ABSTRACT
In the first three chapters of this book the reader was presented with what may well have seemed like a bewildering, if fascinating, variety of leisure concepts, displaying some clear family resemblances as well as some of their own distinctive characteristics. As was pointed out in the introduction, this should in itself not be surprising since the world of leisure does not, as you might say, naturally carve itself into objects. It only becomes meaningful because of how and where we deploy its ‘rules of grammar’, in accordance with ‘language games’ of the various everyday situations in which we find ourselves. We could of course stop there, and treat the understanding of leisure we have developed so far as normative, in no way to be challenged. However, that would go against the protocols of skholē and the critique underpinning this book. As it was demonstrated in the last chapter what we need to continually bear in mind is that our thinking about leisure is influenced by the society and culture in which we find ourselves and so we must avoid the pretence that our own preferred understanding is inherently superior, whereas in fact it will have its own characteristic prejudices, just like any other. In other words, we must never lose sight of the fact that we divide the world up differently when our interests are different, or if certain aspects about the way we are situated in that world or perceive that world change. The same goes for understanding the way in which our ideas change: if certain aspects of our own epistemological and ontological assumptions were different then we might not use the same concepts.
