The country of Laos has not had much success in the world of competitive sports—zero Olympic medals; zero World Cup appearances; very few games, matches, or races won in the Southeast Asian Games; and virtually no chance of ever hosting any major international sporting event. There is a distinct lack of facilities, resources, and experienced international advisors and coaches. Therefore, a book on the history of sports in Laos seems more like a joke told by acquisitions editors at happy hour than an actual publication. Simon Creak is certainly bold, because he actually did decide to write and submit this book to a prestigious university press. We are all the better for his decision to take this chance. It turns out that focusing on sports, masculinity, and physical culture (or perhaps physique-culture) tells us more about the rise of Marxist socialism, international relations, dictatorship, and nationalism in Laos than nearly any other study in the past three decades.

This is one of the most fascinating books I have read in years. While there are certain questions and bodies of research that could have been explored further, this is a highly readable and entertaining book, as well as a theoretically provocative study. Let me just highlight a few reasons students of Laos and Southeast Asia more broadly should read Embodied Nation. First, from the very beginning, Creak focuses on the 1946–90 period that has been largely ignored in Lao studies. Most research focuses on modern development studies or pre–World War II history. Studies of Marxism and socialism in Laos tend to focus on 1975–91, but by looking at sports culture and politics before and after 1975, we see both changes and continuities. The lack of focus on the 1950s and 1960s is primarily because access to the archival material for this period is difficult. Creak pored over material from government archives (a challenge in itself), popular magazines, travelers' reports, photographs, physical education handbooks and curricular material, and pre- and post-colonial French archival materials. For example, his inclusion of a study of sports under the influence of Vichy France is quite illuminating and one hopes that it will inspire more studies of this period. Second, Creak never studies Laos in isolation. By focusing on sports, especially international sporting contests, he shows how Lao culture and politics was in constant negotiation with French, Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, American, and Cambodian politics. In this way he expands on the highly recommended work of Vatthana Pholsena and Grant Evans. Like Pholsena, he does not focus only on the lowland or Theravada Buddhist Lao. Like Evans, he does not project ideas of modern Laos back onto the past. Indeed, he shows that creating a Lao physical culture and a particular type of Lao masculinity did not depend on invoking a timeless culture and ethnocentric pride. If cultural marketing by the Lao government pre- or post-socialist Laos tried to focus on glorious kings, artwork, temples, or battles of a distant past, then the present culture would seem like a lesson in loss and decline. For many governments (through the tools of museums, textbooks, national curriculum, and national holidays) promoting national pride means invoking the powers of longevity; origins; and past military, literary, scientific, and artistic accomplishments. Laos, however, like many countries in Eastern Europe and Africa, did not really exist as an independent nation-state prior to the twentieth century. Therefore, it was a new country that politicians, business owners, and athletes could create. Sports became a defining feature of this newly unified Laos. Sports became as important to Lao identity as a national language, religion, flag, or public education system. Sports were a perfect vehicle for forming a national culture, because they could incorporate indigenous sports like tikhi; regional sports like canoe-racing; and international sports like boxing, shooting, weightlifting, and soccer. Studying sports teaches us a lot about the dynamics of cultural formation and the subtleties behind local and regional political conflicts.

Besides exposing previously unexplored sources and providing the definitive history of athletics and physical culture in Laos, Creak makes a major contribution to the study of gender in Southeast Asia. Indeed, I think Embodied Nation would be a welcome addition to syllabi in gender and sexuality courses in general. Women's studies approaches have thrived in the field of Southeast Asian studies over the past twenty years. Recently, there has been a rise in thorough studies of sexuality, especially homosexuality, in Philippine, Thai, and Indonesian studies. However, Creak's focus on masculinity and physicality (instead of sexuality specifically) is relatively unique. I particularly enjoyed his engagement with the work of Ana Maria Alonso. Alonso has shown that a focus on sport is a particularly revealing way to study the building of national culture, because it has a way of turning the “obligatory” into the “desirable” (p. 241). Watching and promoting sport is not threatening and can break down class, linguistic, and ethnic barriers. It forms, as Creak and Alonso argue, “everyday structures of feeling” (p. 8). The ideological and sensory become fused. It is almost as if sports became a way of making nationalism part of a young man's (and in this case, almost always male) muscle memory. Although Creak does not argue this specifically, his work further indicates that heteronormativity and androcentrism are not normative or central naturally. They need to be constructed and continually bolstered by institutional (religious, governmental, and educational) and economic forces within a nation-state.

There are a couple areas that I wish Creak had explored. There is very little study of Soviet influence, either through Vietnam or directly from Russia, on sport and physicality in Laos. Creak does discuss this briefly in chapter 7. I particularly wanted him to give more attention to the visiting Soviet teams to Laos and Lao athletes who, like academics, trained in the Soviet Union. This omission is a major problem with the study of Laos in general: a distinct lack of the use of Russian and East German sources. Still, it is hard to criticize him for this, as he would probably not have had much success accessing this material with or without reading knowledge of Russian. Second, in the same section that he briefly discusses Soviet visits, he mentions in passing that Laos, like other communist countries in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasized trying to connect “liveliness,” “fun,” and “happy revolutionary spirit” (pp. 196–202). I would have liked to have seen Creak discuss the promotion and institutionalization of Lao leisure culture and public culture in general outside of professional or formal team sports, but I recognize that in this already lengthy study, this might have taken him a bit far afield. Finally, and this is more of a personal interest, Creak discusses the controversy behind the funding and building of a large stadium for the Southeast Asian Games in 2009. I thought he might have spent more time discussing the roles stadium and sports facilities' architecture played in building nationalism in Laos. Overall though, this book on an unlikely subject has generated a number of new questions in this reviewer's mind, and it should become a model for the study of masculinity and sports culture across the region and beyond. I highly recommend Embodied Nation for scholars and students in Asian studies, and for courses in gender and sexuality and sports history more broadly.