Author(s)

Ningning Zhang

School of Social Development, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China.

Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and through field interviews, this paper extracts the daily spoken language of the left-behind elderly in the two places and analyzes the differences of left-behind causes in the central and eastern regions. Habituation means that the old people are already familiar with the production mode, life style and communication mode, and find their own class position in the mechanism of continuous operation. Old people from both places consider they stay in their homeland voluntarily, but there are some differences between them. The east is more like the bonds of nostalgia, while the middle is more like a realistic compromise.

Left-Behind Elderly, Reasons for Staying behind, Habituation

Zhang, N. (2019) Analysis of the Reasons for the Left-Behind of the Elderly in Central and Eastern China. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 7, 275-286. doi: 10.4236/jss.2019.78019.