Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos

Abstract

This strikingly original book examines how sport and ideas of physicality have shaped the politics and culture of modern Laos. Viewing the countryAEs extraordinary transitionsufrom French colonialism to royalist nationalism to revolutionary socialism to the modern development stateuthrough the lens of physical culture, Simon CreakAEs lively and incisive narrative illuminates a nation that has no reputation in sport and is typically viewed, even from within, as a country of cheerful but lazy people. Creak argues that sport and related physical practicesuincluding physical education, gymnastics, and military traininguhave shaped a national consciousness by locating it in everyday experience. These practices are popular, participatory, performative, and, above all, physical in character and embody ideas and ideologies in a symbolic and experiential way. Combining cultural and intellectual history with historical thick description, Creak draws on a creative array of Lao and French sources from previously unexplored archives, newspapers, and magazines, and from ethnographic writing, war photography, and cartoons. More than an oimagined communityo or ogeobody,o he shows that Laos was also a obody at work,o making substantive theoretical contributions not only to Southeast Asian studies and history, but to the study of the physical culture, nationalism, masculinity, and modernity in all modern societies.