Wellington's Polish Community: A Phenomenological Approach to a Study of Culture Contact

Abstract

When persons change their place of residence from one community to another, from a rural to a metropolitan area, from one city or town to another, or from one country to another they find themselves in a new environment to which they must adjust if they wish to be, or continue to be, happy and efficient individuals. An individual's life, even excluding changes of residence is a series of adjustments: to the physical environment and climatic fluctuations of his habitat; to the processes of growth and maturation; to familial changes of birth death and other separations, marriage, and sometimes divorce; to the fulfilling or thwarting of vocational needs or desires; to changes of status and accompanying changes of roles: and to the changes in social organisation of his community and nation. Persons are sometimes unable to make these adjustments satisfactorily. As evidence we have delinquency, crime, and insanity and the network of social welfare agencies, courts, and mental and penal institutions through which we attempt to deal with them. The problems of adjustment necessitated by persons changing their residence must be dealt with simultaneously with these other adjustments which human existence demands. Problems incidental to changing residence cannot be considered as additional to other problems of adjustment, but rather as interrelated with and complicated by them. For immigrants, the general problems incidental to changing place of residence are those of social mobility- vertical, from one social class to another, and horizontal, from one culture to another.