ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the strategies that the Polish gentry historically developed that allowed the group to persist and reconstitute themselves in a hostile political environment, deprived of their former means of existence. The Polish gentry were variously described as a social economic class, a group, or a stratum. The book discusses the gentry's system of dispositions, their socialized tendencies what Bourdieu termed habitus as revealed through the ways in which they managed their transformation and found a new niche. It explores the strategies by which members of the nobility reconverted their inherited symbolic capital into active economic or cultural capital. Conscious of the hazards of working with memory artifacts and narratives, the book entails moving between two highly subjective sources: the bias inherent in personal histories woven into a collective master story, and the revolutionary rhetoric of impersonal documents.
