Consuming Leisure not so Leisurely: Political Economy of Leisure and Desire (original) (raw)
Related papers
Leisure/Loisir, 2021
Recent calls for papers in numerous academic journals within leisure studies have focused on a global and nation-specific climate that leans towards autocratic policy development, fascist rhetoric as the norm, and a greater expansion of a neoliberal philosophy. A critical leisure approach critiques leisure studies and leisure research for what the construction of leisure is in its origin and in its function. The aim of this discussion is to present counter, critical narratives to leisure studies. Two hundred and ninety-two texts that focused on the ‘critical’ in leisure were read and analyzed through critical discourse analysis and political discourse analysis. The analysis resulted in a historiography that articulates four key alternative or counter traditions: Critical Leisure Studies; New Leisure; Post-Leisure Studies; and Anti-Leisure, which could aid leisure studies into taking on a role as a ‘new’ cultural studies.
Liminality of women's leisure in Mumbai, India
This paper theorizes the transformative potential of women's night-time leisure in Mumbai's urban areas. To this end, I draw on instances from qualitative field-based research focused on Mumbai's call centers and surrounding areas of informal urban activity. For women working night shifts in this sector, leisure activities occur with the help of informal vendors who run food stalls on streets around call centers. These times and space of leisure, I argue, disrupt capitalist and caste-based patriarchal systems. I analyze such leisure as a "limen" (cf. Lugones, 2003), a form of liminality that disrupts systems of production and reproduction that constitute the everyday (cf. Lefebvre, 1991). I elaborate on the temporal attributes of the limen to show how it goes against the grain of "efficiency" that otherwise shapes women's routines. The fluid spatial nature of women's night-time leisure helps rework dichotomous understandings of the public and private realm, demonstrating possibilities for intimate interactions within the public domain. The limen and intimate interactions therein often occur between food vendors and women working night shifts, revealing an intersubjective dynamic that ephemerally disrupts societal hierarchies. As such, the limen reworks and challenges existing structures, and in doing so, holds significance for envisioning a politics of change.
In this article I draw on a wide range of studies including my own field research to provide a bird’s-eye perspective of the various points of connection, confluence and overlap between Hindu pilgrimage and domestic tourism in contemporary India. This serves three aims. First, it presents an overview of the contemporary scene in India which lends itself to comparison. Second, it illustrates the ways in which a pilgrimage tradition can be explored via tourism, as opposed to something contrasted with tourism. Thus, I hope to demonstrate the many potential research avenues beyond asking who is a pilgrim and who is a tourist. Third, it seeks to locate lacunas for future research. I suggest four entry points into tourism that can each serve as departures for studying the contemporary nexus between a pilgrimage tradition and tourism: tourism as (1) a service industry, (2) a sector that motivates states and public bodies to act, (3) a travel culture and (4) a negotiated category, part of public discourses and imaginations. The article demonstrates the variety of ways in which Hindu pilgrimage becomes evermore entangled with domestic tourism, and the potential for new research angles this entanglement generates. Hinduism, Hindu pilgrimage, India, pilgrimage and tourism
The Concept of Leisure as Culture-dependent–Between Tradition and Modernity
Journal of Cultural and Religious Studies, 2014
The article deals with the concept of leisure in Israel in terms of time, activity, state of mind, and Jewish values. The purpose of the study is to examine changes in how leisure is conceived in Judaism and the differences in the secular and religious conception of leisure, and the special relationship between leisure, work, and religious obligations and tradition. The study reviews the factors that have shaped the conception of leisure and its developments over time in Jewish religious society in general and in Israel in particular, which is a country with cultural foundations in both tradition and modernity, and one that strives to strike a balance between its multiple commitments to its religious roots and its modern democratic nature. The study proceeds to discuss the implications of such conceptions and developments for the Israeli education system. The article may have practical implications for imparting leisure behaviors, an educational challenge involving people's attitude to leisure.
The multiplex in India: a cultural economy of urban leisure
2010
During the decade of its existence in India, the multiplex cinema has been very much a sign of the times – both a symptom and a symbol of new social values. Indicative of a consistent push to create a ‘globalised’ consuming middle class and a new urban environment, multiplex theatres have thus become key sites in the long-running struggle over cultural legitimacy and the right to public space in Indian cities. This book provides the reader with a comprehensive account of the new leisure infrastructure arising at the intersection between contemporary trends in cultural practice and the spatial politics that are reshaping the cities of India. Exploring the significance, and convergence, of economic liberalisation, urban redevelopment and the media explosion in India, the book demonstrates an innovative approach towards the cultural and political economy of leisure in a complex and rapidly-changing society. Key arguments are supported by up-to-date and substantive field research in several major metros and second tier cities across India. Accordingly, this book employs analytical frameworks from Media and Cultural Studies, and from Urban Geography and Development Studies in a wide-ranging examination of the multiplex phenomenon. "This is a pioneering attempt to situate the multiplex not merely as a space of film exhibition, but a space that becomes the arbiter of cultural economy and aesthetic evaluations. Locating it within the larger debates on changing Indian cities, the authors establish how the closed dialectical relationship between the space and those who inhabit it becomes a key negotiation between self and the legitimate other... This extraordinary book must be read widely and acknowledged for its courage to argue against the aesthetic subversion of many publics, their cities, and their film-exhibition spaces by the multiplex." - Akshaya Kumar; Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2012
Becoming Political: An Expanding Role for Critical Leisure Studies
This article explores the intersection of politics and leisure, pointing to the fact that power has always been present in leisure activities, settings, practices, and institutions. In noting some of the past contributions of leisure scholarship, it also highlights a need for increasingly political leisure research, where knowledge production, epistemologies, and methodologies help unpack multiple critical leisures. Using engagements with Foucauldian biopolitics, political ecology, and radical political thought, this article sets the stage for the eight manuscripts that engage with critical components of political dimensions of leisure. In light of the pressing catastrophes of our time, we contend that scholars and educators can and should be engaged in building a more critically diverse and intellectually productive academy.
Echoes of Leisure: Questions, Challenges, and Potentials
Journal of Leisure Research, 2000
Gregorian calendars, love of linear and progressive forms, Christian beliefs, and fascination with "new" beginnings all intermix to form the concept of millenium. Calendars emerging from Tibetan, Islamic, Hawaiian, Mayan, and other traditions mark no day of celebration or sorrow for January 1, 2000 (and whether this is the first day of the new millenium is still contested). Without conscious attention to the plurality of calendars, concepts of time, historical events, and holidays, it is tempting to view the millenium as an "inevitable given," a reality, a natural occurrence. As any good leisure scholar understands, the millenium provides a wonderful excuse for celebration, contemplation, and play. However, thoughtful attention to plurality, opens new possibilities and engenders other concerns and questions. How do we, in both large and small ways, render invisible other views while celebrating one, albeit dominant, perspective? How do we become accountable for validating and giving support to a single interpretation of reality? Can leisure become focused on fulfillment and re-figuring social bodies/ minds/ souls? Can leisure become inevitably tied to notions of collaborative interpretations rather than predominant and increasingly individual, subjective conscience? I am particularly concerned about creating ethical, meaningful leisure in a paradoxical world of plurality and commonality. How do we, as leisure scholars and practitioners, connected to, or reinforcing, dominant structures and processes, maintain and honor the presence, values, and critiques of alternative perspectives? What leisure praxis will enable "games of truth and power" to be practiced with minimal domination and maximal freedom? How can we transfigure our relationship to powers and knowledges that render us calculable and entangled in harm to others? Seemingly innocent millenium celebrations provide resonance with profound conflicts related to power, dominant structures, and alternative perspectives of leisure. The definitions, parameters, and actions related to leisure are constructed and molded by invisible forces related to cultural dynamics, power relations, collective processes, and societal frameworks. It is no accident, therefore, that freedom and individual perspectives and behaviour are essential features of leisure praxis
2018
319-70974-1 "[...] so it becomes necessary to show him [Émile] what man really is. Society must be studied through men and men through society. Men must not be shown through their masks, but must be painted just as they are, to the end that the young may not hate them, but pity them and avoid resembling them. Let him know that man is naturally good, but that society depraves him; let him be induced to esteem the individual, but to despise the masses; let him see that nearly all men wear the same mask, but let him also know that there are faces more beautiful than the mask covers them".-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: Or, Treatise on Education (1762). p. 346 This magnificent edited textbook highlights the outstanding papers presented at the Research Committee Thirteen (Sociology of Leisure, RC 13) sessions at the International Sociological Association's Third Forum of Sociology which took place in Vienna in 2016. The aim of this academic work is to demonstrate the relevant nature of the discipline of leisure studies and the entire maturity of its theories in local, virtual and global environment (Beniwal et al. 2018). Most of the authors are aware of the philosophical approach and are situated somewhere within this parameter that is to say "[d]rawing on Habermasian theory of communicative action, Spracklen (2009) argues that leisure has the potential to promote democratic, horizontal exchange based on communicative rationality rather than instrumental rationality" (Tanaka and Ishida 2018, p. 214). In that regard, the struggle for a better world in a global era is always influenced by small actions in order to achieve harmony in daily life and certainly calls for the practice of tolerance and for the sharing of values between individuals who are personcentered.
Leisure corrupted: an artist's portrait of leisure in a changing society
Leisure Studies, 1993
Theoretical arguments that leisure is the basis of any culture are available. Yet, scarcity in the literature of serious consideration of leisure in non-Western societies demonstrates that the topic has been neglected. One possible explanation for the failure to achieve progress in cultural comparisons of leisure is the lack of data. At least three approaches permit this type of comparison. This paper focuses on a literary approach by investigating how East Africa's most prominent creative writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, treats leisure in his most important English language novels. This analysis centers on two of his novels, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood. The two novels are complex, intricate stories drawing heavily on Western philosophy and literature as well as African folklore. Although Ngugi suggests that leisure is the foundation of civilization, the fibre that makes the cloth of society, he portrays leisure distinctively in social terms likely to surprise those familiar with Western traditions of leisure.