休闲何以定义自我?——休闲与个体、社会和文化认同

How Does Leisure Define Who I Am?--Leisure and Personal,Social and Cultural Identity

随着经济和社会的发展,人们逐渐从经济束缚中解放出来,获得更多自由和闲暇。工作不再是定义自我和衡量幸福的唯一方式,休闲作为一种新的文化价值观开始对人们的生活起到重要指导作用。休闲的自由和社会互动等性质为人们提供了深入认识自我以及自我与他人关系的时间和社会空间,有助于解答"我是谁"和"我们是谁"等认同问题。由此,个体能够以一种展现自我的生活方式扮演不同的人生角色,构建较为稳定的个体认同和社会认同,发现和实现人生意义。休闲塑造文化认同的历史源远流长,至今仍然发挥巨大作用。在休闲时代和全球化持续发展的双重背景下,休闲塑造和传播文化价值观的重要作用也日益凸显。因此,休闲与认同关系研究对个体发展、社会发展和文化发展具有重要的积极意义。

For a long time,work has been regarded as an activity for people to define themselves and be perceived and defined by others,while leisure is thought to play a subsidiary role to the economy.However,with the advent of the leisure era,leisure is no longer a privilege for the leisure class but becomes the right and daily lifestyle for common people.On the other hand,the high-speed development of globalization and urbanization makes people’s life more unstable and alienated.The intrinsic values of leisure such as freedom and social connection thus provide people with an important way to deeply know themselves and their relationships with the outside world.Against the theoretical background of leisure and identity,this paper examines the role played by leisure in constructing and developing identity to provide people with a feasible scheme to achieve and lead a good life.To achieve the above goal,the paper first reviews the concepts of leisure and identity that have long been discussed in both Chinese and Western contexts,especially the three aspects of identity,namely,personal identity,social identity and cultural identity.Then,the fact that people nowadays have gradually turned their eyes from work to leisure related concepts such as self-fulfilling,happiness,life satisfaction to define themselves is pointed out.And freedom,as the most important feature of leisure enables people to freely explore and flexibly reflect on themselves in the context of leisure.On the other hand,the symbolic meanings contained in leisure activities benefit people in affirming themselves.With the enhancement of self-concept,self-esteem and the like,leisure gives central meaning to people’s life,thus becoming a way of defining oneself.What’s more,leisure is also a social space in which people explore and seek interpersonal relationships and belongingness.The types of leisure activities demonstrate that leisure has an obvious nature of social connection,which helps people find social identity in a mass society.In addition,people act according to the social norms and behaviors regulations behind certain social roles to express and maintain their social identity.Leisure has also become a tool to challenge the essentialist view of social identity.Lastly,leisure’s role in shaping cultural identity since antiquity till now is referred to.The development of globalization promotes global tourism which makes leisure a tool of political consciousness package,culture dissemination and culture identity shaping.But in the violent collision of different cultures,people are also actively constructing aglobal cultural identity in their local ways.At the same time,in the constant immigration waves,engaging in some leisure activities enables those immigrants to reserve and diversify their cultural identity in the subsequent acculturation process.In summary,this paper makes contributions in two ways.Firstly,it builds a theoretical bridge between leisure and identity from a comprehensive perspective of philosophy,sociology and psychology,enriching the existing literature on leisure and identity.Secondly,combining theory with reality,it shows people how to construct a stable identity against the backdrop of globalization,urbanization and leisure age from the angle of leisure and offers people a practical way toward a beautiful life which is being highlighted by the Chinese government and enthusiastically pursued by the Chinese people at present.Future researches may extend the ways in which leisure contributes to identity construction and explore in depth on how identity is related to people’s leisure motivations,choices and behaviors,etc.