Echoes of Leisure: Questions, Challenges, and Potentials

Abstract

Gregorian calendars, love of linear and progressive forms, Christian beliefs, and fascination with 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 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 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 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 (using a standard, dominant, and historically traditional definition of leisure) in the United States. The metaphor of melting pot resonates with leisure research methodologies that render individuals without historical, cultural, racial, gender, and sexual orientation attributes. Revolving around a powerful, solitary individual, leisure education, from this perspective, may undermine or harm individuals who interact with the world as collective, multiple, and interconnected (Dieser, 1997; Fox & van Dyck, 1997; Perogoy & Dieser, 1997). We may oppose cruel and oppressive labor conditions or child labor, but willingly buy the latest recreation equipment manufactured abroad at cheaper prices. The former does not totally explain the latter, but neither are they entirely unrelated. As leisure scholars and practitioners construct specific frameworks to interpret the world and create a leisure niche (i.e., take an action, make our way in the world), ripples of good, harm, and exclusion emanate across space and time. Action always has effects that were never intended and which, once begun, cannot be undone (we can respond to the effects of what we have done, but not undo them altogether) (Orlie, 1997, p. 18). The lack of control and prediction is an integral part of a complex and interconnected world where the effects and meaning of leisure depend upon the actions of others; there is simply no way to avoid creating harm in the universe. No practice, including leisure, is free of power and its effects. So, leisure is surrounded by invisible forces related to ontological and epistemological beliefs, commitments to specific leisure delivery systems, societal norms, and contextual among others. …