Polish Political Refugees in Norway: Between the Established and the Outsiders

Abstract

The model of established and outsiders proposed by Norbert Elias is a useful analytical tool for comparing and contrasting different types of habitus. In this paper, I apply this model in a 2010-11 study based on twenty in-depth biographical interviews with Polish Solidarity refugees in Norway who left Poland as a result of the Martial Law of 1981. In this qualitative, biographical research we managed to initiate extensive narratives on the imagery of the immigrant group. The key notion of my analysis is the “moral circle”, an expression used by one of the interviewees in order to describe the differences in the scope and intensity of personal relations in Poland and Norway, as well as the standard of self-control applicable inside and outside it. My aim in this paper is to expand Elias’ perspective by discussing the role which social imagination and cultural differences may play in the dynamics of relations between established and outsiders.