Sixteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper uses a sociological approach to consider three short stories written by Georgios Vizyenos in the end of the 19th century. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, this paper aims to explore how Vizyenos made use of elements of folklore in order that his autobiographic stories represent the social and cultural environment of the place he was born and raised: Vizye, a village near Constantinople in the late 19th century, inhabited mostly by Greek Orthodox people under the Ottoman Empire. Influenced by his studies in Psychology in Germany, Vizyenos attempted to make psychographs of himself, his family, and friends, converting their lived experiences into narrations, in which health, disease, and death are predominant features. Following the literature review, a thematic analysis of these three texts was conducted, focusing on these three special issues while specific thematic categories as religious practises, popular medicine, and superstitious beliefs were being traced. The conclusions refer to the way this cultural capital, linked to a specific habitus, affected the way of thinking and acting of the writer-narrator himself and his characters and to the formulation of his narrative techniques in a way that they would render this specific effect of the habitus.