A new way to understand urban-rural relations: Habitus studies of rural places

Abstract

“Taken for-granted divisions of geographic space (such as centre and periphery) must be viewed according to Bourdieu, as the effect of distance in social space, i.e. the unequal distribution of the different kinds of capital in geographical space” – as Reed-Danahay, D. (2020, 17) puts it in their book about the spatial aspect of Pierre Bourdieu’s action theory. Field, social space, capital, disposition, and habitus are all essential components of Bourdieu’s theory, but what about places? This paper focuses on the importance of geographical space, place and scales in a habitus analysis and tries to show the possibilities the concept of habitus can offer in spatial studies. While research on the relationship between Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and spatiality is becoming increasingly popular (Berger, V. 2018; Németh, K. 2020; Reed-Danahay, D. 2020), still few scholars (e.g. Máté, É. et al. 2022) undertake place-based habitus analyses. The present paper aims to provide an overview of the international academic discourse on place-based (in this case mainly rural) habitus analysis. Considering a dozen empirical studies from different perspectives and in different geographical areas, I focus on the specificities of habitus analysis in rural places. After briefly introducing the concept of habitus and its critiques, I will describe the characteristics of habitus studies in rural places by presenting various views. Then, I will show how the relationship between rural and urban habitus studies suggests that habitus does indeed contribute to the persistence of urban-rural structures.