Week 2 – Leisure, culture and civilization
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.892.8624&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Culture is the set of values that shapes the behavior of the society at different levels while civilization
is apparent in the physical development in form of man-made environment. Culture is the mind of
society and civilization is the body.
Purrington and Hickerson (2013) Leisure as cross-
cultural concept
Leisure is a term that is used when an individual acquires free time and spend this on several
activities that is not classified as work. Emotions associated with leisure are happiness,
energized, joy and pleasure. Although, leisure is commonly known everywhere, not all
countries use the English term for it but have their own words.
Moreover, the most common conceptualization defines that leisure is:
Free time
Specific set of activities
A state of mind
Experience
Also, it is important to distinguish between the perspective of the participants and the
research community also known as emic (participants) and etic (research community). Both
perspectives are important to study since an emic point of view sees how individuals are
embedded in the culture and an etic point of view understands the perspective from concepts
and techniques that are applicable across cultures.
Previous definitions of leisure contained three elements: free time (temporal), activity
(behavioural) and experience (mental). Free time has long served as the main definition, but
this is not complete since it characterises leisure time only after work and as necessities.
Besides, leisure activity can have a different meaning per culture and country. For example,
hunting. It is modus of survival for some countries and for other countries it is leisure. Culture
is in important in this way since in each culture the leisure activities are different. However,
economic activities are also important to take into account in leisure. Tasks that are
important:
Domestic tasks (transporting fuel, processing food, cooking, and caring for children)
Population dynamics (demography).
Political organisation, law enforcement, family structure, education practices.
There are two key characteristics: leisure being behavioural phenomenon and leisure
separate from tasks related to survival. A good definition is that leisure is behaviour that
differs from culture-specific behaviours closely related to immediate survival and other
practical necessities of life.
A cross-culturally applicable definition of leisure is critical to advancing both the methods
used to conduct research and the theories explaining leisure. Failure to fully conceptualise
and articulate a definition results in inconsistencies across studies that hinder the
,comparability or reliability of such research. As a result, it is potentially difficult to assess
whether leisure patterns differ across cultures, or across time in a single culture, due to the
use of different leisure definitions.
Leisure studies have benefited from many traditional disciplines such as sociology,
psychology, economics, philosophy and history. But the contribution of anthropology has
been minimal so far. This might be because leisure is studied via the Western phenomenon
and anthropology is focused traditionally on non-Western phenomenon.
Chick (1998) Leisure and Culture: Issues for an
Anthropology of Leisure
Also, human cultures also have both instrumental-utilitarian aspects and expressive aspects.
The instrumental-utilitarian aspects are:
- Economic systems
- Political systems
- Kinship systems (kinship means the web of social relationships that form an important
part of the lives of all humans in all societies).
Expressive aspects are: (can be divided into arts and entertainment).
- How people express themselves
- Emotions
- Beliefs
- Feelings
- Pleasure
Anthropologists have spent much more time traditionally on the study of instrumental than on
the expressive parts. And when they have examined the expressive side, they focused much
more on the arts than on the forms of entertainment. Although, recently leisure researchers
have discovered the worth of the anthropology perspective in leisure studies since there is an
increasing concern for multi-culturalism in the world, desire to preserve cultural diversity and
that people in the non-Western parts also experience leisure.
Also, the position of production and reproduction form the foundation of culture and is now
generally known as cultural materialism.
There are four traditional subfields in American anthropology (each of these fields could
make a contribution to leisure):
- Biological anthropology
- Archaeology (can make a contribution to the descriptive study of leisure and
recreation among both elites and commoners.
- Anthropological linguistics
- Culture anthropology
The outcome of this experiment was that most languages have their own word for leisure and
do not use the word “leisure”. But the concept of leisure was understood by the participants
of this experiment.
Domain-of-experience principle is when words are explained and defined with models to
other languages, they eventually will understand even though they do not have an exact
word for this word in their own language.
,In the 1930’s there was a theory by Franz Boas, the surplus theory asserted that cultural
development, especially in terms of technological evolution, resulted in a surplus of food,
population and leisure, all of which resulted from the replacement of food collection by food
production.
Lecture Week 2 (LLTE) – Leisure, Culture and Civilization
By Jochem Jansen
You can see leisure as an activity as itself, as an experience, state of mind, time away from
obligation. Sorts of angles to look at this.
Sociology/Anthropology. Trying to understand if it is more culture or civilization,
Sociology what makes us human. Study of social life, social change, development,
interaction and behaviour of organised groups of human beings.
Anthropology study of humans, past and present. Cross-cultural difference in there.
Different civilizations. How people have developed their communication styles. What makes
us human?
Civilization is a culture writ large (civilization it is a large theme than culture). It is bigger than
culture. Culture is the mind and civilization is the body. Culture represents what we are (as a
group of a subculture, we belong to this group) and civilization represents what we have
(various groups, heritage, what we have and a bit more tangible).
Culture is:
Education.
Communication
Values
Knowledge
Co-working
Wisdom
Experience
Religion
Culture is the set of knowledge, experience and behaviours which is commonly
shared by a group of people (culture is the way people think, act and interact)
High culture and low culture.
High culture (leisure of the elite, upper classes) encompasses the cultural products
of aesthetic value, which a society collectively esteem as art.
Low culture forms of popular culture that have mass appeal. Of the less-educated
social classes.
Leisure helps us shape who we are as human beings. Culture is all the stuff out of which
all leisure experiences are made.
Civilization looking at the bigger picture, writing systems, collective literature, different
cultures all together. There is definitely overlap on a large scale. Many different cultures as
the Western civilization. They have an overlap that is why they belong to one group of
civilization. Civilization provides identity to those who belong to it. Geographical connections
or connected to a certain time frame. Historical memory. Consistency upon the members and
cohesion.
, Language has a big difference on the words culture and civilization. Cilivité was the French
word and Kultur for the Germans. These words have certain feelings and words can change.
They have different meanings. Colonization and imperialism have an impact on how it is
understood. Some groups thought they were better and force their culture on the natives. A
class between civilizations to understand how civilization is researched. Western
civilization is better than the rest.
It is all about the different perspectives the civilizations has. A French man attacking a
Chinese is civilization and the other way around is Barbarian. Some cultures understand it
different.
Coca-Cola everywhere and consumerism is everywhere. Western civilization have a big
influence on the rest of the part of the world. Leisure choice was central to the strategy of
cultural convergence. Americans tried to outgrow Russia, a one model system of civilization.
Russia was a more collective type of thinking.
Outside influence has a huge impact and some cultures have disappeared. Need to combine
these high elements of culture. Culture is mixing since they do not like everything of the other
culture. Certain sports did spread but they mixed with the cultures, they did not disappear.
Globalization and cultural hybridization raise new doubts about the meaningfulness of
cultural isolation. New challenges social media. Every language does understand leisure
and culture differently.
Conclusion it is both culture and civilization and are both important for leisure.
Professional responsibility, to be reflexive. Remember who you are and what is your
understanding. What the impact is.
Week 3 – Social class & Lifestyle
An Introduction to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, chapter
1
by Harker, Mahar & Wilkes
The generative structuralism that Bourdieu describes is designed to understand both the
origin of social structures and the “dispositions of the habitus of the agents who live within
these structures”, meaning the socially inherent habits, skills and dispositions shared by
people with similar backgrounds.
Bourdieu strives to “break” with the economism that is presented by the Marxism, which
reduces the social field to the economic field only. The economism presented in Marxism
means that social classes are only formed by their position in the economy. Secondly,
Bourdieu tries to break with the objectivism of Marxism, which tends to ignore the symbolic
struggles within the social world (such as Ross’s PhD ). Bourdieu defines the “symbolic” as
that which is material but is not being recognized as such. Examples are dress sense, a
good accent and style. It is seen as a disguised form of physical economic capital, and which
value is given to it gives it the symbolic meaning.
