Nowadays, there is trending in reflection the Eurocentric theoretic framework. As a result, many researchers begin to make an effort to bring their specific cultural philosophy integrated into the current system. Leisure study is part of this trending. For example, the study of the influence of Chinese culture has indicated that Chinese groups seemed to have a different set of understanding regarding outdoor recreation. Some leisure scholars with an anthropology background even suggested considering a culture based terminology system in leisure study.
In order to contribute to the argument of Eurocentric debt, this research chose to study the cultural uniqueness in Chinese students' outdoor recreation experience in New Zealand. After 27 in-depth interviews on Chinese students' outdoor experience, the data has reflected an interesting finding that Chinese students have created a culturizing process that signified outdoor recreation beyond a leisure option to cultural practice in the host society. This process was developed by capturing the symbolic differences compared to their culture of origin.
Differentiating from many other types of research that focused on the direct connection between the culture of origin and recreational behaviour, this finding could suggest an indirect connection between original culture and newcomers recreational behaviour: By referring to the original culture, Chinese students created their own cultural explanation on local's leisure style. By doing so, they grasped the meaning and the way of practice from their perspective and used them to guide the reaction on different outdoor recreation scenarios.
This research pointed out how the newcomers specialized the locals' daily routine into a cultural representative. This result allows the locals to re-examine the local leisure policy from the perspective of the migrant population so as to provide better leisure services for a multicultural society.
Mots clés : outdoor recreation |Chinese student|culturizing process|cultural influence
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