Leisure as Heritage: Reconceptualizing Heritage and Leisure
My Session Status
The engagement with heritage becomes a potential site for the exploration, creation and re-creation of identity, and is central to an understanding of cultural and leisure practices. As manifestations of culture, forms of heritage and leisure forge and articulate identities of individuals and communities, as well as regions. In the time of globalization and multiculturalism, leisure, as a cultural manifestation, provides a way to a better understanding of societies and brings together communities. More studies lay the attention on the social and political reasons behind the conservation of a traditional leisure in certain communities and the learning or exchange of leisure in migrated communities. As observed, some forms of leisure have become intangible heritage, which are conserved as a tradition, either in communities with a long history or migration communities with a divergence of cultures.
However, gaps still exist between heritage and leisure studies academia. In this session, we aim to bridge the gaps and generate dialogue opportunities between these two sections. Therefore, following issues will be explored:
•How leisure can be viewed as heritage?
•How history and culture shape leisure and heritage?
•How traditional leisure is kept and transformed in modern society?
•What are the meanings of leisure to locals and how they contribute to their well-being?
•How leisure becomes heritage and how they jointly build communities and shape cultural and ethnic identities?
•How does a local leisure tradition articulate a local notion of heritage?
•What are the role of heritage in the leisure experience and benefits to the wider society?
•Also how immigrants maintain their leisure at home countries and acquire new leisure, thus build a more diverse heritage in the host countries?
In addition, being a critical element of leisure, tourism and its connection with heritage are worthwhile to be explored. Topics interpreting the relations between heritage and tourism are also very welcomed.
•What are the motivations, experiences, benefits and satisfactions that heritage visitors have?
•How interpretations affect heritage visitors’ experience?
•How does pilgrimage tourism shape visitor’s identity? How heritage tourism helps sustainable development?
This session not only continues the important discussions on heritage and tourism, but also extends to heritage and leisure.
Sub Sessions
This paper will explore the continuity and the changes of the lived experience of traditional and social dancing in a rural community in Norway. Previous research in the field of ethnochoreology in Europe analyzed traditional dancing either as a process of revival, where dance is regarded, for example, as a leisure activity or as a safeguarding project, or as a form of socialization and, therefore, an integral part of the community. In my research, I have found that these spheres in fact c...
Leisure has been primarily viewed as “a measure of time, as a container of activity, and in terms of meaning,” either independently or in combination. From a philosophical perspective view, “leisure is a mental and spiritual attitude…It is in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul…” Religious leisure in this study are those leisure activities performed to pursue religious faith by Tibetans. They include both core religious leisure activities that practiced daily such...
As Ashworth (2009) has argued, the mainstream heritage tourism literature characterizes tourists as a problem. Tourists are routinely defined as causing economic commodification, pollution, and physical damage to sites, and they obscure or erode other values of heritage. Most importantly, tourists have been defined as “culturally inauthentic” and as passive sightseers. They come to heritage for leisure, recreation, or entertainment, with little or no agency in the meanings they construct a...
Heritage tourism has always been a driver of visitors at the local and international levels. It is inherent among human beings to try to reconnect with their past while being driven by different sets of motivations (novelty, self-exploration, enrich knowledge, connect with their roots, etc.). At the international/global level people relate heritage tourism with monuments and sites that are well known and symbolize regions, countries, ethnic groups, and even periods of times. These sites an...
In every era of human history heritage and travel or tourism have an effect on each other. Heritage causes mobility. Travel or tourism seen from an outgoing and incoming perspective change heritage either in a positive or negative sense. One of the most frequently cited examples is the city of Venice, which was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1987: trade activities as well as political affairs produced a travel history that has been well documented since the Middle Ages (e.g. Marco...
Within the last decades, cultural tourism developed and became an important sector in the economic development of historic sites for the local authorities in Turkey. Although it has had some positive effects on the conservation of historic sites and development of these areas, tourism has had negative impacts on the conservation of the urban heritage and the depletion of traditional civic values in historic centres. In Turkey, changes and developments one the legal and intuitional levels s...
