What enables villager participation in rural amenity tourism? Habitus adaptation in post-productivist transition

Post-productivist transition (PPT) in rural China is well-documented at the structural level, but its micro-level mechanisms remain undertheorized, especially the limited participation of indigenous villagers in amenity provision. This paper addresses that gap by arguing that habitus adaptation is the micro-level mechanism that determines both whether villagers participate in the commercial opportunities PPT creates and how fully they benefit from doing so. Drawing on eight years of ethnographic fieldwork (2016–2024) and interviews with 124 respondents in Gaoshan, a Yao village in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, we develop a two-level analytical framework. At the first level, field legitimacy and capital profile explain who participates and who does not. At the second, differential depths of habitus adaptation across three practice domains explain variation in participation quality. Adaptation depth is governed by field-side conditions (field legitimacy and legibility) and actor-side conditions (capital profile and field exposure), which together determine the quality and sustainability of participation. The paper provides the first longitudinal, individual-level account of how habitus adaptation unfolds across a village population navigating PPT in tourism.