Strange Families

Katrina Q. Wang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Families are strange. Across distance and delay, transnational kin remain bound to one another while becoming partially unknown. In Simmel’s terms, they occupy the position of the stranger within intimacy itself. I argue that moral reprimand serves as a central mechanism through which families govern this condition. Letters operate as interactional sites where uncertainty is converted into enforceable moral claims and where hierarchy is reproduced across absence. 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 identify patterned combinations of accounting, piety, shaming, and conditional promises. These communicative moves render distant kin governable. Transnational families persist through the continual moral management of relational strangeness.

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 Presented in Session 52. Migration Affects