A LOOK AT THE LATIN AMERICAN CONCEPT OF LEISURE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF TRADITIONAL OCCUPATIONAL SCIENCE

Abstract

The Occupational Science, created in 1980 at the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Southern California, studies human occupations with attention to their meaning and cultural context, as well as it studies the human being as an occupational being in the complexity of everyday life. The concept of leisure by Christianne Gomes, a Brazilian author, emerged in the years 2000. She identified the leisure as a human need and questions the idea of ​​ it as the opposite of work. Frequently, the concepts of leisure and occupation are initially considered different, reason for which this article raises the question: is there any proximity between the concept of leisure proposed by Gomes (2004) and the occupational perception formulated by the postulates of the traditional occupational science? Therefore, this paper, in an essay format, seeks to correlate the Gomes leisure understanding with the occupation as proposed by the traditional occupational science, observing points of interaction and contradictory aspects. A comprehension of the concept in the perspective of occupational science creates bridges to unite the two knowledge, with familiar lecture. In the end, thoughts on the two themes, give us a comprehension of leisure as an important and necessary occupation for the current human being.