Abstract
Bourdieu's theories and relevant conceptualizations in analyzing social and cultural phenomena and literary works were formulated based on his close attention to the transformation of the rural society. Such perspective distinguishes him from Zimmer, Benjamin and Adorno, whose aesthetics and literary theories were formed through their engagement with the transformation of modern urban society and industrial civilization. “Habitus” is the most important concept in Bourdieu's analysis of the characteristics of action in the literary and artistic fields, and is used to interpret how the revolutionary actions of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Manet and other pioneers of modernist artistic revolution took place. From a historical and generative perspective, the concept of “habitus” was first proposed in Bourdieu's early rural sociological studies of the social transformation in the 1950s and 1960s, which was concerned with the process of peasants' cultural adaptation to urban settlement in Algeria as well as the growing number of single men in rural areas affected by urbanization in Béarn, France. The term “system of dispositions,” which was used to explain the concept of “habitus” in rural social research in the 1960s, repeatedly appeared in Bourdieu's 19992000 lectures on Manet at the Collège de France. It was employed to emphasize the proactive nature of the actor and their transformative impact on the field.
Keywords
habitus, system of dispositions, temporality, rural sociology
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Zongshuai. 2024. "The Historical Genesis and Transformation of Bourdieu's Concept of “Habitus”: A Rural Sociological Perspective." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 44, (1). https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol44/iss1/20
