'Body work' : a history of sport and physical culture in colonial and postcolonial Laos

Abstract

This study investigates the importance of physical culture in modern Laos, and the variety of local, regional and global forces that have shaped it. 'Body work' practices, including sport, physical education and military training, and the ideas on which they are based, have placed gender and the body at the centre of colonial, postcolonial and socialist subjectivity. The ubiquity of these ideas and practices throughout the twentieth century has demonstrated an on-going concern with physicality, transformed by the cosmologies, epistemologies and ideologies that have created the modem states and cultures of Laos. ey concern in modern societies. Sport and physical culture has in turn given material and aesthetic expression to the rich variety of twentieth-century events and cultural forces that have shaped the colonial territory and nation, including pre-colonial cosmogonies, colonialism, the Second World War, the First and Second Indochina Wars, nationalism, the Cold War, revolutionary socialism, market-based development under post-socialism, and successive varieties of regionalism and globalisation. These findings highlight a global interconnectedness that belies the image of 'untouched' Laos, offering insights into the importance of transnational physical cultures in other colonial and postcolonial societies. The study employs a multi-disciplinary approach, combining cultural history, cultural anthropology, gender studies, global studies, visual studies and sports studies, and draws on a range of sources, including Lao and French archives, ethnographic writing, newspapers, magazines, cartoons and photography. This blend of textual and visual sources reveals how physicality is represented and regarded, both rhetorically and aesthetically, as a key concern in modern societies.