Introduction

Summer camps are widespread events in Brazil. Because of the characteristics of their activities, several Physical Education teachers are involved and working in these places. The main activities of most summer camps are physical ones, such as games, sports, recreational and rhythmic activities, among others. The reason is their finality, that is usually the opportunity to fill the vacation time of students with physical and leisure activities in an oriented way, stimulating the students to like them and arouse the team spirit, community action, autonomy, leadership and sportsmanship (^{SILVA, 2008}; ^{MARCELLINO, 2000}).

Summer camps were motivated by two perspectives: pedagogical and hygienic-sanitary. The first one regards the need for softer impacts generated by excessive school intellectualism and sedentary habits commonly transmitted by the school. Hygienic-sanitary perspective was based because some groups were submitted to poor housing conditions, which have contributed to a high infant mortality rate. Summer camps were understood as a palliative for this situation because it kept children far from those conditions, at least awhile (^{MARTÍNEZ, 2009}).

According to ^{Berto, Ferreira Neto & Schneider (2009)}, summer camps in the 1930s and 1940s decades in Brazil are considered extracurricular institutions and, as a plan for the future of the nation, a way to present notions of health and hygiene for participants. Its purpose was also developing the children to be civilized and ready for progress, as citizens of tomorrow. The main purposes were regeneration, civilization and nationalization through discipline.

Within today is possible to affirm that there is a strong presence of disciplinary power and biopolitics in summer camps, which are a heritage from what these events were originated and perpetuated in the last years (^{MATTOS et al., 2017}). Currently, the summer camps are seen mainly as a “product” to be consumed during the vacations, and ^{Silva (2008)} alerts to the “activity pack” commonly imposed on the children because of the market interest. This format disregard characteristics which are specific for each group, further reducing possibilities for development promoted by the leisure.

According to ^{Viana (2015)}, leisure commodification is inseparable from its bureaucratization and control. It means that “[...] whether people are already controlled in their work, to work and social obligations, now another moment of their lives starts to suffer an external control” (^{VIANA, 2015}, p. 66). It allows the inference that besides the school environment, those regard informal education follow the same path of most pedagogical models already available. These models keep training passive and receptive students because they are not who formulate questions, but those who always receive orders and tasks (^{CRUZ, 2011}; DE FREITAS, 2015).

In summer camps the pedagogy is the same as the traditional one, and it contributes to people became apathetic, even in unusual moments when they could be protagonists of their life and formation. A summer camp might be a great tool for collective construction, but for that happen, overcoming certain occupational and welfare nature practices nature is necessary, also thinking about critic and creative ways that might stimulate children’s autonomy. ^{Silva (2008, p. 18)} explains:

While summer camps are configurated as a professional field of significant number, if not dominant for Physical Educators, proposals are still poorly systematized, what result in shortage production on the thematic and suggests a poorly reflected action.

Thereunto, this work aims at understanding the commodification and leisure discipline in summer camps. This study considered the suggestion by ^{Mattos et al. (2017)} and contributes to the emphasis on presenting the most recent empirical results once the leisure field needs this type of content.

Method

This study has a qualitative approach because it searched for understanding the senses from experience within a specific scope of participants. Content Analysis was used as a resource (^{BARDIN, 2011}, p. 48), defined as

a set of communication analysis techniques in order to obtain, through systematic and objective procedures for describing the content of messages, indicators [...] which allow inference of knowledge regarding the production/reception conditions [...] of these messages.

To meet the objective proposed, ten Physical Education teachers were established as research subjects, who worked as teachers and/or coordinators in different summer camps in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. The chosen for these professionals and institutions where they work occurred by convenience, obeying the inclusion criterion worked in at least two summer camps as a teacher and/or coordinator in the last five years. This criterion has ensured that participants have more than one professional experience² in summer camps, which might increase the credibility of collected narratives.

Data were collected in the first semester of 2016 through semi-structured interviews. A semi-structured interview was based on the possibility to guide the questions that the interviewer considers important for the objective in his/her study, while the freedom of interaction is ensured (^{AMADO, 2017}).

According to the categorical analysis methodology, the theme was established as a registration unit, searching for the apparent sense cores in these communications, which allows understanding the subject studied. To facilitate understanding the procedures regarding the content analysis, following ^{Bardin’s (2011)} recommendations, the actions were divided into three stages. Initially, a pre-analysis was carried out through floating reading to capture the content, but without search for the apprehension techniques in detail. Posteriorly, the material was deeply explored to elaborate indicators, text clippings, and categorization. Finally, the data were interpreted. Approved by the Research Ethics Committee under the number CAAE: 50712915.9.0000.5259.

Results and discussion

Chart 1 presents indicators and categories which emerged from the analysis of material collected in the interviews. Categorization points to a form of ordering the researched reality to understand it globally.

Leisure commodification in Summer Camps

Interviewees showed discontent with the precepts that the summer camps carry. They showed clear information that these spaces should intend the young people and children’s leisure. However, some teachers regret that these spaces intend to work commercially.

In fact, summer camps would be a living and leisure moment for them, but nowadays they are commercialized. The number of students is more important than what you do there (Interviewee 1).

According to Interviewee 1, summer camps are understood within the market scope, because their purpose is having the greater number of children, not valuing the service quality. When introducing the concept of Commodity Fetishism, ^{Marx (2013)} explains that the capitalist production model covers the social characteristics of workup, because it considers them as materials and social properties inherent to the work products, then they become commodities, social things. Fetishism occurs when work products are generated as commodities.

The commodity is something that satisfies every specie of human needs from its characteristics. It is not understood as something simple, but as something that detains malicious mediations and determinations (^{MARX, 2013}).

According to ^{Lukács (1974)}, the specificity of capitalism is rationality applied to the subjectivity, not only to the production. In other words, commodity fetishism spreads to all the areas of everyday life. ^{Bourdieu (1979}, ¹⁹⁹³⁾ discussed this spread of capital logic to several areas, such as art, fashion, sport, among others. With the idea of field and market, the author infers this adjustment to the modern sport, which is guided by business logic.

Following Marx’s thoughts and Interviewee 1’s discourse, holiday camps assume a marketing character. Thereby, what Physical Education professionals produce in summer camps are commodities that depend even more on the number of children/clients.

^{Marx (2013)} affirms that in capitalism the worker does not use the production instruments: on the opposite, these instruments are turned into the capital to use the worker. The author explains that in a factory, the worker is subordinated to the machine movements, obeying a purpose that is the profit. The managers’ and entrepreneurs’ intentions are purely selling goods, in this case, leisure. Another excerpt from the Interviewee 6 report show aspects which are adjusted to this idea.

[...] Even starting by the coordination that no longer accepted some practices which I would like to do (Interviewee 6).

Regarding the team of a summer camp in which the interviewee has worked, he affirmed that the worker should follow the manager’s movement, performing most activities according to the proposing institution and obeying the orders so that the work would be even more uniform and promoting more profit. It allows thinking that production is a pillar that concerns people responsible for this type of leisure space. ^{Fuchs (2017)} affirms that the creation of certification of animator and director of summer camps in the 1940s decade has promoted the summer camps.

When someone uses some daily movements to have leisure moments and exchange them by the equivalent money, whether, in a movie, an art exposition, or a summer camp, this person is exchanging the artists or summer camps work objectivation. This person is exchanging by hours of human work. To perform the need for consumption, the human being undergoes a commodities relation schema expressed by a pure relationship with money, not as a result of social or individual work.

This same process occurs in the Health area and its main consequence is citizenship weakening when it affects the right to health (^{SANTOS, 2013}). ^{Paulino, Siqueira, and Figueiredo (2017)}, e.g., have found the disciplinary discourse dedicated to elder health. They explain that the consequence is the dissemination of guilty and elders’ responsibilities by their sores, masking the infrastructure that should be ensured by right. The citizen does not see his/her health as a right but as a good. This fact also reaches the summer camps, affecting not only the right to health but even the leisure, another fundamental right according to the Constitution.

^{Mendes et al. (2017)} observe that the attack on social rights and imposition to risks for universal health construction is observed. For the authors, it does not happen only through cuts in public spending linked to health, but when organizing a social protection practice to serve the market interests. It is not different with the leisure, mainly when it is understood as a non-obligatory occupation, a free choice developed in a moment that is not used for life obligation; in other words, free time (^{REQUIXA, 1980}; ^{LEMA; RUIZ; SCARLATO, 2011}).

This discussion becomes even more important when, despite recognizing the variety of concepts of leisure and its relation a little ambiguous in literature, considering a guideline that understands the leisure as a set of occupations that a person might surrender willingly. Some examples are the rest, amusement, entertainment and even developing information or disinterested formation, or the free creative ability after being free from the professional, family, and social obligations (^{DUMAZEDIER, 1979}).

Labor activity is an element that demarcates the structuration of society time frames. Social time presents some characteristics, among which is the free time that regards human actions carried out without an external need. In other words, the person is free to use this time with full autonomy and in a creative way, depending on his/her worthwhile awareness of your time (^{MUNNÉ, 1980}).

For capitalism, free time is a waste, because it struggles even more by increased profits. Therefore, free time becomes another opportunity to gain, and leisure is an example. Leisure becomes consumption, profit, considered one of the most opportune and profitable businesses nowadays. Leisure cultural dimension is fully replaced by the commercial function, and in parallel with work, activities linked to the free time appear. However, these activities have assumed the way of industrial society (^{PADILHA, 2000}).

Thereby, as the usage value, the commodity is presented as an independent will of people. In the summer camps case, parents pay for supposed leisure that children would have during the determined period. For ^{Silva (2012)}, the word leisure is more and more present in people’s daily. Nevertheless, it does not mean that it is lived in the same proportion. “By and large, leisure has gained evidence to be treated as a commodity, adding value to other products [...], or by proposals of amusement and entertainment to be consumed” (^{SILVA, 2012}, p. 12). To the author, it is serious because the use of leisure as social and personal development is not considered.

^{Mascarenhas (2005)} discusses the difficulty to identify in a safe and decidedly way some type of leisure that has not resisted the commodity figure. The author uses the word “mercolazer” to expresses the dynamic of the leisure commodification in its most immediate manifestation that assumes the figure of a commodity. The word also configures leisure when the

[...] promised use value, when its imaginary power, as a significant thing, appears unintentionally bonded to the body of other goods; as a stage for experiences, serving as an amusement attraction and lending the status of leisure to a set of sale points or commercial equipment; and as fun shopping when the exchange process itself assumes the identity of a leisure activity (^{MASCARENHAS, 2005}, p. 157).

“Mercolazer” is accepted as an exclusive paradigm for leisure interpretation and organization when people adopt the value and market relations as life guiding and organizing principles. Considering the market as a commonplace for leisure practices and that cultural industry takes charge to assert what leisure is better, it seems that there no other alternative than “mercolazer” (^{MASCARENHAS, 2005}).

According to ^{Camargo (2017)}, almost half of the Brazilian population spends its free time with leisure produced by the cultural industry, which involves television, newspaper, magazines, among others. However, the mass media does not reproduce other leisure practices contents, such as art, sport, and music, for example. This phenomenon represents effectively that there is certain leisure consumption, not its effective practice.

^{Fuggle (2016)} affirms that the leisure industry captured the summer camps. The discourse of freedom and leisure on vacation omits the idea of productivity in the non-school period. The freedom widespread is a neoliberal project to capture the leisure and increase the control of human resources. It is biopolitics even of a naked life (^{DIKEN; LAUSTSEN, 2005}).

From the reports collected, it is possible to think that the maintenance this phenomenon is different in summer camps. What happens is an imposed leisure consumption, accepted as correct to practice, inhibiting the construction and autonomy in that period.

The notion of cultural industry is coupled up with the idea of control and organization process of a new way of communication. At first, people are exposed to this freedom and are given the option on what to watch, what to do to them, before plenty of options. However, remembering that the cultural industry consists of molding cultural and artistic production is important. Thus, people see these manifestations as commodities and become things, legitimatizing the alienation of the production of art for people who lack critical view. This industry aims to create, reinforce, and maintain a new need for consumption to generate its commodities, encouraging products, not knowledge (^{ADORNO; HORKHEIMER, 1990}).

The industry produces culture, becoming a commodity to produce a profit. This means that culture cannot simply exist, it needs to have a finality, then reducing its capacity for expression. Culture needs to undergo the capitalist logic, which generates a powerful effect on unconscious capitalism. When culture becomes a commodity, capitalist logic starts to dominate not only food, clothes, leisure, and others, but the unconscious too. Leisure commoditization and its bureaucratization are noticed by making people even more controlled (^{VIANA, 2015}).

According to ^{Dumazedier (1979)}, not everything beyond work is necessarily free time, so it could not be considered leisure. The author views some projects, such as courses or qualification and training requirements, and they are those that support social obligations as “to-work” activities.

^{Adorno and Horkheimer (1991)} assert that leisure is searched by those who intend to escape the mechanization process presented in work and most activities. However, mechanization has huge power over human leisure and happiness. This power determines the production of commodities addressed to amusement, entertainment, and leisure. In other words, a person searches for refuge in leisure by basing leisure structure on the same mechanized work logic.

Discipline and leisure in Summer Camps

Some interviewees showed that they feel that some children would not like to be there, but they do not have another option, hoping that moment will end soon. It is a reality that is in line with previous argumentation that a moment that could be different from daily life becomes the same. In summer camps case, children see it as the same as the school because they need to attend it with no alternative, carrying out activities proposed without chosen opportunity, having schedules, and tasks to fill.

Most children do not want to be at the summer camps. Unfortunately, what I have noticed is that parents work there during the school vacation. They need to leave their children with someone. Summer camp is a solution. Some of them want to practice, want to play with a ball, want swimming pool, but many children do not want to be there. They knew that “I have to stay here until certain time and soon my parents will come to take me. But I want to it end as soon as possible” (Interviewee 1).

Consonant with this study, ^{Silva (2012)} points that summer camps are common in the school vacation period, commonly meeting the needs of parents who do not have a place to leave their children during that time. Considering the leisure, cultural industry commoditization and other arguments previously exposed is important because they have a link with this characterization of the summer camps. What interest more here is the market influence that achieves professionals and children involved in.

Two points deserve highlights regarding the report below. The first one is about children associating school with summer camps, and the second regards the children’s behavior when identifying that place as a school. They reproduce what they do at school because they found similarities among situations.

In fact, the child thinks that is at a school, in a vacation school and repeats what she or he uses to do there (Interviewee 7).

[...] at school, the child is already conditioned to punishment. [...] However, when the teacher keeps his or her position and explains the rules, it is simple to deal with any kind of violence, both at summer camps and at school. [...] They attack or practice any kind of violence because they want (Interviewee 9).

Maybe at school you have a greater variety of punishment, but I think that attitude should be the same, towards conversation, guiding, draw the student’s attention (Interviewee 6).

According to ^{Antunes and Zuin (2008)}, when walking towards cultural imperatives and reinforcing education as dressage, the typical hegemony of a clarified society becomes evident, instead of enabling autonomy, conserves the culture authoritative standard. ^{Houssaye (1998)} also highlights that the school structure dominates summer camps and other leisure activities. These places duplicate the school disciplinary model. It is possible to affirm that further to be influenced by the school, Summer camps nowadays receive strong influence from the market behavior, becoming it a commodity to profit. This process occurs with all the life areas once the capitalist logic invades the unconscious. The vision of any leisure area as a commodity carries a good dose of bureaucracy and control, which makes the person exposed to the same domination dynamics of work.

In other words, a person looks for leisure to set him or herself free, even for a moment, from the mechanization process that dominates him or her all day long. However, leisure follows the same mechanization of work logic. Therefore,

The logic of commodity and instrumental rationality invades the consumption, leisure, art and culture activities, in a way that cultural reception is conditioned by the exchange value, to the same extent that higher values and purposes of culture succumb (^{MANCEBO et al., 2002}, p. 327).

Thorough control of children occurs from the control of the middle, the time, space, activities, and the body. These types of control are easily noticed in summer camps (^{MATTOS et al., 2017}; ^{RANGEL; SILVA, 2017}). However, the interviewee also reported the influence of the discipline during these events. This characteristic makes the summer camps similar to the Gorky Colony, where young offenders had a routine full of mandatory tasks, including those addressed to the leisure, and were subjected to punishment when a rule was unfulfilled (^{MAKARENKO, 2012}).

When we ask teachers on the organization of children who participate, we noticed that teachers claim the summer camp principles were against any turmoil or behavior which deviates from what is expected by the institution.

No, I believe that it happens because of the characteristics of the children who came. Not by the summer camp, even because we preach social values all the discipline, cooperation and overcoming time long (Interviewee 2).

Here it is possible to see that professionals are concerned with making the summer camp a controlled and organized environment, where they are the authorities before the children. They have the power and the responsibility to do not let children leave what they consider ideal behavior for that environment. The system related to social values is an important part of the discipline expected in summer camps, as evidenced by the teacher's reports.

The recognition of teachers as the authorities in summer camps make us resort to ^{Foucault (1993)} when he affirms that disciplinary apparatus enables a sight that sees everything permanently. Therefore, it is, at the same time, a source that illuminates everything and a place of convergence: nothing escapes that eye, and it is the point where everyone looks.

According to ^{Silva (2012)}, people responsible for summer camps should be mediators, which does not happen in most cases. What happens is the reproduction of activities in which the responsible her or himself in the spotlight. It occurs due to the need for meeting demands from the market. In summer camps, the number of children is high to make the profit greater and greater, and use of the disciplinary power strategies is the way by the teachers found to enable them to carry out their work before the number of children under their responsibility. According to the study by ^{Saja (2013)}, we are in a consumer society and bodily practices are serving the interests of the market. That is the reason why people who work in the Physical Education area should be critical and reflective subjects regarding these practices to understand how the practitioner assign meanings to them.

Summer camps organization is a consequence of the entertainment industry and functionalist practices (^{SILVA, 2012}). Indeed, it provides the “activity pack” imposed on the children. ^{Matos (2007)} problematizes these issues highlighting that leisure is a time/space for freedom and creation. However, oftentimes it is produced within the circulation and consumption scope. It happens with the purpose of achieving mainly the entertainment and occupy the free time, denying the spontaneity of the subject from the standardized plans.

Another finding from this research was the violence.

[...] I worked in the last summer camp with children from 3 to 5 years old, so you always have to keep your eyes on them. If you turn your head for 5 seconds, a child might hitch another (Interviewee 8).

It almost was an aggression case, if we do not intervene, he will literally fight with a colleague, about take a broomstick (Interviewee 1).

[...] I have seen many children fighting, because of the snack, or because one felt underestimated by the other, or because another one got there and make a little friend and another friend become jealous, then attacked this child. Or she felt underestimated too, at long last... I already also have seen a child wanted to hitch a teacher (Interviewee 3).

Other studies already investigate violence in schools, but not in summer camps. ^{Giordani, Seffner, and Dell’Aglio (2017)} investigated the students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the violence in school space. By the content analysis, the authors established discursive categories, including violence among pairs and the violence among teachers and students. ^{Loureiro and Queiroz (2005)} detached violence at school under two aspects: physical and verbal ones. We relate the causes of violence at school were related firstly to the unstructured family and to the environment that the student or the school is inserted, which indicates an uncritical view of dynamics woven inside the school. This fact is similar in our research:

Violence is everything that harm the other, aggression, even verbal one. It might be everything that can hurt the other. There are verbal and physical violence. I consider the physical one most serious, because it generates a damage (Interviewee 10).

I believe that all of them are serious, but I think that the physical one keeps as the most serious, because it hits directly and might cause irreversible damage too. Despite the psychological one is also profoundly serious; I believe that physical violence still let the society more shocked and astonished (Interviewee 9).

I think that physical violence is more frequent, such as a pinch, a slap. But I also see the verbal one. Both are serious. Physical violence hurts, but words can hurt even more (Interviewee 8).

Most common violence we also see at school, it is more about possession, such as: Oh, it is mine. And prejudice, such as: Oh, you are not playing with us because you are like this or like that. I think that prejudice hits not only the physical [aspect], but also the emotional one too. Sometimes the child carries it. It is about do hitch, the act of punishment because the child wants something (Interviewee 7).

I understand violence as any attitude that attacks in physical or emotional way, or psychiatric, social ones, so [...] there is the physical violence that the contact is physical, an attack. In the physical case, I think that there is more something conscious, do you understand? And other kinds of violence when there is the emotional, psychic, and social matter, and might occur in in conscious or unconscious ways (Interviewee 6).

^{Maranhão et al. (2014)} highlighted that violence suffered might occur more in threats and humiliation forms. In general, these episodes are continuous within the domestic scope. Brazilian society still seems to have the conservative marks of a colonial, slavery-based society, characterized by the predominance of the private space over the public, and on the patriarchal family, with strong hierarchization. ^{Maldonado et al. (2005)} collected data with mothers in-home visits. Results pointed to correlations among school violence and families’ social-economic conditions.

^{Marcel Soriano, Fernando Soriano and Evelia Jimenez (1994)} assert that school violence might be more related to the fact that children from different cultures are together in the same environment. This hypothesis seems to be more convergent with violence inside the summer camps. Despite several experiences of violence manifested in summer camps, leisure lived there still might be considered a way of freedom. Thereunto, elaborating a critical theory of leisure is necessary (^{HEMINGWAY, 1996}). In this sense, studies which expose how social practices regulate bodies allows at the same time create an emancipatory space (^{ROBINETT, 2014}).

Final considerations

Nowadays, it is rare to identify some type of leisure that had resisted the merchandise figure (^{MASCARENHAS, 2005}). In this study, we found merchandise figure signs of dissatisfaction with the professionals involved due to the printed marketing feature in the current summer camps. The cause of this dissatisfaction is the quality of service shortage, in which professionals recognize that they are performing because of the excess of children under their responsibility, in one group or class. Besides, summer camp management seems to disregard the way some professionals like to work.

This dissatisfaction comes from the need to couple a leisure activity up to the mechanization of work, which appears when there is the need to manage a great number of students and the use of strategies of discipline, for example, are used as a way of control.

These are points that can be consequences of the influence of market thinking in summer camps, and the life and work of children and teachers, respectively. Some children see the summer camps as a school because they are presented to a series of ready activities for the dynamics, and the event progresses as favorable to profit and managers’ intentions.

The logic of work mechanization at school also is found in summer camps; playful dimension has been removed from both environments, and the excess of discipline is also quite visible. In an attempt to get time to be free from the production logic, a person who looks for leisure found the same traits of this logic in it. In this case, after spent the entire year attending a school, the child found some of its characteristics in a leisure moment, that would be the summer camp.

Physical Education teacher is first of all an educator, and his or her practices should be further than the reproduction of movements and knowledge transmission. Understanding matters regarding leisure and their meanings for the human being is necessary. A practical suggestion is considering the choice and the listening to, enabling democratization (^{SILVA, 2012}). Besides, health and education practices should go against all the oppressive conducts from the market to exist production of new rules and ideas under the perspective of social justice through the mobilization of institutions (^{ARTUR, 2015}).

Therefore, perhaps the summer camps do not have a clear relation with leisure, even considering the lack of consensus by part of the literature that embraces this concept. The contribution of this study to whom that work in this field runs through this issue and involves the suggestion that considers the entire context in which summer camps are involved is important. It includes the commoditized “leisure” and all the disciplinary characteristics which embrace it. In an attempt to reduce this industrial and individualist society, as well as of the productivism load in an important moment for children and young people, tools that allow questioning and chosen at least some activities should be used.

In short, affirm that leisure commoditization makes some professionals need to use mechanisms common with the disciplinary power is possible. That because the excess of children by group/class is chosen by the summer camps to profit even more. To control this large number of children, teachers must use the disciplinary power. These techniques involve calculated manipulation of gestures and behaviors, control schedules and activities, the value of the hierarchy, submission, and obedience among others, always intending to maintain the order and the balance.

Consequently, leisure possibly is not present in a summer camp, as described by ^{Dumazedier (1979)}. However, presenting and teaching what leisure can be is necessary. Then, carrying out studies that focus on summer camps is imperative once they even maintain characteristics of the school, their objectives routines and dynamics are different . Studies considering the opinion of the children involved are interesting options to allow a view of this phenomenon from another viewpoint.