Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos by Simon Creak (review)

Professor Susan Brownell’s (1995) seminal work Training the Body for China—which analyzed the symbiosis and intersections between (sporting) physicality, state identity, and political discourse—played a key role in drawing attention to processes of embodiment within the context of nation making and global international relations in the East. Historical trajectories, sociocultural processes, political machinations, public rhetoric, and citizenship, Brownell (and scholars such as Joshua Newman, Embodying Dixie, 2010; Dale Spencer, Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment, 2012; Andreas Niehaus and Christian Tagsold, Sport, Memory and Nationhood in Japan, 2013) reminds us, are inextricably entwined, contoured, and reinforced by corporeal practices. Embodied Nation, by Simon Creak, makes a further contribution to these debates and, notably, provides new terrain upon which we might continue our ongoing sociological, historical, and political analyses and interest in the body/bodies, sport, physical culture, and nation-state formation. Creak’s specific focus is on Laos, a relatively small Southeast Asian nation that has, over the course of the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, effectively become a playground of domestic, regional, and global ideologies and interests. Creak’s Embodied Nation details the intricacies of these forces, while concomitantly articulating their influence on sport and physical cultural practices.

Laos is an interesting space for examining synergies and tensions of embodiment and nation making, not least because of its regional and domestic tensions, dominant French colonial histories, socialist landscape, territorial insecurities, revolutionary politics, militaristic contours, public discontent over its national image and physicality, and general sporting inferiority complex. Over eight chapters, Creak identifies key periods and junctures in the history of Laos that have crystalized the body’s value as political and politicized. Outlining the significance of traditional, precolonial, physical cultures, Creak establishes how fundamental physicality and corporeal knowledge are to being, knowing, and doing in Laos society and, within this, to the recognition of a synergy between national citizenry and bodily practices.

Not unlike other nations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere during the twentieth century, Laos became subsumed within, and contoured by, colonial and postcolonial forces. Such forces essentially fostered domestic, regional, and international turbulence, but also destabilized notions of nationhood and assumptions about the roles of active, able, and productive bodies therein. Central in this regard was the Vichy administration that ruled over French Indochina between 1941 and 1945. During this time, Creak highlights, Laos witnessed an expansion of the colonial regime and consolidation of the French relationships with Germany and Japan; this, in turn, aided further “renovation” of the nation-state. After 1945, the militaristic emphasis within sport and physical cultural practices did not abate, but rather took on renewed and altered significance in light of the country’s repositioning within the global and regional politic axis (for Laos, this predominantly meant in relation to American operations in Vietnam). Even after the subsequent socialist revolution and movement, the use of physical and sporting cultures as mechanisms of statecraft was still significant. As the remaining chapters show, physicality remained important in “high socialist Laos” as new tensions emerged between the socialist undertones of mass spectatorship and participation and the political value of the country’s elite/global sport presence.

Overall, Creak’s work excels in drawing attention to a little-understood and -appreciated physical culture/sport history space. Creak has produced an erudite piece of scholarship that is meticulously researched, carefully structured, balanced, and insightful. Historians will, invariably, appreciate his rigor with a variety of conventional archival sources but also his useful incorporation of additional sources such as ethnographic writing, military photographic records, museum exhibits, and other ephemera. While not a feature of Creak’s examination, the research may also pique readers’ curiosities with regard to the utility and politicization of memory as a heuristic device—that is, for example, raising questions as to ways body knowledges are remembered in the construction of public imaginaries. Ultimately, Creak’s examination does provide fresh perspectives...