leisure and tourism

anyway, we should keep up with the times and do our best to talk about ourselves in a way that makes others think we are somehow important and ‘worth knowing of’. in this sense i offer something of a personal introduction, a foreign national at a university here in korea, i work as a visiting professor and i have been ‘visiting’ for four years now! my interests are related to leisure and tourism. not so much the industries but what they might potentially be doing to us. in other words what do the notions of leisure and tourism mean to us individually and socially.

quite simply my thesis is that outside of our chosen professions, our work, leisure pursuits make a powerful contribution to our identity and tourism poses the greatest threat. community leisure programs work to facilitate its members’ personal and social development. a camping trip for the family or a sports day for the company serves to build social relationships or they offer an opportunity for the individual to revitalize herself. on the other hand, tourism facilitates the experiences of others in our community by reducing it to a destination offering a handful of various stereotypical experiences and scenic views.

this more or less debatable attitude – leisure and identity versus tourism and image – may not be a foolproof universal generalization but it seems to me to be the best starting point for discussion of the subject. in other words, leisure is fundamentally good whereas tourism is fundamentally risky at best. this dualism could be as easily reversed by pointing out that a community’s leisure base is provincial and isolated and limited by its own cultural quirks. and that tourism is like a great diplomatic enterprise that fosters interpersonal communication between groups that can lead to innovation and the like. that would be a more optimistic outlook. to the reader should forgive primalamerica’s pessimism.

leisure programs are fundamentally concerned with the improvement of social life in the community. but tourism development seems to whitewash the destination using slogans and imagery that promise only the best in terms of natural and cultural heritage experiences. consider the vocabulary. in leisure the social context is referred to as the ‘community’ whereas in tourism it is referred to as the ‘destination’. the community is a place where people live, a destination is a place where tourists visit. tourism does its best to take all but the most photogenic ‘out of the picture’. in leisure, the beauty is not only skin deep.

so in leisure we seek social benefits and in tourism the focus is economic. tourism is a universal panacea for failing agricultural and manufacturing economies and it seems that the demise of the base is the rallying call for tourism. come and see our failure! our isolation! our lack! it is the abundance of lack that makes a destination attractive.