Habitus do make the monk: Olinda seminary at a pre-council crossroads in the 1950s – a draft of a case study

Abstract

One of the aims of the present article is a self-analysis, with a complement of research sources, of an experience which was lived in the 1950s in the old Olinda Seminary. Such sociological self-analysis (as a memory study) is at a merely instrumental level, as long as the main objective of the article is to place the institution “seminary” in the historical-cultural context of the 1950s as a transitional period, both economical and cultural, not only in Brazil, in terms of industrialization and urbanism, but also in the post-war era in a broader sense. The article evidences three cultural traces in the tridentine seminary which express an opposition/differentiation in relation to the external world: the cultivation of silence, the cultivation of Latin and the cultivation of the existential isolation through celibacy. Such traces are analyzed especially in relation to the concept of the Bordieu habitus, as shapers of the social person.