Overview

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.

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9780824838898

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Reviews

Creak s book will be the authoritative account of this history for years to come.-- <i>New Mandala</i>

Creak provides with Embodied Nation an easy to understand historiography of Laos, which does not lose itself in technical terms and thus provides, and also provides non-specialist readers a fascinating read from a hitherto unique perspective.-- Australian Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

It is unusual to conclude a review by quoting from the glowing statements to be found on the dustjacket of the book that is being reviewed. In this case, however, the words used to describe EmbodiedNation are fitting - superb, well-written, outstanding and highly original. Creak has much tooffer sport scholars as well as those with a specialist interest in the modern history of Laos or insouth-east Asia more generally. He is to be heartily congratulated on this fine publication.</p>-- International Journal of Asian Studies

Author Information

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.

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