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

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. Keywords: epistolariumlettersself and societyW. I. ThomasFlorian ZnanieckiThe Polish Peasant in Europe and America Notes 1. CitationFairchild's (524) review commented that 'this work is unique', while CitationFaris (816) on the new edition suggested that it was 'a strong competitor for the position of the most valuable contribution to American sociological literature'. 2. Pragmatism was concerned with the practical consequences of action and so the primacy of social practice, and promoted the non-reification of theories and concepts for investigating this, which should instead be empirically grounded. 3. In part modelled on Toynbee Hall, but more radical, less religious and more women-friendly, Hull House was concurrently a settlement, a place for research and a locus of intellectual and reforming activity; see CitationDeegan. 4. Mead and Thomas both lectured at Hull House, were close to Jane Addams and generally supported its women members; see CitationDeegan 118–120. 5. Blumer's main criticisms were: the letters were not analysed inductively; the meanings of the letters come from the introductions and footnotes rather than being self-evident; 'the letters do not meet the methodological requirements' and also did not meet 'the rigid application of scientific canons' regarding their representativeness, adequacy, reliability and validity, although taken as a whole and given their diverse origins they had considerable consistency (CitationBlumer Critiques 35–37). 6. Indicatively, when Blumer's report and the conference proceedings were published in 1939, the focus moved from The Polish Peasant onto Blumer's critique; thus in the Allport and Gottschalk et al. reports, The Polish Peasant is viewed through this lens, while in 1979 it was Blumer's critique which was re-published in a series of 'social science classics' and not The Polish Peasant itself. 7. For an interesting contemporary commentary, see CitationMoore. 8. For its publishing history, see Bulmer 238. 9. This was probably a political strike against Thomas and his then wife Helen Park, because of their friendship with Jane Addams and involvement with Hull House and pacifist activities. Addams, a key figure in US pacifism around World War One, was seen as tantamount to a traitor; Park's and Thomas' 'bohemian' marriage was also frowned upon. 10. Thomas and Znaniecki comment about a daughter and son of the Osinski family doing this for their mother Wiktorya (427), for instance. 11. As some commentators in the 1938 conference proceedings noted, Blumer's measures of scientific rigour were more stringently required of The Polish Peasant than was usually so of sociological research. 12. Consequently I am not proposing that Thomas should replace Mead as 'the leading figure', but emphasising the multi-appearance of these ideas.