Leisure, tourism, and environment: issues for human development

An adventure began as I walked out of the New Delhi airport terminal. The choking reaction to the brown pollution that hung as a backdrop for the people sleeping on the sidewalks was quickly subsumed by a dozen eager faces rushing to carry my baggage. I said "No thank you" three times before one adolescent boy virtually grabbed my suitcase and scurried ahead of me. My companies were assailed at the same time and amid the confusion, we finally were able to get ourselves and the bags into a taxi to head for our hotel. During the half hour drive to the hotel, I counted at least six "near-misses" between our compact diesel powered automobile and people, bicycles, camel arts, and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws. It was only 3:00 am. This scene sets the stage for my first encounter with India and with a week-long World Congress that would open my eyes to new ways of thinking about leisure, environment, tourism and human development.

The congress I was attending was sponsored by the World Leisure and Recreation Association (WLRA), a professional association of educators, practitioners, researchers and students who have a common goal of promoting the value of leisure throughout the world. The organization began as a division of the National Recreation Association in the United States, but has been its own free-standing organization headquartered in Canada for over 40 years.

The international congresses that WLRA holds every two or three years provide an opportunity for individuals from around the world to come together and share information about leisure and recreation. Currently the organization has three commissions that center on worldwide issues related to leisure research, management and education. In addition, three separate task forces have been organized by the membership to address leisure/recreation and AIDS/SIDA, women and disability.

In this "Research Update" I would like to share my impressions of the December 1993 World Congress held in Jaipur, India, and offer some suggestions about how a global perspective can be useful in local communities in the United States. Often we become too busy to think about what is happening in the next state, let alone the next country. Each of us often keeps overly busy in our day to day lives with justifying budgets, recruiting volunteers, planning appropriate clinical interventions; our other role is to be concerned about the lack of public recreation opportunities in India. My experience at the recent WLRA World Congress reaffirmed my belief that we cannot ignore the majority of the world and all its obvious and rich variations if we are to understand the meaning of leisure in our backyards.

We live in a global environment. We know that the pollution created in one country spills over invisible country boundaries. Further, we know that the economy and political problems of other countries affect the economy of our country. In addition, with the availability of mass media, we in the United States have both exported and imported culture from around the world. It may not be completely apparent, but the desire for free time or physical activity of a woman living in a tribal village in India may have implications for leisure behavior in the U.S.

Within the context of being in a developing country and interacting for over a week with individuals from other countries, I began to develop some insights about the meaning of "leisure, tourism and environment" as related to human development, the theme of the conference. Not only did I get the cognitive stimulation from learning from others, but I also struggled personally with making sense of what the research had to say to me. Further, I struggled with the trip on an emotional level as I smelled the environmental pollution, heard the constant whirring of an overcrowded urban area, observed the cultural dances and listened to the music, and saw the poverty that suggested homelessness is more of a norm than an anomaly. For these reasons it is not possible to report strictly a summary of the salient research studies given at the world congress without trying to make sense of what these findings might mean in a broader context.

Common Themes

I was struck by the common themes that emerged in the congress and the ways that different cultures struggled with those themes. The environment was an important theme addressed at the congress. Based on my experience when landing in the Delhi airport, I was very aware of its relevance in a developing country like India. The omnipresent sepia tones when looking at lights in the dark night that remained a similar shade in the sunlight suggested that clean air was not a common occurrence in that city. Environmental degradation and its impact on leisure and tourism was an issue described by presenters from a number of different countries. I was encouraged to find, for example, how S.C. Bagri described the serious efforts in Nepal to avoid the current rate of overuse and environmental destruction occurring in trekking areas. D.K. Behera presented a compelling argument about how development in some countries is really anti-development that causes irreparable damage to the poor, the dispossessed, and the environment.

The conference linked tourism to the environment as another important theme. The conflict between tourism and environment that occurs on a local basis in parts of the United States was discussed in a larger context as individuals from countries around the world discussed the "catch" associated with the need for tourism dollars but the way that tourism sometimes exploits cultures and natural resources. U. Bhargave and H. Singh from the state in India where the conference was held described the steps that were being taken to develop sustainable tourism in the arid and semi-arid areas of India. I was also struck by the apparent contradiction between developing resources for tourism such as the plan in India to develop golf courses to be marketed to Westerners and the needs of rural impoverished peopled for any type of recreation offering. The relationship of tourism to cultural heritage was also a topic discussed by several researchers. Preservation of cultural heritage is seen as a potential resource according to M. Jansen-Verbeke of Belgium; however, cultural tourism is not without conflicts due to the potential for exploitation.

In the presentations made, leisure was conceptualized from a number of perspectives. Time was frequently used to measure leisure as were surveys of leisure activities. Related to leisure, time and work ethics, unemployment was an issue of broad concern. Unemployment was described by K. Roberts of the United Kingdom as one of the main global problems of the late twentieth century. He suggested the challenge of unemployment lies in converting the unemployed person's surplus time into leisure time. N. Samual of France raised questions about the actual role that leisure should play in unemployment. Researchers such as F. Lobo of Australia studied the impact of late career unemployment and lifestyle and found that it led to despair for some people while for a small minority it was a positive experience.

Facilities for Economic Return

Management themes were of interest to those conference attendees who lived in countries that had structured recreation programs. For example, I. Cooper reported that in the United Kingdom an increasing emphasis is being put upon meeting minimum standards of public recreation service provision in both performance and quality terms. He described the statutory requirements for how performance must be evaluated in all municipalities in England beginning in 1994. P. Jonson of Australia described the merits of providing sporting and recreational facilities for economic return in the public sector. He argued that public authorities are not only fully justified but also obligated in providing facilities for economic return. These two papers have implications for some of the issues currently being discussed in municipalities in the U.S.

WLRA has been active with a Task Force on AIDS/SIDA for more than five years. A series of research papers converged around the issue of AIDS, an obvious international problem, with more than 138 countries confirming cases of AIDS. The implications for AIDS and its impact on leisure and recreation programming were discussed by several speakers. A. Grossman from the United States stated that lack of family and social controls and moral teaching, more interaction between men and women during employment, overcrowding, commercialized recreation including sex and drugs, and other forms of illicit sex relations are considered as some of the reasons leading to the spread of AIDS in many countries.

He suggested that all recreation and leisure professionals have a responsibility for becoming educators about stopping the spread of the disease. V. Sharma described how lack of information was a problem regarding the spread of AIDS in India. In his study of adolescent boys and girls, less than a fourth responded correctly about knowledge concerning human sexuality and the transmission of diseases. R.C. Swarnakar from India also discussed how tourism has contributed to the spread of AIDS. Just as pollution knows no country boundaries, neither does AIDS. Thus much discussion occurred concerning what role leisure researchers and practitioners have in addressing the issues.

The newest Task Force of WLRA addressed issues surrounding people with disabilities. Although therapeutic recreation is an area of professional practice in only a few countries, all nations have people with disabilities. Bob Fern provided background about making natural, historical, and recreation areas accessible to persons with disabilities by describing the work of Parks Canada. He focused on how to make areas accessible, assuming that recreation providers ought to see the value of "access to all." S. Sharma and D. Punia examined the leisure and recreational activities of blind school inmates. They concluded that despite advances in tourist, recreation, and leisure, many individuals with visual impairments were deprived of recreation opportunities. A.E. Estrada Gonzalez reported that a growing interest in integration into leisure services is occurring in Mexico.

Contrasts as well as similarities were found in the description of leisure as related to women and gender. For example, K. Gopal suggested that professional women in India are experiencing problems of leisure denial due to the absence of professional domestic help, lack of gadgets, power-cuts and traditional gender biases. M. Gupta of India described the leisure of tribal women and concluded that leisure generally occurs when it is directly related to work. These women found leisure within the context of being with others in doing daily work tasks.

Similarly, S. Hooda found similar results in her study of another Indian village. She found that women considered leisure to be a privilege that they seldom earned. These findings are not unlike some experiences of women in the U.S., although the cultural context is much different.

Implications for Research

The papers presented at this conference provided me with new insights. Although united by common themes related to leisure, tourism and environmental issues, cultural differences were apparent in the way problems were described and the solutions offered. Cultural context and communication barriers sometimes impeded mutual understanding of some of the issues. In many ways, I walked away from the World Congress with more questions than answers, although that may not be untrue for my experience at any conference.

Because of cultural differences, I found myself asking how important or trivial the differences were. As a presenter of research, I sometimes found it difficult to think outside my own cultural context. Despite the problems, I learned several things about leisure from a cross-cultural perspective.

First, I learned how much people from developing countries seem to be looking to the Western world for answers to their problems. I was humbled by this feeling because I am not sure that we have any corner on answers to issues about leisure, environment, tourism and human development. Perhaps we all need to work carefully to identify the issues and see how various cultural approaches might be used to address some of these issues.

Second, I found that little of the research presented was really cross-cultural. Presenters described their research within a narrow context and then left it to the listener to make the connections. As I reflected on the World Congress and other research meetings that I have attended in the past five years, I see little cross-cultural research in leisure studies. Doing this type of research requires contacts in other countries as well as other resources. It also requires that researchers and practitioners see the value of learning from other cultures so that they can make cross-cultural exchanges.

Third, I believe a value exists in understanding more about how cultural affects behavior. A broad understanding of culture may help us work better with people in the United States who come from different backgrounds than our own. We know that behavior is mitigated by a number of circumstances, including one's roots and family origins. The diversity that exists in the United States might be better understood if it were examined within the context of culture on a broader perspective.

Fourth, we need to find ways to synthesize this information from other countries and other cultures so we can learn from it. By examining both cultural similarities as well as differences we can also learn more about human behavior. Further, it is not just data we are collecting, but understanding. We need to understand the conceptual significance of cultural differences (Messic, 1988). If we do not, we will be left saying "we say house, they say hacienda, we drive on the right, they drive on the left, we eat beef, they believe cows are sacred." These descriptions may provide information, but they provide little insight.

They value of world congresses, cross-cultural research and insights from other countries lies in helping us understand and appreciate our own local work to a greater extent. University is not the goal of any cultural research; the challenges lies in how richness and diversity can give us new images to provide better or more meaningful leisure experiences for all.

References

Messick, D.M. (1988). On the limitations of cross-cultural research in social psychology. In Bond, M.H. (Ed.) The cross-cultural challenge to social psychology (pp. 41-47). Newbury Park: Sage Publications.

WLRA. (December 5-10, 1993). World Congress "Leisure, Tourism and Environment: Issues for Human Development" (Program Book), Jaipur, India.

Karla A. Henderson is a professor in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences, Curriculum in Leisure Studies and Recreation Administration.

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