canadian friends use the word 'Cossack' pejoratively, sometimes with a shudder, recalling familial memories of rape, murder, slaughter of precious cattle, burning of villages, in stories transmitted by their grandparents. Canada is populated by many ethnic and cultural groups such as Ukrainians, Armenians, Lebanese, Bosnians, Chileans, Bangladeshis, Palestinians, Sikhs, Tamils, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Somalis, Afghanis, and many others. Happily, they all or almost all have shed their fears and hatreds and get along with other ethnic groups that once were their bitterest enemies. The restless, turbulent movements continue. Canada is a fruitful population laboratory. I'd like sometimes to be starting my research career, not ending it, so I could devote another professional lifetime to studying and answering some of the important questions raised by these turbulent movements. In the world of the early 21st century, this mass movement of people about the world continues at an unprecedented pace, raising many questions for research workers in sociology, demography, epidemiology,national and international security, economics, and much else. A good reason for wishing my research career was just beginning, not fizzling out, would be to find the answers to some of these questions.