Introduction: Mapping Leisure Studies

Abstract

There is an inherited capacity of humankind to have pastimes. These practices in different countries are given different names and concepts. In the Western world, at the beginning of industrialization, such practices were usually labelled ‘free time’ or ‘leisure’. During that period the term referred to non-obligatory time, or time in which a person was free from household and/or industrial salaried work performances, duties and practices. As the connotation indicates, duties were conceived as being ‘not free’ times, or being obligatory and compulsory. From the twenty-first-century perspective one is inclined to label household and work conditions in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century—though at that time considered ‘normal’—as rather ‘inhuman’. Workdays of 12 h or more for six or even seven days a week for the entire year were no exception in the West. Salaries were low and work conditions generally poor.