To the letter: Thomas and Znaniecki'sThe Polish Peasantand writing a life, sociologically

Abstract

Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America emphasises the importance of people representing their own lives, in written autobiographical life histories and more particularly in letter-writing and correspondences. Some of the canonical and disciplining processes that led to this book ‘disappearing’ from the key texts of sociology are outlined. However, the emphasis is on Thomas and Znaniecki's conceptualisation of the self around ideas about ‘social becoming’ as revealed by the relational and sequential nature of writing, over time, in letters and correspondences. Life writing, and in particular epistolarity, is central to their project, because the new ways in which people represent themselves and their lives in circumstances of social change and mass migration provide an index to the times and so make available in representational form what ‘self’ is and becomes under such conditions. Thomas and Znaniecki's notion of self is not inner-reflecting, but rather a socially-embedded, relational, situational and temporally-located self which reflects on the outer world of happenings and situations so as to re-engage with these. For them, it is less that people ‘construct a self’, in the sense of self-making, and more that a self is constructed and eventuates in situational, relational and responsive ways, with the representational forms of life writing providing the key to analysing this.

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