Extreme Landscapes of Leisure

Extreme Landscapes of Leisure

Author: Patrick Laviolette

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1317137051

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In recent years, there has been an increased engagement throughout the social sciences with the study of extreme places and practices. Dangerous games and adventure tours have shifted from being marginal, exotic or mad to being more than merely acceptable. They are now exemplary, mainstream even: there are a variety of new types, increasing numbers of people are doing them and they are being appropriated and have infiltrated more and more contexts. This book argues that hazardous sports and adventure tourism have become rather paradoxical. As a set of activities where players and holidaymakers are closer to death or danger than they would otherwise be, they are the complete opposite of normal games or vacations. Adventure sports and tours reverse the general definition of a holiday as being an escape from the seriousness of everyday life, as in most cases, they are innately serious, requiring as they do 'life or death' decision-making. Beginning with the rise in colonial explorations and moving on to consider the Dangerous Sports Club of Oxford, this book examines the increasing phenomena of adventure sports such as bungy jumping, cliff jumping or 'tomb-stoning', surfing and parkour within a framework of positive risk. It explores how certain assumptions about knowledge, agency, the body and nature are beginning to coalesce around newly developing spheres of social relations. Additionally, extreme games have become activities that are germane to the dawning of green social thought and so the book also addresses issues that deal with the intimate connections that exist between pleasure and the moral responsibility towards the environment.


Extreme Landscapes of Leisure

Extreme Landscapes of Leisure

Author: Patrick Laviolette

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9780754679585

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An investigation into the increasing popularity of adventure sports like bungy jumping, surfing and parkour. Taking an ethnographic approach, the book examines what attracts humans to interact with extreme landscapes and the impact such interactions have on society as a whole, the individuals involved and the landscapes themselves. The book also addresses how best to reconcile enjoyment of adventure sports with a moral responsibility towards the environment.


Atlantic Automobilism

Atlantic Automobilism

Author: Gijs Mom

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2014-12

Total Pages: 768

ISBN-13: 1782383778

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Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs ...


Ethnologia Europaea Vol. 42:1

Ethnologia Europaea Vol. 42:1

Author: Orvar Löfgren

Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press

Published: 2012-10-29

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 8763537478

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How did an African elephant reach a North European museum? What makes fashion displayed in museums such a hot topic today? Two of the articles in this issue of Ethnologia Europaea deal with museum ideologies. Liv Emma Thorsen’s essay follows the story of a museum elephant. What lessons can be drawn from its death, transport and exhibition in a postcolonial world? Marie Riegels Melchior looks at the intersection of the fashion industry and nation branding as an arena for developing new museums. These two articles tie in with Alexandra Schwell’s reflections on ideological shifts in Austrian state officials’ concept of the nation’s place on the political landscape, past and present. Patrick Laviolette explores metaphors of emplacement to understand regional character through its linguistic idiom. Relying on extensive fieldwork, Vihra Barova employs classical kinship scholarship to understand present-day Bulgarian village ties as they are expressed in the festivities of extended families.


Tourist Experiences

Tourist Experiences

Author: Chris Ryan

Publisher: Channel View Publications

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 184541926X

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This book explores the application of psychological theories to tourist behaviour and experiences. It traces the evolution of those theories and how they have changed in response to broader social and economic changes. Among those changes have been the development of tourism, which reflects those social changes and contributes to them. In doing so, tourism theories also contribute to and gain insights from emergent psychological theories including those derived from the neurosciences. The book provides both undergraduate and postgraduate students with an understanding of core psychological perspectives derived from both humanistic and empirical psychology and their application to tourist behaviours and experiences.


Exploring the Natural Underground

Exploring the Natural Underground

Author: Kevin Bingham

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-07

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1000893936

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This book explores the enigmatic world of the natural underground, viewing it as a site of leisure and a primary sphere of anthropotechnics. It reshapes the old language of caving into new ideas that broaden the possibilities of the sociology of caving. After outlining a novel methodological approach that can be used to understand new leisure trends and cultures in present modernity, Exploring the Natural Underground offers a comprehensive investigation of the societal context in which caving takes place. Thereafter it goes on to argue that the natural underground can be used as a means of escaping some of the unavoidable influences of consumer capitalism in the way that it stimulates imaginations, senses and emotions differently. Marking a turning point in the way that the natural underground is understood, and the degree to which sensory dimensions of leisure are valued, this book will appeal to anybody interested in caving, as well as scholars and students of leisure studies, the sociology of leisure, the ethnography of leisure, and human geography.


Nature Sports

Nature Sports

Author: Ricardo Melo

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-07

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1000997219

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This book represents the first international collection that challenges current thinking and research in the emerging field of nature sport. Owing to its inherent connections with fields such as business, leisure, health, tourism, and education, this emerging field has attracted perspectives from a wide range of theoretical viewpoints – much of which are discussed within this collection. In simple terms nature sports refer to a group of sporting activities that predominantly take place in natural and rural areas. Participation can be both competitive and recreational, with the primary aim to work in relation to nature, where participants seek harmony rather than the quest to conquer it. Within this book, experts from around the globe consider the very essence of nature sport(s), including numerous practical examples of it in action, offering invaluable insights to those both familiar and new to the field. Driven by an increase in non-traditional sports, coupled with growing concerns about the environment, nature sports have experienced significant expansion and interest in both participation and academic debate. This book is a valuable resource for students and academics in fields such as alternative sports, alternative sport subcultures, sport philosophy, sport and social issues, ethics, and phenomenology. It is also a fascinating read for outdoor educators and practitioners. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issues in Annals of Leisure Research.


Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality

Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality

Author: Jennifer Hargreaves

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-05

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 1136326960

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The Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality brings together important new work from 68 leading international scholars that, collectively, demonstrates the intrinsic interconnectedness of sport, gender and sexuality. It introduces what is, in essence, a sophisticated sub-area of sport sociology, covering the field comprehensively, as well as signalling ideas for future research and analysis. Wide-ranging across different historical periods, different sports, and different local and global contexts, the book incorporates personal, ideological and political narratives; varied conceptual, methodological and theoretical approaches; and examples of complexities and nuanced ways of understanding the gendered and sexualized dynamics of sport. It examines structural and cultural forms of gender segregation, homophobia, heteronormativity and transphobia, as well as the ideological struggles and changes that have led to nuanced ways of thinking about the sport, gender and sexuality nexus. This is a landmark work of reference that will be a key resource for students and researchers working in sport studies, gender studies, sexuality studies or sociology.


Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Author: Francisco Martinez

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2018-07-06

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1787353532

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What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people’s conventional values is losing its effective power, opening new opportunities for repair and revaluation of the past. Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: the railway bazaar in Tallinn where concepts such as ‘market’ and ‘employment’ take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a grandiose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses diffi cult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial and temporal co-evolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO and the European Union, and represents a place of continual negotiation of belonging; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu, that has been turned into a memory field. The anthropological study of all these places shows that national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and disrepair too, also demonstrating how we can understand generational change in a material sense. Praise for Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia 'By adopting the tropes of ‘repair’ and ‘waste’, this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions.' Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL 'This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.' Maria Mälksoo, Senior Lecturer, Brussels School of International Studies at the University of Kent


The Anthropology of Sport

The Anthropology of Sport

Author: Niko Besnier

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0520289013

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"Few activities bring together physicality, emotions, politics, money, and morality as dramatically as sport. In Brazil's stadiums or parks in China, on Cuba's baseball diamonds or rugby fields in Fiji, human beings test their physical limits, invest emotional energy, bet money, perform witchcraft, and ingest substances, making sport a microcosm of what life is about. The Anthropology of Sport explores not only what anthropological thinking tells us about sports, but also what sports tell us about the ways in which the sporting body is shaped by and shapes the social, cultural, political, and historical contexts in which we live. Core themes discussed in this book include the body, modernity, nationalism, the state, citizenship, transnationalism, globalization, and gender and sexuality"--Provided by publisher.