Abstract
The new era of leisure and all its new concepts are already quite with us, but we are still anchored in the state of mind of the “old world”. We will need to move from a standard, quite passive condition of adaptation towards a creative one. Leisure, the word by itself, invites us to enter into a special mood of liberty and leads to review our “obvious” concepts as community’s concrete reality or imagined (Anderson 1991); “countries”, “homelands”, and the supermarket of populations; “nation” and its genuine members, “citizen” or “stranger”, “client” or “customer” of an interchangeable state, and so on. How we perceive our identity? Who is a stranger? Meursault, the stranger of Camus’s novel, has all the attributes of citizenship. How can collective identities preserve their pertinence in leisure’s open nature, which is mostly individual, far from clear-cut definitions, categories, and belongings?
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Notes
- 1.
“The increasing rate of migratory currents has significantly affected not only the demographic profiles of the societies, but also their cultural contours. In one sense, all the countries of the world have become multicultural societies, and their capitals, as well as other metropolitan centers, have assumed a cosmopolitan character” (Atal 2004, p. 207).
- 2.
Beyond Good and Evil, § 24.
- 3.
Could we know, for instance, even a few aspects of the richness of the inner life of Jean Valjean (Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo), who otherwise is likely to be labelled “a brutal convict”?
- 4.
“Like the dark side of the moon, formal institutions tend to ignore this part of life, in which everyone has to be by themselves; a space where knowledge and skills of social functioning are not helpful enough and sometimes not at all” (Cohen-Gewerc 2012).
- 5.
“The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face” (Levinas 1971/1991, p. 50).
- 6.
In the Stranger, by Camus, the Arab has no name and no visage.
- 7.
Free time is not only an empty schedule and freedom is not a fact; rather, it is an act. La Bruyère (1688) wrote: “Liberty is not indolence; it is a free use of time.” Leisure is now a legitimate and present part of life. The new era of leisure entails a review of concepts, which are assigned a new place in the hierarchy of one’s personal life. Concepts, such as work, time, body, age, country, state, homeland, stranger, uniqueness, and human solidarity, are revised and acquire new meanings.
- 8.
“The possibility of the dwelling together of these contradictions in the same mind, without seeming recognition that they are contradictions, is one of the curious facts of psychology” (Gordon 1906, p. 28).
- 9.
“They brutally expose the fragility of a most secure of separations. They bring the outside into the inside, and poison the comfort of order with suspicion of chaos. This is exactly what the strangers do” (Bauman 1990, p. 146).
- 10.
Coming back to the imagined community of Anderson, we can ask ourselves, together with Christine Chivallon, about a “certain fragility due to inherent theoretical contradictions that prevent any clarification of the antithesis between the ‘actual’ and the ‘imaginary’” (Chivallon 2007, p. 172).
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Cohen-Gewerc, E. (2017). Leisure, Community, and the Stranger. In: Spracklen, K., Lashua, B., Sharpe, E., Swain, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56479-5_38
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