Transnational Practices and Integration Materialized: Polish Transnational Migration and the World of Goods

The paper addresses the historical and class-contingent processes of transnationalism and integration mediated through material culture. I see the world of goods as a means to uncover the daily, potentially cosmopolitan, practices through which migrants (re)create the ties to their places of origin and destination and contribute to the transnationalization and cosmopolitanization of the subjectivity of the people with whom they interact: the Finnish “natives” and those who stayed behind. The analysis is based on my multi-sited ethnography conducted across Poland and Finland.
KEY WORDS: transnationalism, integration, material culture, Polish migration, Finland