| The life and works of the renowned bunjin poet-painter, Yosa Buson, have long been an object of study by both academic scholars and non-academic intellectuals. Most traditional biographers view Buson, the author, as the principle source of his work without taking into consideration any other possible mediating factors of literary and artistic production. Based on their naive belief that Buson's works directly reflect the historical Buson's desires and feelings, they construct a consistent but erroneous image of Buson as bunjin from his literary works and paintings. The image presents Buson as if he resided solely in an aesthetic realm, relatively unconnected to the exigencies of his own time.; Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social Practice provides an effective tool for overcoming the deficiencies of such subjective and reductive approach. According to Bourdieu, social space includes various fields of struggle. For example, a literary field is constituted of institutions, social relations and socially constituted individuals called agents, and groups of individuals with shared values and beliefs. The literary field is positioned within the field of power, and agents within the literary field struggle for position-takings, competing for the capital to maintain or to enhance their current position. Agents' positions within the field are determined by their access to economic, cultural, symbolic and social capital.; My research on the literary field of eighteenth-century Japan based on the application of Bourdieu's model has demonstrated that the bunjin subfield occupied positions that were semi-autonomous or totally autonomous from the forces of the market in Bourdieu's terms, and that Buson practiced within the bunjin subfield. My analysis of the diversified social aspects of Buson's life and works from a broader socio-historical perspective contributes to demystifying Buson's romanticized image as bunjin who worked only for aesthetic purposes, and helps us to understand that Buson's two-fold practice as a bunjin poet-painter was socio-historically constituted. |
