LEISURE STUDIES AND CULTURE: Reflections on Creative Leisure from an Empirical Research Perspective

Leisure is a significant sector because of its economic importance and its impact on well-being or on current lifestyles. The enjoyment of culture, as a personal decision of the subject that experiences it, is also considered leisure; but neither culture as human production is all leisure, nor is leisure all culture. This article examines the encounter between both concepts from the idea of creative leisure and data obtained from empirical research. From a humanistic approach, one of the great exponents of the relationship between leisure and culture is creative leisure, which has become the current embodiment of the concept of leisure inherited from classical culture. The development of the subject is based on the analysis of the study on Cultural Activities in Spain 2010-11, as well as data relating to two specific researches, conducted at the Institute of Leisure Studies at the University of Deusto, Bilbao (Spain): one on the practices and experiences of leisure in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and the other focused on the Experience of Leisure in people who practice a consolidated leisure.  From among the conclusions, we highlight the imbalance between the culture of reception and its creative aspect, which makes it necessary to differentiate between leisure practices associated with a broad vision of humanistic leisure and cultural practices whose meaning has been reduced to the consumption of so-called cultural industries. Still, it is evident that there is a wide range of confluence and, in both cases, it is possible to differentiate the two aspects, creation and re-creation, as different scopes of the same reality.