A Hundred Years of Sociology by G.Duncan Mitchell

Author:G.Duncan Mitchell [Mitchell, G.Duncan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351535052
Google: NCMxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T04:33:27+00:00

The Polish Peasant

This massive study, which tends to be neglected today, is one of the most impressive pieces of sociological investigation ever carried out. The authors were obviously interested in a practical problem, namely the settlement of Polish immigrants in the United States. And it must be remembered that there were very large numbers emigrating from Poland to the U.S.A.; indeed, at one time the Polish community in Chicago was the third largest in the world, the others being Warsaw and Lodz. Yet practical problems were not in the forefront of their minds, for they explicitly say that sociology oriented primarily to social problems will fail to achieve anything worth-while.2 They are exponents of a theoretical discipline, their aim is to describe and explain, although they were well aware that adequate explanation provides the basis for remedial action.

Thomas and Znaniecki start out with some views about the nature of sociological enquiry. They argue that it is possible either to consider the individual's dependence on the culture of his society and the social organisation it manifests, or to consider the manner in which the culture and social organisation depend on the individual, or to consider both. They prefer this last approach for they say they are able to look at the objective cultural elements of social life, what they call for short social values, and also examine the subjective characteristics of members of the society, which they denote as the attitudes, both of these being correlated. Here then was one of the earliest attempts to carry out what amounts to a cultural anthropological study and relate it to the psychology of the people whose culture it is. They argue persuasively that whilst interested in certain social problems which occur both in Poland and in America, but which are exacerbated in the latter among the Polish immigrants, it is first necessary to make a study of the whole social system giving rise to these problems. Their analysis, therefore, was of Polish peasant society in Poland, in which they noted the changes that were taking place early in the present century, where necessary tracing them back and relating them to Polish history; and then they proceeded to examine the situation among Polish families and communities in the United States. The method they adopted was for the most part to examine documentary evidence in the form of letters written by Poles to their relatives in the United States and letters sent back to families and sometimes to others, such as the village priest. They made much use of one life-history, given in great detail, and also of court records in Poland. The wealth of data is most impressive, and so is the way it has been used.

It is not possible to do justice to the substantive findings in so short a span as this. It must suffice to say that they give a detailed analysis of the social values of the Polish peasant, his family structure and the normative order bearing upon his life.

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