Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos
Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos
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Abstract
This 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, the book illuminates a nation that has no reputation in sport and is typically viewed, even from within, as a country of cheerful but lazy people. It 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. The book travels through more than a century of Lao history, from a nineteenth-century game of tikhi—an indigenous game resembling field hockey—to the country's unprecedented outpouring of nationalist sentiment when hosting the 2009 Southeast Asian Games. Despite increasing female participation since the early twentieth century, the book demonstrates the major role that sport and physical culture have played in forming hegemonic masculinities in Laos. Even with limited national sporting success—Laos has never won an Olympic medal—the healthy, toned, and muscular form has come to symbolize material development and prosperity. The book outlines the complex ways in which these motifs, through sport and physical culture, articulate with state power.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
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1
Making a Modern Tradition
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2
Renovating the Body, Restoring the Nation/Race
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3
Embodying Military Masculinity
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4
Sport and the Theatrics of Power
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5
Representing Meuang Lao in Southeast Asia
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6
Socialist Cultures of Rhetoric and Physicality
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7
Mobilizing the Revolution
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8
Vientiane Games, 2009
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End Matter
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