Leisure in China. Problems of Defining the Invisible: an Attempt to See Beyond the Mirror of One's Cultural Assumptions

Abstract

Abstract Leisure in China seems interwoven in the texture of everyday life. When I asked a class to find an English proverb they found incomprehensible, the first to be proposed was “No rest for the wicked”. The notion of guilt gathering like silt on the soul which only labour can shake off was totally alien. Can there be a notion of leisure, then, comparable to what we have in the West if work situations are not so loaded with value that one needs compensatory activity? Since culture so intimately shapes our lives, we only become aware of it under special circumstances, in fact, we need to encounter difference to become aware of our own cultural assumptions. Culture begins to lose its invisibility when we become aware that there are many other ways of fulfilling the basic needs of human lives, including the need for leisure. A non-western culture, such as that of China, where dichotomies are treated in ways unfamiliar to us can provide an unusual perspective on our own way of conceptualizing experience. ...