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

Abstract

Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos Simon Creak Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015, xvi+337p.This book is a welcome addition to the literature on under-studied country, Laos, on also under-studied topic, sport in relation to nationalism and masculinity.Before looking at the evolution of sport and masculinity from a chronological perspective, Simon Creak reviews in the Introduction numerous theories and concepts related to physicality and masculinity-from Ana Maria Alonso's idea that physical practice strengthens national consciousness to Clifford Geertz's view of power in a theatre state exercised through spectacle, for instance-as a to present his overall argument that sport is the most significant means of substantializing notions of the body, masculinity, and the in modern societies (p. 12), since at the center of the book is empire building, making, and socialist construction.The first chapter discusses the case study of the indigenous game tikki, which resembles field hockey, and how French travelers' accounts transformed the game into a crucial element of what it meant to be truly Lao. Such accounts served the French colonial state's aim to differentiate the Lao territories and people from Siam and the Siamese. Indeed, the traveler-writers, young Lao researchers, and Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient scholars Paul Levy and Charles Archiambault, by writing about tikki a tradition and ritual, helped in creating an idea of Laos, justifying its constitution a French colony and later a distinct and independent nation (p. 50).Advancing through the French colonial period, chapter 2 presents the Vichy-era Lao Nhay cultural renovation movement (1941-45). While reading this chapter discovered that it was built a critique of my own work on the Lao Nhay movement and sports in Laos during the Vichy era (Raffin, 2005). The author contests my argument that sport development was secondary to the promotion of the Lao Nhay movement, whose function was to nurture a cultural and linguistic nationalism in response to the threat of Thai irredentism in Laos. Creak contends that both were important and complemented one another (p. 53). Although rightfully underlining that did not look at Lao-language sources, his own argument is based mostly on French sources. Adding a few examples from Lao-language sources on sport, a Lao-language novel by P. S. Nginn (who was a Lao Nhay member), a short excerpt of the memoir of Governor Jean Decoux stating that I decided to rely on Sports-Youth activities in this country to launch 'le movement lao' (p. 66), and mentioning the creation of sport clubs without talking about their activities, membership, etc. does not provide enough evidence to convince me that the colonial state's politics at the time promoted both sport and the Lao Nhay movement on equal footing and that subsequently the Lao Nhay movement was as much a physical awakening it was a mental or cultural one in Laos, too (p. 64).Overall, through this chapter the author stresses how the male body was the primary agent of Philippe Petain's National Revolution in the metropole and in Indochina, and how racial and right-wing ideologies well militarism shaped sport policies in Indochina. Such a militarization of society was carried out in the 1950s, with the National Youth and Physical Education Cadre School, or ENCJEP, being molded after the Vichy-era schools in Phan Thiet and Vientiane (p. 95).This leads to chapter 3, which discusses the militarization of masculinity in independent Laos during the 1950s. Projects are usually not carried out in a vacuum; hence, the sport policies of the 1950s show quite a few continuities with the World War II period, from the military-style choreography of human bodies to adapted Vichy-era uniforms for ENCJEP instructors and trainees and the use of the natural method for trainee parachutists. …