Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory): 35 - Hardcover

Creak, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0824838890 ISBN 13: 9780824838898

Publisher: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015

Synopsis

This strikingly original book examines how sport and ideas of physicality have shaped the politics and culture of modern Laos. Viewing the country’s extraordinary transitions―from French colonialism to royalist nationalism to revolutionary socialism to the modern development state―through the lens of physical culture, Simon Creak’s 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 practices―including physical education, gymnastics, and military training―have 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 “imagined community” or “geobody,” he shows that Laos was also a “body at work,” 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.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Creak is associate professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research and visiting associate professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Hawai'i Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0824838890
• ISBN 13: 9780824838898
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 334