Collective Defense Mechanisms in the Polish Peasant Families

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 6. Migration Experiences I

Abstract

How do families govern obligation and authority when physical co-presence is impossible? Historically, migration created conditions in which family members were separated by long distance and correspondence was slow and irregular. I argue that, to maintain trust in transnational families, communications between members are organized through collective defense mechanisms (CDMs) that emerge in micro-level interactions. Defense moves are defined as signals of cooperation under uncertainty. Leveraging a newly coded epistolary dataset of 472 letters across 27 family correspondence series in the early twentieth century from "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America," I analyze how family members deploy patterned combinations of accounting, piety, shaming, and conditional promises to manage distance. Letters operate as interactional sites where uncertainty is converted into enforceable moral claims and where hierarchy is reproduced across absence. By reconceptualizing correspondence as an interactional field, this study reframes transnational family life as an ongoing process of moral regulation. It contributes to sociological theory by showing how authority is stabilized not despite distance, but through it.

Author

• Katrina Wang, University of Wisconsin-Madison