Not Just a Wave, but Part of the Ocean: Examining My Small Town Roots

It was two months before my fifth birthday when my parents, brother, and I moved from our rented home in Quincy, Massachusetts, to our very own house on Cape Cod. The small town of Chatham became my new home and would remain my home for the next sixteen years. Now that I have learned what it is, I guess one could say this is where my sociological imagination really first began to take flight. In his book, The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills describes the sociological imagination as a "capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self--and to see the relations between the two"(350). The sociological imagination is what allows us to see ourselves and our own lives in relation to everyone else and the world around us. When most people think of Cape Cod they think of lighthouses, beaches, and beautiful summer homes. This is all very true, yet the Cape is not just a summer vacation for me. A human-made canal separates my hometown from the rest of Massachusetts and you need to first cross over a bridge and then drive approximately forty-five more minutes before reaching Chatham, the elbow of the Cape. Chatham's population in 2004 was 6,860 (www.mass.gov/cc/chatham.html); this survey was taken in July, however, which includes summertime residents. The median age of Chatham residents is 53.9 and the residents are composed of whites (95.3%), blacks (1.8%), hispanics (1%), and other populations (0.9%) (www.city-data.com). Reading this data made me realize more than ever how different the town is from other parts of the country. I didn't think of it at the time, but the excerpt from the film, The Matrix, can really be applied to my life. In the film, Neo and the rest of the humans are living life while wearing blinders. According to phenomenological sociology, we must study and gain knowledge of the world from the eyes of the active participants, us. In the film, Neo and the others can only view the world with the stock of knowledge they have been provided with. Stock of knowledge is one of Alfred Schutz's concepts and in the text it is described as, " ... social recipes of conceptions of appropriate behavior that enable them to think of the world as made up of 'types' of things like books, cars, houses, clothing, and so on" (Wallace & Wolf, 2006, 264). The "them" in this definition are people or individuals. Neo's stock of knowledge is limited to what the Matrix provides, much like my own stock of knowledge being limited to what my small town could provide. Chatham is often depicted as a wonderful, safe place to raise a family or simply spend an enchanting few weeks or months when visiting in the spring or summer. It is a small village on the water with virtually no crime rate. The loud, fast paced movement of urban areas is only experienced to a small degree when tourists arrive. Somewhat macrosociologically speaking, this sheds some light on how well the structure and function of the town must work. Functionalism tends to look at the institutions of society and how they all relate to each other, as well as depend upon one other in the larger social context. When I was still in elementary school I could ride my bike to school without the accompaniment of an adult. There was no such thing as crime, and every person in the town was a friend and neighbor. If a new business wanted to move in, it had to be approved by the town. The social institutions, such as town government, churches, police, and schools all worked together to keep the town functioning properly. The functioning of the town was also made a lot easier by its shear size. In a sense, everyone knew each other. I was, and still am, Jennie Porter, JP, or simply Porter, according to which friends you ask. I lived on a street that included chop houses (associated with the low-income families), near the Dugan's, Dunne's, and Logan's. From the time my family moved there I was integrated into the specific social order of Chatham's society, an integration process in modern society Emile Durkheim wrote about in his work (Wallace & Wolf, 20). …