'Intelligentsia' as an ethnic habitus: The inculcation and restructuring of intelligentsia among Russian Jews

This study employs Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' as an analytical tool to reveal how the notion of 'intelligentsia' is inculcated, transposed and generative during socialisation, and becomes a constitutive force in Russian Jews' personal and collective identity. This analysis is based on the reading of life histories narrated by 43 Russian Jewish university students who have been living in Israel since the 1990s. The findings reveal four distinct socialisation practices employed by the Russian Jewish family in inculcating a notion of belonging to the intelligentsia, and how this notion was restructured in adolescence in Jewish informal Jrameworks that became widespread during Perestroika. The study corroborates Bourdieu's thesis about the formative force of early socialisation and verifies the transposal quality of habitus-its ability to adjust to major biographical and social-historical changes. The discussion proposes that considering both kinds of change sheds light on the dynamics of habitus in socialisation.