Hospitality, tourism and leisure

Hospitalidad, turismo y ócio

Abstract

This article examines the conceptual links between hospitality, tourism, and leisure, as well as the heuristic advantages of such articulation and implications for studies in these fields, today closely connected yet still distinct. To this end, after establishing the similarities and differences between the concepts, I will try to show how the articulation of these concepts can contribute to the current discussion of overtourism, school, and sex tourism. Finally, it is discussed how the emergence of studies on mobility and the economics of happiness tend to strengthen the integration of these fields.

Keywords:
Hospitality; Leisure; Tourism; Sex tourism; Overtourism; School

Resumen

Este artículo trata de las relaciones conceptuales entre hospitalidad, ocio y turismo, de las ventajas heurísticas de esa articulación y de sus consecuencias para los estudios en esas tres áreas, hoy próximas pero aún separadas. Así, tras establecer las similitudes y diferencias entre estos conceptos, pretende mostrar cómo la articulación de estos conceptos puede enriquecer el análisis de los casos hoy bastante discutidos del overturismo, de la escuela y del turismo sexual. Finalizando, muestra que la emergencia de los estudios de movilidad y de la economía de la felicidad tienden a contribuir aún más a la integración de esas áreas.

Palavras clave:
Hospitalidad; Ocio; Turismo; Turismo sexual; Overtourism; Escuela

RESUMO

Este artigo trata das relações conceituais entre hospitalidade, lazer e turismo, das vantagens heurísticas dessa articulação e das suas decorrências para os estudos nessas três áreas, hoje próximas mas ainda separadas. Para tanto, após estabelecer as semelhanças e diferenças entre esses conceitos, pretende mostrar como a articulação desses conceitos pode enriquecer a análise dos casos hoje bastante discutidos do overturismo, da escola e do turismo sexual. Finalizando, mostra que a emergência dos estudos de mobilidade e da economia da felicidade tendem a contribuir ainda mais para a integração dessas áreas.

Palavras-chave:
Hospitalidade; Lazer; Turismo; Turismo sexual; Overturismo; Escola

1 INTRODUCTION

The invitation of this journal to ANPTUR’s Researcher Emeritus laureates is a gift that, more than any other, cannot be refused. Increasingly hampered by ever-stricter academic standards, forced to remain within the narrow limits of scientific objectivity, the opportunity I have been given to freely expose ideas about the challenges and trends of tourism research is certainly an exceptional gift. To paraphrase the interjection of my master Joffre Dumazedier about the doctor's privilege of freely exposing his ideas to peer criticism, I would also say “ça vaut de l'or!”, i.e. it is worth more than gold, and it would be a crime to pass up this opportunity.

The possibility of writing in the first person is another gift and, despite the promise of a free forum, it raises the question: what, in my academic path, justifies a relevant reflection for colleagues? As the doyen of Brazilian leisure researchers, introducer and coordinator of tourism and hospitality programs and involved from the outset in the creation of the Graduation Program in Hospitality at Anhembi Morumbi University (UAM), I decided that my contribution should be an attempt to bring these three fields closer together by answering the following question: what are the relationships between leisure, tourism and hospitality? Or, in other words: what and to what extent my academic experience in the three fields can be of relevance to academia?

We should remember that these fields are interrelated, with the emphasis changing from one field to another according to the circumstances. In this article, the assumption is that the correlation between the concepts can be beneficial to each of them and will certainly enrich the approaches that use them together.

For this reason, it seemed to me that it was not enough to stick to the epistemological dimension of bringing together theories. I decided, then, to illustrate this theoretical reflection with examples in which the articulation of these notions showed heuristic power, provoking new approaches. The choice of examples, however, proved to be the most difficult challenge!

Leisure and tourism have several features in common being the most significant-or at least the most obvious-the pursuit of recreation. As Maffesoli (2005) put it, Western societies have just left two centuries living in the shadow of Prometheus-a Titan god who was forever chained to a rock where each day an eagle would torn out his liver, which would regenerate overnight to be devoured again the next day. This myth can be understood as a metaphor for the fate of workers in the industrial revolution, enduring long days of hard work with just enough rest to get them through yet another day. The episteme-a concept he borrows from Foucault (1999)- the spirit of time, the paradigm was duty, obligation. However, Maffesoli continues, since the mid-twentieth century, we live in the shadow of Dionysus, the god of sex and drugs, and the new episteme is the pursuit of pleasure in everyday life of family, of work, of religious rites. In this narrative, leisure and tourism as spaces in which hedonism is a key feature, the pursuit of pleasure is even more accentuated. A good example of this, is the reformulation of leisure spaces, in general, seeking to obtain ever more pleasure. Another example, which we bring here and which can provide a good illustration of the articulation of these concepts is that of sex tourism. Would the notion of hospitality have anything to add?

Tourism and hospitality in turn face an ever-increasing problem: overcrowded tourist attractions or overtourism. Since the emergence of mass tourism after the 1950s, cities are hungry for tourists' money, but both tourists and residents revolt against the excesses of people, noise, congestion, and rising prices. These problems have been around for a long time and have led to studies of the negative impacts of tourism since the 1970s. However, now it seems that the problem has arrived at what can be called the limit of an unsustainable situation that leads to ‘tourismophobia’. Lawmakers, promoters, and tourism researchers are searching for answers. Would hospitality and leisure have anything to add?

School is not a main object of study in any of these three fields. It can be said that, by developing under the aegis of discipline, school tends to place itself on the opposite side of pleasure which lies at the heart of the pursuit of leisure and tourism. Therefore, it excludes all those who somehow do not settle within the imposed standard of discipline. If it is through school that society welcomes its new members, would it have the right to propose a school model that excludes all those who do not attune to the proposed discipline? This issue brings school as a problem of leisure, hospitality, as well as tourism.

In the development of these thoughts, only references to sources will be kept from the list of academic requirements. I imagine that some thoughts are bold and, if well accepted, should be credited to the journal; if not, they are to be placed in the list of intemperate thoughts of a researcher near retirement and who does not miss an opportunity to take the stage that is offered to him.

2 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM: THE CASE OF OVERTOURISM

How do tourism studies impact on hospitality studies and vice versa? Let us start with the simplest, the contribution of tourism studies to hospitality. As banal as this may seem, tourism has had to be heard in hospitality studies, marked by pressures from another type of migration, the one that take people from poor or conflict-ridden regions to richer regions and countries. It is important to remember that it is no coincidence that Levinas (1988), Derrida (Dufourmantelle, 2003), Buber (2001), Montandon (2011), Gotman (2009), Shérer (2004) and francophone scholars think of hospitality as a migrant problem. It is true that this situation of poor populations seeking places that can provide them with dignified living conditions (especially now in the case of refugees) speaks more to researchers’ social sensitivity than tourist migrations, particularly those from rich regions to poor regions.

It also happens that tourist migrations can foster conflicts between tourists and host populations. Not seldom tourists behave like conquerors in scorched earth, and often locals see tourists as an easy prey for exploitation. The expression “this is for tourists”, which translates into “this is overpriced and fake”, reveals the antipathy toward visitors, who are often seen as idiots with money.

In English-speaking countries-contrary to French-speaking ones-tourism was the gateway to hospitality studies, and this was also due to a linguistic particularity: hospitality simply refers to the hotel industry and events. Thus, hospitality led automatically to tourism studies, although only referring to tourism infrastructures. Only in recent years has the British group coordinated by Lashley and Morrison (2005) rescued the socio-anthropological breadth of the term. So, conversely, research on hospitality has begun with tourism, and now, with Lugosi (Lugosi & Allis, 2019), it encompasses migrants who leave their origins behind, not for the simple desire of starting a new life, but as refugees, expelled from their lands.

Anyway, today it is common to hear about hospitality within tourism, and to some people the terms seem like synonyms. It is obvious that, within tourism, there is always some type of hospitality. It is impossible to conceive a trip (except in the case of explorers of inhospitable regions or seeking to test boundaries) without the one who travels and the one who hosts, even if the host is the so-called tourist infrastructure or, in the humanized concept of Márcia Cappellano dos Santos e Perazzolo (2012), the welcoming collective body.

In an increasingly globalized world and global culture that, as pointed out by Trigo and Panosso Netto (2009), rest on three pillars-the financial market, the media, and tourism-the conceptual link between hospitality and tourism is becoming stronger.

We can define hospitality-from an analytical and operational point of view-as a process of human interaction in domestic, urban, commercial, or virtual contexts, where a host receives, eventually lodging, and/or feeding, and/or entertaining, visitors/guests temporarily displaced from their usual habitat.

This definition is similar to that of tourism by the World Tourism Organization -UNWTO: “[tourism] comprises the activities of people traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for no more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to an activity remunerated from within the place visited”.

It is automatically inferred that the first contribution of the notion of hospitality to tourism is to show that the study of the tourist encounter can be extended if we understand it in the context of interpersonal encounters in general. The notion of a tourist encounter has embedded the idea of an encounter with a stranger (is it not that every stranger is a kind of foreigner?), such as the neighbor we do not know, the individual who stops us on the street (or that we stop) to ask for directions, the new co-worker, the hotel receptionist, the Eskimo whose village we visit.

The notion of hospitality expands this challenge by assuming the declared mission of tourism, that of contributing to universal peace by showing that if we do not create ties with what is a little strange, how can we do so with what is very strange?

At the heart of the notion of hospitality is the encounter with the other (always a stranger) that happens in the house. From there, it extends to other encounters that take place in different spheres of social life, correcting the misconception that there is a gap between the models of hospitality taking place in domestic, urban, commercial, or virtual spaces. We are hosts when we are in our home, and when we interact with other people (relatives, neighbors, as well as acquaintances or strangers who come to us), or when, outside the home, in the workplace, we interact with those who seek the company. We are guests, whenever we leave the house and seek the hospitality of schools, hospitals, clinics, public offices, parks, shopping centers, banks, bars, or restaurants in our city. The people who work there, our hosts, must welcome us and, eventually, provide food and entertainment. From the point of view of hospitality, all hosts’ practices that condemn us to long queues, tedious moments, not to mention rudeness and intimidation, are reprehensible.

This idea is important for an actor of the tourist industry, the hotel. The hotel is not the host. It is impersonal. The real hosts are the people who work there. These bring the so-called local color, in their posture, gestures, words, etc. The large networks and hotel chains and restaurants sometimes imagine artificial hospitality styles, standardized by administrative necessity and sometimes even in the name of quality. Everything happens as if the hotel or restaurant reception gained in quality if standardized regardless of the socio-cultural and economic characteristics of the different territories in which it takes place. This is a problem. If we do not conceive of a color, a local style of receiving, we will have aseptic hospitality, without local color, smell and tonality and certainly the “non-place”, which provokes in the guest the sensation of being in a kind of limbo, of passage, or nowhere (Augé, 1994) and certainly this has something of a false event, the event by the event, or as Boorstin (1964) named and studied, the pseudo-event.

A city hotel is not a destination, like the resort, but tourist infrastructure. Tourists visit the city and not the hotel and there is no reason they would return voluntarily to the hotel if they did not like the city. A good hotel in an inhospitable city can only exist for the business segment, when travel is not a choice. However, there are not a few who predict that with the evolution of hospitality in the virtual environment, even business trips will always be marked and intertwined with leisure activities, and in this case inhospitable cities will be big losers.

The understanding that the tourism infrastructure encompasses the city and the entire local population-making all residents equally responsible for the hosting success-is a lesson from the sociology of hotels and the second contribution of hospitality to tourism. The third contribution stemming from this can be summarized as follows: tourism studies connect a source audience (tourists) and a tourism infrastructure composed of information points, hotels, event centers, restaurants, trade. Residents are not included as such, and they rightly argue that large events and tourism only benefit the tourism industry, while residents are left with rising prices, traffic congestion, prostitution, or violence. Hospitality, as mentioned, cares for people. It connects and aims to bring together visitors and locals. It values the democratization of the economic benefits of tourism and seeks to adjust accessibility, regulation of access, and coexistence with tourists.

It should be noted that if, at the outset, tourism studies were markedly economic and were summed up in the tourist-transportation-hotel triad, this view gradually began to broaden to the study of the visited. In the 1970s, Valene Smith (1977) and her group inaugurated tourism anthropology, highlighting the figure of the local resident, but the very notion of tourism impact already hints that the focus remains on visitors and the positive and negative effects they have on places and communities visited. But how is the study of the impact of the visited on the visitor? It is treated under expressions such as “tourist gaze” “tourist experience”. In other words: even in the approaches of Valene Smith’s group the resident remains passive.

If this group already linked the notions of hospitality and tourism, the International Social Tourism Organization (ISTO) (former Bureau International du Tourisme Social - BITS) took a step forward. Its approach has always been the overall tourist experience, highlighting the inclusion of local communities. Despite the importance of organizations under this brand, social tourism has always been treated marginally in tourism studies, commonly associated with poor tourism. In Brazil, the prestige of one of the main authors linked to ISTO, Jost Krippendorf (1989), and the three formulas he brings in the unusual final recommendations of his book (travel to places closer and closer, travel always to the same place, do not leave home) as well as the difficulties we have in explaining to students that he is not an enemy of tourism.

More recently, the notion of sustainable tourism started including the host communities in its concerns, but it should be noted in all these initiatives that the focus remains on the traveler. On the contrary, the notion of hospitality, even in common sense, does the opposite, with the visited being the protagonist whereas the visitor plays no special role. See, for example, dictionary definitions in Portuguese¹ , French² , and English³ .

In fact, the notion of hospitality unveils a complex interaction between a host and a guest, treating them both as actors of equal importance for the smooth running of the hospitable encounter. This is the third contribution of the notion of hospitality to the study of tourism, and today this collaboration between areas is essential when we are faced with a complex subject such as overtourism, which we examine next.

As Goodwin (2017) points out, overtourism describes a situation where an excessive number of visitors makes tourists feel that the quality of the experience has deteriorated, while the residents feel that the quality of life is deteriorating. It is the opposite of responsible tourism. The author reminds that the phenomenon stems from a variety of factors: on the tourist side, falling cost of travel, disintermediated accommodation with new online platforms, the desire of rich and new middle classes to travel; On the residents' side, deregulation of the real estate market, increase in the cost of living, overcrowded spaces, hustle and bustle of people, visitors pay nothing for the impact on the landscape whose maintenance costs are to be borne by residents, jobs created by the sector remain seasonal and low-paid. Hence, expressions such as ‘tourismphobia’ and similar begin to win the media and the phenomenon enters a vicious circle: the more we talk about the problems of overcrowding of the places visited and the annoyances suffered by the locals, the higher the interest of tourists and the higher the discomfort of locals. In addition, overtourism appears as a hybride of the figure of the hosted tourist, who spends, and the day tripper/visitor, who spends nothing, as with the hordes that the cruises pour out daily. As a result, host communities begin to put up measures to change tourism rules in these regions.

In 2019, the UNTWO (2019) listed the following strategies to manage visitor flows in major destinations affected by overtourism:

1. Promote the dispersal of visitors within the city and beyond;

2. Promote time-based dispersal of visitors;

3. Stimulate new itineraries and attractions;

4. Review and adapt regulation;

5. Enhance visitors’ segmentation;

6. Ensure local communities benefit from tourism;

7. Create city experiences for both residents and visitors;

8. Improve city infrastructure and facilities;

9. Communicate with and engage local stakeholders;

10. Communicate with and engage visitors; and

11. Set monitoring and response measures.

It should be noted that of the 11 strategies listed by the UNTWO, two (6 and 8) relate exclusively to benefits for residents and three (7, 9, and 10) refer to interactions between visitors and visited. This is another evidence of the conceptual closeness between tourism and hospitality.

How, then, can the concept of hospitality shed any further light on the issue? Resorting to the concept of hospitality implies bringing the problem from the political plane to the ethical plane and this, perhaps, can throw some light on the political issue. This political plane is that of written laws: customs law, commercial law. The ethical plane is basically that of unwritten laws. The question is: what is the basis of the right of tourists to know the places and the right of residents to obstruct their presence? What does hospitality have to say to both groups?

At first, the statement is clear: unconditional hospitality requires that visitors (guest) be accepted in all circumstances, but residents (hosts), even if they have the obligation to host them, have the right to set rules for the use of space. But is this resident the same host who welcomes someone in a house he built and bought? Unexpectedly, the hospitality perspective may this time favor the guest, the tourist.

Here let us take the example of Venice: the residents’ rights are understandable, but it must also be noted that the present inhabitants have not contributed to the cultural wealth of the city and certainly take little advantage of them. In addition, locals-like every resident-are immersed in their daily occupations and enjoy little to nothing of the landscape and attractions. Taking the example of Rio de Janeiro, a 1975 survey (Medina, 1976) already showed that more than half of the population simply did not leave the house on weekends, and among housewives, the percentage was over 70%. At the same time, a budget-time study (Souza, 1976) showed that the weekly beach time of Cariocas was only 7 minutes, which meant very limited frequency.

This would not be a problem if billions of people had no interest in just having the privilege of looking at the sights of Venice and Rio de Janeiro for a day! In what way, can residents claim that the natural landscape, as well as the architectural landscape produced by generations and generations, is a property like a house they have built or rented?

On the other hand, the tourist is also not a conventional guest. First, tourists have what Miguel (2016) calls “the right to know the world and to acquire the tools to think with their own heads” and that, according to Gotman (2009), has always been claimed by anthropologists to justify their intrusion into indigenous territories. Secondly, the city's website invites tourists and says they are welcome, although the invitation seems moderated by warnings about the problems of over-visitation: “visit and respect Venice”, reads the website. Is this tourist the same guy I invite to dinner at my house and call him a guest? What is the retribution for hospitality received?

Venice, like most environments facing overtourism, is listed by UNESCO as “World Heritage Site” and as such is part of a “legacy of monuments and sites of great natural and cultural wealth that belongs to all of humanity (and) constitute crucial landmarks for our world. They symbolize the consciousness of states and peoples of the significance of these places and reflect their attachment to collective ownership and the transmission of this heritage to future generations”.

Therefore, hospitality invites us to think about another question: how to reconcile the interests of a population eager to enjoy moments, even if brief, of the wealth of a locality relatively disdained by the resident population?

It is clear that tourism policy must move toward a rational solution of the problem, requiring that visitors-without denying them the right to visit-somehow compensate residents for the inconveniences of all the hustle and bustle. This could even be the embryo of a truly tourism policy, encouraging local people to travel, since the current policies aimed at attracting visitors should be more appropriately called hospitality policies. In the same way that Paris's wealthier residents travel to other places to escape the excess of visitors during the high season, who knows if a tourism policy using the resources of visitors could not encourage the most affected residents to travel and discover the beauties of other places!

3 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN HOSPITALTY AND LEISURE: the case of school

The relationships between hospitality and leisure are much more subtle. Receiving someone as a guest is to take care of him in addition to offering food and entertainment and, eventually, lodging. This need to entertain the guest makes the ability to converse (along with food and, above all, beverages) a great instrument both of leisure and hospitality. Being a causeur, someone gifted with the quality of the conversation, the ability to “hold” a conversation makes him or her someone competent both as a host and as a guest, someone endowed with what the British have termed ‘hospitableness’, the quality of being hospitable.

This term is of utmost importance for the understanding of hospitality. For Anglophones in general, hospitality, as noted above, has become a noun that designates the industry of providing commercial hosting to guests-primarily hotels and events-and not the quality of a hospitable individual, who knows how to host a guest. To designate the quality of the hospitable individual there is the words hospitableness (hospitality condition) or hospitability (hospitality capacity). In Portuguese, apparently there is no such need, since the noun hospitality designates the corresponding quality.

But this meaning is not univocal. In Portuguese, too, the noun hospitalidade (hospitality) refers to a commercial sector and therefore can have either a positive or negative connotation. When one says that there is a hospitality problem in the city, one wants to say that its tourist infrastructure has problems: in transportation terminals, in the signage, in hotels, etc. This justifies the adoption of Anglicism “hospitabilidade” also for us, with the same meaning of hospitability capacity.

Regarding hospitality from the leisure studies perspective, it is important to note that, according to budget-time surveys (Souza, 1976), most leisure time is spent in-house and divided almost equally between media consumption and domestic hospitality. There is even a strange uniformity in the results of budget-time surveys: no matter the size of cities, their climate, their attractiveness, their location within the globe, approximately 70% of leisure time is spent in-house and in two types of activity: on the one hand we have the so-called domestic hospitality (family life, visiting and receiving friends, various events, decoration, small repairs, time with animals and plants, private time) and on the other, media consumption (radio, TV, internet, social networks, e-mail, letters).

This uniformity of results suggests that the house has other meanings for the individual besides the sociological or demographic meanings, referring individuals to their own identity. In fairy tales, and part of our imaginary, to lose oneself is not to know the way back home. For psychotherapists, dreaming about home refers to what the German existentialists call-such as Biswanger-the eigenwelt, i.e. one’s relationship with oneself. Those who, in another city, have remained, even if momentarily, without an address (house or hotel), experiences a sense of strangeness that certainly has nothing to do with the simple discomfort of luggage storage.

In this context, another question arises: is hospitality in the domestic space in decline, as the common-sense suggest? It is true that today fewer people are introduced into the family environment, neighbors do not know each other, the house is less open to friends and acquaintances, also, it is expected more formality in dealing with strangers. In fact, this hospitality is governed by laws marked by insecurity and by that law deduced from urbanity (care for strangers): it is a phenomenon directly proportional to the size of the population, being quite visible in the metropolis. This perception, however, must be at least counterbalanced with another: the smaller the number of guests, the greater the care from the hosts. The figure of the casual guest practically does not exist in the big cities. Therefore, the very invitation for a visit is already a first step, if not toward friendship, at least acceptance of the other.

Hospitality in domestic space continues to be so important that there is a plethora of TV programs exclusively devoted to living at home and hosting people (neighbors, relatives, friends, co-workers): architecture, decoration, furniture, domestic economy, space organization, etc. In short: receiving well ceases to be an informal gesture and enters the rules of good living.

A second relationship between hospitality and leisure concerns spaces. The duty of the host to entertain the guest leads researchers to the problematic of urban leisure and, particularly, to the need for leisure organizations and facilities-as reminds Jean Viard (2005)-to take care of the hospitality of the places. Differently from what occurs in working and teaching spaces, wherein personal discipline and hierarchy govern relationships, in leisure spaces other kinds of relationships emerge, marked by personal affinity and recreation. They are also educational spaces, within the so-called non-formal education and, as such, governed by a pedagogy opposed to that of school and formal education: instead of authoritarianism, persuasion; instead of repression, deterrence. Instead of “must”, “why not?” And instead of “no”, “what if?”.

Non-formal education institutions-cultural centers, sports centers, museums, public libraries-depend on people’s adherence to their proposals and activities to gain customers. These institutions need to have an appealing architecture, a welcoming reception, integration of facilities to promote participation in the largest number of activities, cultural (to easily allow variety and/or replacement of activities) and social (to allow coexistence of different publics) versatility, hospitable staff at least because of the need for the presence of the other, with discreet security staff, without the hostility common in other facilities, like banks, malls, and even schools.

And it is exactly the unusual topic of school that we bring here to illustrate the relationship between hospitality and leisure, and, of course, tourism.

From what has been said above, the choice of school to discuss the relationship between tourism, hospitality, and leisure deserves a preliminary explanation, or rather a historical contextualization.

Curiously, the evidence (and it is an evidence) that the democratization of the conditions of participation in the society requires a basic education of universal quality, still has not managed to make the society more aware as a whole, not even with other evidence (and it is also evidence) that this initiative is a sine qua non for the economic development of the country. Until today, this discourse only led to an increase in time in the classroom and on school days.

Let us go back to the 1950s, when the reports of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL, 1963) already said that the mode of living time by migrants from the interior of our country [Brazil] was incompatible with the needs of industry. This diagnosis explains in retrospect why, according to Bastos (2004), most of the workers in São Paulo at the beginning of the twentieth century were born Italians. Even when they came from rural areas of Italy, they had enough material culture and urban culture to work in the industry.

Other sociological analyses confirmed this scenario. It was already known at the time, as shown by Antônio Cândido (1964), that many inhabitants of the interior of the country lived far from civilization, with a level of material culture close to that existing in the Neolithic, i.e., still lived in prehistoric times. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1989), in 1936, had already noticed that the Iberian (Portuguese and Spaniards) who entered inland areas, instead of raising the level of material culture of black and indigenous slaves, found it easier to adhere to their customs. As a result, the first exodus from rural areas to big cities at the end of the nineteenth century already indicated that the infrastructure of the urbanization of the country, as Flusser (1998) called it, was composed of individuals completely unprepared for the cultural, social, and economic needs of cities. The desperate housing situation in the outskirts-urban cancers that, similar to physical cancer, are models of reproduction that do not obey the guiding principle of collective city life-the pollution of rivers with garbage, the difficulty of dealing with city codes, the difficulties of preparing the labor force, and the violence itself has to do with the lack of preparation of a rural population that migrated to the cities unprepared. According to Norbert Elias, it was in this condition that the civilizing process emerged in Europe at the dawn of modernity, which in simple terms was a set of rules to make the migrant more familiar with urban life.

All this was known in the 1950s, but the remedy applied to compensate for the backwardness of inland Brazil was... the construction of Brasilia. While this measure has had some positive economic impact, it has brought about a reduction in resources for other areas, especially for the public-school system, the true solution of the problem for thinkers such as Anísio Teixeira and Darcy Ribeiro.

To this day there is a nostalgia for the public school that at that time began to decline, following a path common to other areas, such as health, safety, and even the university: democratizing access at the expense of quality, i.e., leveling down. Leonel Brizola was, perhaps, the only politician for whom public education was a cornerstone in the government program. It was under him that Darcy Ribeiro rescued the 30-year-old dream of universalizing full-time public-school education with the CIEPs [Integrated Center for Public Education], a school model that was not limited to classrooms with ample leisure spaces. The logic of the discipline gave way to the different cultural-recreational interests of children.

What does the study of hospitality have to say about it? If childbirth marks the reception of the child by the family, the school marks the reception of the child by society. It is an oft-repeated mantra by pedagogues and scholars that the school’s job is to educate the citizens. Now, how can this school-concerned only with the intellectual formation of children and with topics dissociated from their everyday life-accomplish such a complex mission?

For most people, education is synonymous with school and school is synonymous with classroom. But what is a traditional school class, usually expository, if not the process in which the teacher answers questions students did not ask and about content whose need and usefulness are more than debatable? Bernard Charlot (1999), one of the few sociologists to study the school from the student's point of view, shows as a result of his research that the current school is only hospitable to a quarter of the children (a quarter of them do not accept and escape, while half only creates strategies to survive through it and to get their business card, the diploma).

It is important to begin with the evidence that since the Copernican revolution in education and its basic principle that the subject of education is the educatee and not the educator or the school, the disciplinary guideline that has always guided the school since the Jesuits and the Rerum Studiorum is increasingly replaced by play-based learning. How to make school fun? Do not the modern methods of active pedagogy bring in the idea of engaging students in learning through play, curiosity and recreation that accompanies it? How to teach math through play? How to encourage, using games, the study of geography (games like War) or even language learning?

There is no doubt that a more playful school is also a more hospitable school: instead of artificial seating arrangements in the classrooms (e.g. by size), personal affinities should be allowed to manifest, more movement instead of torturing children (one day it will be denounced) by making them sit still for hours! The noise of playgrounds, which can reach 100 decibels (the maximum bearable by the human ear is 65 decibels), is certainly the natural reaction of children momentarily free from these torments.

Hospitality and leisure can do much more for school, if school wants to go beyond its current goals of providing citizens with an average intellectual culture. There is a school model that has been known for a long time and there are few societies that are willing to implement it due to its cost: it is a full-time school, compulsory, and accessible to all children from 6 to 15 years of age. Though Joffre Dumazedier-the founder of sociology of leisure-did not write specifically about this proposal, he often referred to it in his lectures: a 9-hour school day, divided into three equal periods: (a) that of the average intellectual culture (the current school but with reduced time, coordinated by the direction with the participation of teachers and students), (b) that of compulsory, yet optional, activities coordinated by the teachers with the participation of the direction and the students, within a wide range of alternatives, (theater, cinema, music, plastic arts) and physical activities (gymnastics and sports), and (c) free time with activities coordinated by students organized in institutions (clubs, fraternities) with the support of teachers and management.

In other words, if school is to be hospitable to all children, it should address all cultural interests of children, intellectual but also physical, artistic, and social interests in which recreation is perceived, if and when freely chosen.

It is clear that the implementation of this concept on a national scale today would be costly and it would hardly win over politicians whose horizons are limited to a four-year mandate. Compared to the current model, this school would have twice the number of teachers and, ideally, it would have a very different space, having besides the classrooms, library, and auditorium, varied physical and artistic equipment. It was roughly the CIEP model of Brizola and Darcy Ribeiro. An enormous cost if you want to implement this model throughout Brazil. It may be necessary, at least at the outset, to call on a utopian concept that, nonetheless, is already working out well in many Brazilian northeastern cities.

The growing movement of exchange students, the study of the environment (educational tourism) and the increase in study programs abroad show that tourism in its relationship with school is a critical condition for future professional survival and tends to become a right.

In the 1930s, Bachelard (1996) wrote about the true position of school in society. He concludes one of his most prestigious works by stating the necessity of reversing social needs: the school was not made for society; it was society that was made for school. The school he spoke of was not a simple building much less the home of a class of workers. It was society as a whole. For the first time someone enunciated the concept that would later be called educational society. How can we understand, he asked, the impoverished physics, chemistry, and biology laboratories in schools, if even in the smallest cities there are an electric power generation plant, a water treatment plant, hospitals, a series of places where the most up-to-date science is known and practiced?

This reasoning can be extended to other areas. All cities have sports courts, swimming pools, auditoriums, not to mention connoisseurs of traditional culture, visual artists, musicians, all underused and underutilized. Why cannot school take advantage of them? Recreational clubs, always better equipped with facilities than schools, have idle facilities most of the time (especially school time) and do not pay IPTU [Urban Building and Land Tax]. What is the retribution they offer? Have we not here, then, a good clue to schools?

Perhaps, this reflection may sound chimerical; but before anyone says that, it would be interesting to understand how some schools in Piauí and Ceará are among the best in the country and certainly use the concept presented here.

In conclusion, we can state, this time without fear of error, that this reflection is only chimerical because the political discourse on school education is demagogic. Brizola, more than creating the CIEPs, created a factory of CIEPs. Moreira Franco, who replaced him, just said that Brazil had no money for this school and closed the program.

4 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TOURISM AND LEISURE: THE CASE OF SEX TOURISM

Relationships between leisure and tourism have been are more studied. It is known, for example, as Pronovost (2018) reminds us that, at the outset, the social sciences of tourism borrowed the main categories of analysis from leisure. For Marc Boyer (1972), tourism is nothing more than leisure activities carried out outside the city where one lives. For MacCannel (1976), tourism is the field of study of a new theory of the leisure class, reproducing the title of Veblen's classic work, one of the first sociological approaches to contemporary leisure. As Pronovost reminds us, the social sciences of tourism distanced themselves from leisure when they assumed their main feature, i.e., that of representing a triple change for tourist: of landscape, of rhythm, and of lifestyle.

But is leisure within this triple change the same leisure that the individual has at home and in his city? From the empirical point of view, as noted over and over, although sometimes still practiced for utilitarian reasons (business, family, religious, health), tourism translates into travel in which the main purpose is leisure. In other words: tourism is not the only “noble” activity of leisure, but it is the most “distinct”-either in the positive meaning of refinement, of a genuine desire to appreciate new societies and new landscapes, or in the negative meaning of mere ostentation, as Pierre Bourdieu (2007) assigns to it. Travel is the most cited project by lottery winners, it is the first impulse of those who hit the jackpot and, mainly, is the question that most presses individuals on the rise; the pleasure of leisure is the most looked for in travel, even in business with, perhaps, the exception of health tourism, when we are the patient, but even then only if we are in pain.

This explains the obsession of individuals in treating these terms as interchangeable or reducing one to the other. More important than differences, however, let us speak of the main similarity: they both have in recreation or, more precisely, in pleasure, their focus. And as tourism requires an additional investment, people expect greater entertainment than in everyday leisure activities. It is accepted that work is not a source of pleasure, it is accepted that family life is not always a bed of roses, but the absence of pleasure in a leisure activity or trip is, in the words of many, “money thrown away”. That is why we speak more about experience tourism than experience leisure but, in fact, we expect fun recreation in both.

Anyway, the emphasis here is the recreational motivation, the pleasure, present in tourism. And when one talks about recreation, one must remember the two most pleasurable activities of individuals, according to the founder of neuroendocrinology Jean-Didier Vincent (2000). I am talking here about food and sex. Albeit not leisure activities in themselves, food and sex became part of the individuals’ expectations when engaging in leisure or tourism activities, precisely because these are closely linked to the pursuit of pleasure. The explanation is more in biology than in culture. These are essential activities for the perpetuation of the species and, if they were not pleasurable, the species in general, and the human species in particular, would be doomed to extinction.

Coincidentally, the forms of pleasure-more in the case of sex than of food-are classified either as “healthy” or “harmful”. Also, because they are so pleasurable, they can become an addiction for some individuals with negative impacts on work, health, or family life; not to mention, the array of evils that accompany addiction in such activities.

Surely, about the importance of food there would be much to say; but here we will focus on the pursuit of sex, within the set of human needs, in leisure and tourism.

In his novel Platform, Michel Houellebecq (2002) narrates in the first person the case of an employee of the French Ministry of Culture addicted to sex tourism and who becomes a consultant of a network of resorts with the following mantra: sex or any form of romantic intercourse is the clear or hidden expectation of any trip. Let us replace any trip, since everything, whole, nothing, no one are terms that do not fit science. One can imagine, for example, that Mother Tereza of Calcutta would travel without this expectation. But we cannot deny that sex is a travel motivation for many people, whether explicit or not.

A caveat is in order before proceeding: there are no certainties in science, only probabilities. Therefore, all fields of knowledge belong to a universe of ambiguity and allow for a refutation. In fact, as Karl Popper (1975) said, every proposed theory must be attacked on all sides, always seeking to find the dimension, or situation, or case in which it proves to be false. Nonetheless, it is important to return to Jean-Didier Vincent (2000), who considers that the relativity of science is never as evident as when analyzing human pleasure. Pleasure poses an ontological problem that stems from the researcher’s own roots. Take the discussion about leisure for instance or a more recent example, the debate on drug regulation. Here the reasoning seems to lose its creative function and disappears under the curtain of preconception or, worse, prejudice. Reasoning becomes mere post hoc gymnastics toward its own axiology, of confirming beforehand what one wants confirmed.

One can understand there, also, why sex is still taboo in tourism and hotels. It is not a matter of endorsing Houellebecq's conclusions; after all, the dominant moralistic atmosphere hinders today, and in a near future, hotels and brothels of working together. But there is no doubt that the standard hotel practice is still far from accommodating the idea that many guests have this expectation and would like some support or at least not having their expectations frustrated.

This ideology-to the extent that it guides protocols, in which values are assumed-contaminates not only receptionists and hotel concierges, but the very notion of sex tourism, placed as it is in the ‘Index’ of tourism. This condemnation of sex tourism ends up encompassing everything that concerns sex: not only the hateful sexual exploitation of children and adolescents-a fight that will never suffice-as the legitimate-though morally contested in religious doctrines-desire of travelers to enjoy their freedom to have sex and even the somewhat humorous, but certainly cynical, idea that every tourist interested in sex visiting us, whether male or female, is a plunderer of our natural resources. To the common sense, today, every form of sex in tourism is sex tourism.

Incidentally, it would be good if the actual target of sex tourism policies were the repression of exploitation of children and adolescents. But for that, the deterrent and repressive force of the state is not enough. A great help could come from within prostitution.

Even if one enters the swampy terrain of individual liberties (of drugs, gambling, sex), it is worth remembering that legislation does not criminalize prostitution per se, only its commercial exploitation. But prostitution organized within professional standards, besides representing an additional security to the interested tourist, could generate an additional protection to the children and adolescents. These would obviously be prohibited from participating in the activity and the prostitutes themselves would have an interest in defending their market.

This ideological substrate of sex tourism tends to become anachronistic in view of the myriad of situations in which sex transgresses morality and places people in a gray zone between conventionally accepted sex and prostitution. This evidence should gradually influence hotel practices.

5 CONCLUDING REMARKS

The relationships between hospitality, leisure, and tourism should be enriched soon with the evolution of research around a new concept, that of mobility. Contemporary hypermobility, conceived according to Medeiros, Telles and Allis (2018), as a phenomenon with varied effects and implications in the environmental, physiological, psychological, emotional, attitudinal, identity, and social dimensions must bring about a rearrangement in the current bases of these disciplines.

As Jean Viard (2005) says, we evolved from a predominantly sedentary society- Leroi-Gourhan (n.d.) would say sedentary in the Neolithic and over sedentary in the Industrial Revolution-to an increasingly mobile society. He recalls that in France, a few decades ago, individuals traveled daily on average 5 km; today it is 30. Beginning in the 1950s, travel began to be part of the expectation of individuals. Nowadays one already speaks of necessity for both students and practitioners. Currently, due to the psychological and educational advantages of travel, one can speak of the “right to travel”, as well as some mention the right to leisure.

Mobility, thus, tends to become a paradigm and places the concept of hospitality at the heart of public policy. Receiving and being received become essential skills in times of mobility. In fact, it can be said that even today the concept of hospitality can already be considered central to public policy, whose republican ideal is precisely to eliminate or minimize mechanisms of exclusion.

For the time being, mobility, such as hospitality, focuses on migration-more recently refugees-and tourism. However, if we consider mobility a new paradigm of analysis, we must go beyond and think of all its unfolding in the different dimensions. For example, the notion of neighborhood no longer indicates the individuals living next door. The change of domicile is increasingly frequent and sometimes we do not even have time to know the neighbors, let alone interacting with them. The neighbors today are the ones that are close to us at work, at leisure and in the relationships, albeit momentarily, we establish in travels, in hotels.

Mobility can become a relevant topic in the social and human sciences, and even in the health sciences. If one already thinks about the psychological transformations of travel, like Sheller and Urry (2006), why not think about the unfolding of the mobility in the physical and biological dimensions? The field of tourism and health, today, focuses on travelers' health controls, as if vaccines and quarantines were the central problem of mobility. The richest hypothesis seems to be the one that seeks to unveil all the changes that affect individuals in mobility. The more we leave home, the more we depend on the hospitality of others, the more survival resources we must carry, not to mention the health consequences in general (stress, gastric or emotional problems, etc.).

It should also bring out one of the theoretical underpinnings of hospitality, which is the difference between the individual at home and away from home. At home, we are ourselves. Outside the home, we are actors, we play roles. The image of the individual who comes home at night, closes the door, and begins to discard objects and clothes that accompanied him away from home could be a metaphor for the restoration of his own identity.

Mobility also affects the relationship between tourism and leisure. For the common sense and hasty students, leisure is the playful practice within the city itself, while tourism is leisure practiced in other cities, regions, and countries. But the paradigm of mobility shows that the true distinction to be made is not between leisure in one's own city and another city. It is between leisure at home and away from home (or city). As has been shown above, most of the leisure time is experienced inside the house itself. Thus, extra domestic urban leisure and tourism itself can be understood as the set of changes that operate in individuals within a new measure-how far they move away from home.

In addition to mobility, other topics should also be addressed in leisure, tourism, and hospitality research. If the pursuit of pleasure is at the very heart of these fields, why not go further and study happiness itself, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1992) and his theory of flow have tried. The tourism economy has this debt to the area. It is not enough to study the relationships between travel and the economy of countries. Someday, we should study the relationships between money, consumption, and personal satisfaction, a kind of cost-benefit study of tourism, which would include the studies on the non-monetized economy, already mentioned by Sahlins (1979) and which inspired the work by Pierre Bourdieu, as well as the current studies on human happiness.

There is no doubt also that these new studies must be discussed at an interdisciplinary level, a methodology that has been much talked about but little practiced. To this day we limit ourselves to multi-disciplinarity, in which we respectfully listen to our colleagues from other disciplines, and then speak simply from the point of view of our discipline. One hopes for the day when sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians, psychologists, economists, and even researchers from the exact sciences, will be able to review and reformulate their own research in the light of the contribution of others.

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• 1
  “Ato de hospedar; hospedagem.”. (Dic. Aurélio, Rio. Nova Fronteira, 1986) or “1. Bom acolhimento dispensado a alguém. 2.Agasalho dado a hóspedes. (Dicionário Michaelis, 1998).
• 2
  “Action de recevoir et d´héberger quelqu´un chez soi, par charité, liberalité, amitié” (Le Petit Larousse, Paris, 1993.
• 3
  “The food, drink and other comforts that an organisation sometimes provides in order to keep its guests happy. (Cambridge International Dictionary of English, London, 1995) or 1. Welcoming behavior toward guests. 2. Food, a play to sleep, etc. when given to a guest. (Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture, London, 1992).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  25 Nov 2019
• Date of issue
  Sep-Dec 2019