80
Popular Culture Review
Cara Aitchison provides a wonderfully concise review of leisure studies in
relation to disability (space limits more than a few examples here but I do direct
those interested to this paper for a better understanding of the topic; Donlon,
2001, for issues related to Civil Rights). According to Aitchison (2009), a major
problem with our conceptualization is that leisure scholars have—I might say in
addition to being Eurocentric—enduringly defined the subject in terms of the
established and normal (or, as Gramsci might say, in terms of the hegemony).
For Aitchison, this results in at least two fundamental errors “ . . . because
[definitions] are dravm exclusively from the able-bodied world, the definitions
prevent a fhll understanding of the relationship between leisure and disability
and of disabled people’s experiences of leisure” (Aitchison, 2009, p. 381). In
turn, this failure creates a definition which is “fundamentally flawed” (p. 381),
starting a cascade effect preventing the meaning to ever be more sharply pulled.
Importantly, Atchison’s Exclusive discourses: leisure studies and disability
(2009), with its focus on the role of special populations within leisure studies,
underscores the frequency with which leisure is poached by adherents of the
medical model: converting time and again contemplation into practical reason.
If Aitchison perhaps conflates leisure and recreation, Godbey et al tease out
the separate fibers in their Contributions o f leisure studies and recreation and
park management research to the active living agenda (2005). Again, the paper
presents a broad but concise read of the texture of recent leisure studies history
from a particular perspective. Quickly, these authors say “the intellectual content
of leisure studies and recreation and park management [these topics are often
housed in the same curricular setting in American universities] evolved from
different, but related perspectives” (Godbey et al, 2005, p. 151). For our
purposes, there are central salient differences. Recreation is seen as responsive
to environmental circumstances (the need for access to the outdoors, relief from
labor degradation). Oddly, the authors state that “leisure studies emerged from a
different, but related, set of traditions” (Godbey et al, 2005, p. 151). Again, in a
certain sense, leisure is seen as being essentially responsive—no Aristotelian
contemplation of the Gods here—resulting from a need. “Social problems” and
general benefits stimulated academics to action. In support, the authors explain
the emergence of leisure studies curriculum since the 1940s and the growth of
the field’s main journals. There can be little doubt that scholarship was strongly
motivated by desire to deal with perceived social problems and thus improve
quality of life.
Just as the dark underbelly of Aristotelian/Platonic Leisure is the
acceptance, even demand, for a slave class (today, this would probably be
constituted by those groups of people addicted to the work-spend-work-spend
cycle James Oliver (2008) calls victims of “affluenza,”) which might even
attenuate to hatred of democracy. Buddhism’s understanding of life’s suffering
might be tasked with the sobriquet of “utilitarian fatalism.” And many critics
have pointed to the sharp failings of commercial (not to say fraudulent)