A Response to Gary Chick's "Leisure and Culture"

by

Benjamin Hunnicutt

University of Iowa

LEISURE SCIENCES

SELECTIONS

Between mid-1970 and 1983, the year he died, Victor Turner was recognized as one of the most important cultural theorist for several disciplines; anthropology, religious studies, literary theory, and American studies. Whereas Chick takes an ahistorical, universalistic approach to leisure, looking for covering, prescriptive "definitions" and for "cross-cultural validity of the concept of leisure," Victor Turner sees leisure as a relative term, depending on the perceptions and experiences of historical actors who create their own cultural realities. Leisure is a historical development, varying from time to time and place to place- it certainly has no universal a priori definition.

Turner traces leisure back to what he sees as a more fundamental reality- to a process at the very heart of cultural change and transmission, the "liminal." Leisure is a modern incarnation, or an analog, of tribal and simple agrarian societies' "antistructures." Certain rituals and celebrations, particularly rites of passage such as the coming of age, allow participants in these archaic cultures to stand "outside" the static social order, and in the "passage " between well-defined social roles, objectify normative functions, rites, and duties. Following the Belgian folklorist Arnold van Gennep, Turner called these transitional times and places "outside," the "liminal."

Turner is struck by the liminal's ludic quality (Turner, 1982, p.27), for these "new forms of symbolic action," are "particularly conducive to play... and to experimental behavior... undertaken to discover something not yet known.... In liminality new ways of acting, new combinations of symbols, are tried out, to be discarded or rejected." "...[I]n liminality people 'play' with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them." (p. 28)

Turner's descriptions call to mind Johan Huizinga's claim that culture changes (or "emerges") through the medium of play during such periods of "liminality" (Huizinga, 1955, chapter 1). Turner describes the liminal as a "the seedbed of cultural creativity [from which] new symbols and constructions then feed back" into the exiting social and economic orders. Huizinga speaks of the "play circle" as being set apart from ordinary life, and of people in play "being apart together" in ways strikingly similar to Turner's discussions of the liminal and the "communitas" experienced there.

This fundamental dynamic, ludic, "flowing" aspect of culture is expressed in various ways through history. Tracing the liminal over time, from ritual in tribal societies, through the fiestas, carnivals and charivaris of feudal peoples, to the mass amusements of today, he detects a general evolution as the liminal has become more private and free, less public and obligatory.

"Leisure" has emerged in modern times as an enlarged private "freedom to transcend social structural limitations," with the potential to establish "an independent domain of creative activity, not simply a distorted mirror-image, mask, or cloak for structural activities in the 'centers' or 'mainstreams' of 'productive social labor'" (Turner, 1982, p.33).

The evolution is so striking, that Turner coins a new word, the "liminoid" that he closely identifies with modern leisure. Like the British historian E.P. Thompson (1967) and the writers Chick criticizes, Dumazedier, deGrazia, and Nash, Turner believes that modern leisure and work are unique historical products and that cross cultural differences in how these two are experienced and understood are as important as similarities.

Turner maintained that modern leisure provides openings for new discourse, new ways of talking about existing social forms and roles, and consequently an unprecedented avenue for cultural transformation. Leisure, much more than the archaic liminal, promotes "potentially subversive" social experimentation, stimulating creativity and providing the "seedbed for cultural creativity" (Turner, 1992)

"Liminal phenomena are ... often subversive, representing radical critiques of the cultural structures and proposing utopian alternative models.... [L]iminal and liminoid phenomena constitute metalanguages (including nonverbal ones) devised for the purpose of talking about the various languages of everyday, and in which mundane axioms become problematic, where cherished symbols are... reflected upon, rotated, and given new and unexpected valences... (p. 57).

[But] leisure is the freedom ...to enter, even for some to help generate, the symbolic worlds... It is the freedom to transcend social-structural normative limitations, the freedom to play---with ideas, with fantasies, with words, ...with paint, ...and with social relationships [new forms of community...].

...[I]n this modern 'leisure,' far more than even tribal and agrarian rituals, the experimental and the ludic are stressed. There are many more options in complex, industrial societies...both as models of past work experience and models for future work behavior....[Leisure activities] being optional,... remain part of the individual's freedom, of his growing self-mastery, even self-transcendence, as [in]... flow. Leisure (...more than industrial work in which men and women are alienated from the fruits and results of their labor) is thus potentially capable of releasing creative powers, individual and communal, either to criticize or prop up dominant social-structural values. It is... possible to conceive of leisure as betwixt-and-between, neither of this nor that domain, [as] between two lodgments in the work domain, or between occupational and familial and civic [arenas]..." (p.49ff).

Historians have already used Turner's theoretical insights to investigate the role leisure played in cultural transmission and transformation in the United States, finding that among other things; leisure constituted a contested cultural terrain, was vitally important in the formation and sustaining of local communities (especially immigrant communities) (Martin, 1990) and class consciousness (Rancière, 1981), was a way to for workers to resist domination and establish new gender and class relations (Hunnicutt, 1996).

Following Turner, I argued in Kellogg's Six-Hour Day that for sixty years the "extra-time" created by the six-hour work day disrupted parts of the established social order in Battle Creek, Michigan. Gender and class distinctions established on the basis of work were unsettled there and:

"... [W]ithin that narrow, two-hour opening, existing social forms became somewhat fluid; housework and child rearing, work and leisure, "recreation" and sports were rendered problematic. Kellogg workers were able to stand there, briefly "outside" the static social order, and objectify established gender roles, customs, and duties. New possibilities were tried out, new structures of authority and control, role, identity, duty, and even mutuality and giving, emerged from that interstice only to fade with the disappearance of shorter hours" (Hunnicutt, 1996, p.8).

Surely, Turner's theories and the anthropological and historical work already built on his theoretical foundation, should be included in any general survey and added to Chick's agenda.

Anyone who has taught an introductory leisure studies course in college will notice immediately that aside from his Turner omission Chick leaves out Marshall Sahlins. What more important anthropological insight is there than Sahlin's, that the "Original Affluent Society" is to be found among tribal and Paleolithic people, who seemingly poor in material things from a modern point of view, yet are rich in time for life? This remains something of a shock to modern prejudice- most of us still assume that pre-industrial folk have to work virtually all the time to keep from starving or being eaten by bears or whatever.

Surely my colleagues share my relish in revealing to undergraduates that modern industrial societies are poverty stricken in the time we have to live compared to the rest of humanity and history.

I gather that Chick and those that he does include in his survey are refining and correcting some of the fine points of Sahlin's original insight. But why is he excluded? Again, I suspect it is because Sahlins is more of a cultural relativist and critic than Chick allows.

Sahlins describes himself, "in the current anthropological controversy," as standing "between 'formalist' and 'substantivist' practices of economic theory," But concludes that Stone Age Economics (the book most of us use for "The Original Affluent Society) "is substantivist... " (Sahlins, 1972).

He explains that:

" 'Formalism versus substantivism' amounts to the following theoretical option: between the ready-made models of orthodox Economics... taken as universally valid and applicable grosso modo to primitive societies; and the necessity- supposing the formalist position unfounded- of developing a new analysis more appropriate to the historical societies in question and to the intellectual history of Anthropology...."

"The Original Affluent Society" does not challenge the common understanding of the "economy" as a relation between means and ends; it only denies that hunters find any great disparity between the two" (Sahlins, 1972, p.xi-xii).

For Sahlins " 'Economy' becomes a category of culture rather than behavior, in a class with politics or religion rather than rationality or prudence: not the need serving activities of individuals..." (p.xii).

Sahlins and Turner's views are echoed by developments in my discipline, history. In recent years, historians have been writing what Lynn Hunt and others have called "the new cultural history" (Hunt, 1989). Scholars have challenged the economic, psychological, and social interpretations favored for decades by Marxists and Annales historians, turning instead to what E.P. Thompson called "cultural and moral mediations." A short account of these developments might also serve to broaden Chick's survey and agenda.

Lynn Hunt claims that a "major shift in emphasis" has occurred in the writing of history over the last few decades, noting that cultural historians no longer understand "economic and social relations" as "prior to or determining of cultural ones; they are themselves fields of cultural practice and cultural production-- which cannot be explained deductively by reference to an extra-cultural dimension of experience" (Hunt, 1989).

Giving up the base/superstructure social model, historians such as Sewell "deny the ontological priority of economic events," and with Suzanne Desan (1989) propose that "culture and community, not economics or class" are history's "critical forces."

It is hardly surprising that practitioners of the "new cultural history" and ethnohistory have turned to local studies or focused on the details of short historical periods. Since the days of George Rudé (1959), historians have been trying to write "history from below," providing accounts of the everyday life and leisure of ordinary people. Growing out of this local focus has been the emphasis on "community."

"Community" has taken the place of social class in some of the key cultural interpretations, notably those of E.P. Thompson (1966, 67, 71), Reddy (1884), and Natalie Davis (Desan, 1989), as historians discover the "motive power" of groups of people small enough to play with each other and share, freely and often in leisure, a "common discourse" (Thompson, 1971).

Moreover, according to Clifford Geertz and others, it is at the community level that "meaning" occurs. People, trying to make sense out of the world and behave reasonably, do so within a sea of symbols and signs. But in traditional cultures, ordinary individuals help create as well as respond to the local environment of words and images- Thompson speaks of the working classes "making" themselves in such terms (Thompson, 1966).

It is the group response to and creation of sign and symbol that is the warp and woof of historical narrative. Without "thick" accounts of local changes in the "common discourse," history is dry abstraction and free floating generalization, "meaningful" only to a small, closed community of scholars (Biersack, 1989).

Chick ends his article acknowledging "[t]he issues and approaches that I have discussed above will not satisfy substantial numbers of both leisure researchers and anthropologists, especially those who subscribe to one of the various postmodern, social constructionist, or interpretive approaches." Indeed not- but perhaps my response here will help to broaden the discussion a little and answer his call to find "ways of knowing [that] complement, rather than compete with" those studies and theories he presents so well.

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