Personal Being and the Human Context of Leisure (original) (raw)
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Controversial Reflections on the Theme "Leisure": from Free Time to Lifestyle
Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research, 2010
Controversial Reflections on the Theme "Leisure": from Free Time to LifestyleToday there is more of a dialectical approach to the meanings of leisure. In earlier times there was more of a consensus or similar understanding of one's free time. The purpose of this paper is to explain today's various meanings of leisure. We discuss the meaning of time and space and its relation to leisure. In addition we have focused on a discussion of free time, work and not work, as well as one's lifestyle. In particular we will introduce the ideas of Dumazedier. In summary we concur with other authors, especially Dumazedier, that leisure is more than free time: it is best understand as a way of life, as a lifestyle.
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A paradigm shift to working to protect the leisure of people in later life from the machinery of growth and consumption is needed. Recognition of the rational instrumental drivers behind active ageing is overdue, research in this area could be about enhancing quality of life, instead it focuses on how to make lives cost less. This book offers a modest development in Leisure Constraints Theory, developing understanding of the interaction of interpersonal and structural constraints in later leisure lives, thus troubling ideas of separate levels of constraints. The Mass Observation Archive offers additional voices for the study of leisure in the context of everyday life. It supported this study of later life leisure to see beyond the noisy concepts of death and disability and ‘age induced constraints’ that direct much leisure in later life research.
5-CONCEPTIONS of Leisure : A Historical Approach on Societies
2013
Introduction Leisure has been the focus of countless studies on contemporary society. This is due mostly to the strong correlation among leisure activities and quality of life and the social development of individuals. Although it is impossible to precisely foresee the starting point of concerning about leisure activities, it is known that those have accompanied man ever since the beginning of humankind. Although leisure has been the focus of studies in different areas, it should be studied from the precept that man is a biophysicosocial being, and his biological, psychological and sociological characteristics cannot be dissociated. An investigation concerning leisure can reveal several characteristics that show the social and cultural context of a society. Eventually leisure is conceived as a synonym of free time, nevertheless, such proposition is not true. Leisure activities are practiced during free time, but free time is not completely fulfilled with activities characterized as ...
Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory
1999
Leisure studies is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be shaken to get it working once again, and if that does not do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its gears, springs, sprockets and levers cleaned, oiled, and its 'movement'the clock's condition embodied in its 'tick-tock' soundmade to run in an even balanced beat. Unlike clockmenders, scholars overhaul subject fields by leaving parts behind that after decades of use have become unnecessary to their workings, replacing these with new ones. They cannot afford to be sentimental when it comes to replacing old parts; if getting the clock back 'in beat' is the objective, then it is best to replace what no longer works. This gives us the impression that things in our subject field change while ostensibly remaining the sameeven if this is not really the case. Just over two decades ago, Chris Rojek published Decentring Leisure, the fruit of his attempt to overhaul leisure studies. This book changed our understanding of leisure forever. Like clockmending, it is a study that draws parallels with deconstructionism. This term is derived from the work of Jacques Derrida, a philosopher with a uniquely sharpened ability for remedying subject fields that have lost their beat. If the job of the clock-mender is to disassemble the 'movement' in a clock, work on it, and then put it all back together again, the job of deconstructionism is to disassemble and reassemble subject fields; that is, take them apart, to not only demonstrate how they are necessarily contingent to time and place, but also to reveal the gaps and absences they render unintelligible. Deconstructionism works with the assumption that all subject fields contain hidden and unexpected meanings, which often signify points of resistance. In this regard its central aim is to show how subject fields do not come up to scratch under their own terms of reference. A successful deconstruction not only changes a subject field, but it also conceives new ways of seeing. Rojek's study is a deconstruction of leisure studies in the sense that not only does it call for a critique of taken for granted assumptions made about leisure, but it also prompts changes in our perceptions about the potential and the limits of leisure studies. Leisure studies after Decentring Leisure was supposed to be business as usual and a return to normality but in reality it was just the opposite. It is the norm in leisure studies to adapt Tolstoy's famous sentence about families and say that good books tend to be good in the same ways. Certainly, if you encounter something that is radically different you are liable to suspect, and perhaps to go on suspecting, that it is different because it is not good. Tolstoy also wrote that the greatest threat to life is habit. Habit, he argued, destroys everything around us. By familiarizing us to the point that we no longer really see anymore, habit destroys our critical faculties. In his important book Thinking Sociologically (1990) the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that the cure for habit is defamiliarization. In opening up leisure studies to new and previously unanticipated possibilities Decentring Leisure restores leisure studies for us, by remedying the blindness, so that we come to see what it is that is important about leisure in the contemporary world. In so doing it brings the furniture of the critical imagination back into focus. The idea of 'decentring' leisure not only assumes that leisure studies is a discursive formation that exists independently of individual leisure scholars, but also that it should go about its day-today business by undermining the significance of its own unifying centre
Exploring the Concept of Leisure and Its Impacts on Quality of Life
The purpose of this study is to express the concept and components of leisure so that people can have clear idea of its meaning. A well adaptation to leisure-centred life could help individuals experience good life. It has been espoused that what is done in free hours has great effects on the growth and development of individuals and by extension, the nation. Leisure has been viewed in various ways by different authors. It is viewed in relation to time, activity, play, state of mind and work. Having a clear idea of what leisure stands for is very germane. This is because the meaning one gives to leisure may affects the individual's choice of discretionary activities.
Leisure as a Category of Culture, Philosophy and Recreation
Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research, 2010
Leisure as a Category of Culture, Philosophy and RecreationWhen we look at the very origins of human world, civilization in its history and prehistory, we can trace strong evidence of the archaic presence of leisure in human life. It seems striking and meaningful that in fact all that is human streams out from leisure. Leisure occurs to be an arch-human phenomenon. This paper addresses this multidimensional cultural presence and the sense and value of leisure conceived as a source of civilization, symbolic thought, social institutions, habits and practices. The cultural primordiality of leisure is evident when we take into consideration an aboriginal release from total preoccupation with only impulsive and instinctual survival activities that took place in the era of Homo habilis some 2 millions years ago. It is obvious that free time was a great achievement of these evolutionary forms of human beings when we reflect upon the earliest seeds of consciousness expressed in primitive pe...
Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure – Meanings, Motives and Lifelong Learning [Book Review]
Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 2014
Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure proposes that we are entering into a new phase of leisure, brought about by the social, cultural and technological changes taking place in modern societies. While the editors acknowledge that change has always existed, they call out the pace of change and the manner in which leisure is consumed as key differentiators from the past. The book examines the key debates in leisure centered on three themes: meanings, motives and lifelong learnings. In doing so, Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure seeks to better understand the relationship between leisure and the individual, and the ways in which people look at and make sense of the world around them. A surprisingly moving experience, the book will resonate with those who have engaged in leisure experiences which have left them wanting something more, the exact nature of which they are unsure.
Leisure, identities and personal growth
Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure: Meanings, Motives and Lifelong Learning, 2013
""Leisure studies have a long history of associating leisure practices and the meanings of leisure with notions of personal growth and self-development. This association is bound up with questions of personal identity and relies on the possibility that we have a stable personal self that we can develop. The prospect of a stable personal self is a distinguishing feature of modernity, and there is now substantial literature from a postmodern perspective suggesting that identities are instead fragmented and transitory. This raises a fundamental tension. If identities are transitory, how can we develop them? And what are the repercussions of this for personal growth through leisure practices? These questions have important implications for the meanings of leisure. In this chapter I attempt to unpack some of these issues. I begin by discussing personal identities in the context of modernity, drawing out how the challenge of developing a coherent sense of personal identity became a defining feature of the late modern period in the Western world. The discussion leads us to how leisure is implicated in modern developmental approaches to self, particularly through concepts such as ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins 1982) and ‘flow experience’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). My focus then turns to a divergent postmodern perspective that argues that there is no core self and we instead exist in a world characterized by increasingly fragmented identities. A postmodern perspective argues that the concept of a stable personal identity that we might develop has been a historical social construction. Such a view has little time for notions of personal growth through leisure. I then turn to how the social sciences have begun to see a middle ground between postmodern ‘discourse determinism’ (Wearing & Wearing 2001) on the one hand and an essentialized notion of self on the other. Such a view allows for a re-examination of how we might attempt building a reflective sense of personal identity out of embodied everyday practice. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how positive experiences of leisure, rather than necessarily being viewed as disparate or episodic, may instead constitute a lifestyle in which the accumulation of personally enriching leisure practices engenders perceptions of self-development and growth. It is through this perspective that there may be some reconciliation of modern and postmodern stances on personal identity and scope for assigning value to the importance of subjective lived experience.""