Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos 0824838890, 9780824838898

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SIMON CREAK

Embodied Nation Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos

Embodied Nation

Southeast Asia politics, meaning, and memory David Chandler and Rita Smith Kipp series editors

Embodied Nation Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos

Simon Creak

University of Hawai‘i Press

Honolulu

© 2015 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 20 ​19 ​18 ​17 ​16 ​15 

6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Creak, Simon, author.   Embodied nation : sport, masculinity, and the making of modern Laos / Simon Creak.     pages cm—(Southeast Asia, politics, meaning, and memory)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8248-3889-8 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. Laos—History—20th century  2. Sports—Laos—History—20th century.  3. Physical education and training—Laos.  4.  Sports and state—Laos.  5.  Masculinity—Political aspects—Laos.  6. Nationalism—Laos—History.  I. Title.  II. Series: Southeast Asia—politics, meaning, memory.   DS555.7.C74 2015  959.404—dc23 2014013985

Publication of this book has been assisted by the following organizations:

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-­free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Composition by Westchester Publishing Services Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

For Clair and Olive and Jem

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix xiii

Language Conventions Map

xv

xvi

Introduction

1

1. Making a Modern Tradition

22

2. Renovating the Body, Restoring the Nation/Race 3. Embodying Military Masculinity

84

4. Sport and the Theatrics of Power

118

5. Representing Meuang Lao in Southeast Asia 6. Socialist Cultures of Rhetoric and Physicality 7. Mobilizing the Revolution 8. Vientiane Games, 2009 Notes

247

Bibliography Index

311

289

195 226

52

140 167

Ac know ledg ments

The story behind this story begins on my way to Italy in the late 1990s. Having completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in history at Melbourne University, I did what many other Australians of my age did and left. The idea was to live in Italy and to do further study, not necessarily at the same time or in that order. As I didn’t have much money, I planned to work and save in northern Australia before heading through Southeast Asia and India and onwards to Europe. After leaving Darwin in October 1998 I spent several months in Indonesia, then in the grip of political upheaval, and by April 1999 found myself enjoying the Lao New Year festival in Luang Prabang. I am probably not the first person to change plans in Luang Prabang. My first debt of gratitude is therefore owed to the people of and in Laos, who introduced me to the country. These include my students at Vientiane College and elsewhere, who taught me much about their country and piqued my curiosity in “civilization,” development, socialism, and other themes in Lao history. Thanks must go to Denley Pike and Leon Devine of Vientiane College, who opened my eyes to the wonderful world of pedagogy and imparted much knowledge about the country we worked in. My greatest appreciation in Laos in those years was to Bounnaliam Thammavongsa and her family, who introduced me to aspects of Lao history, culture, and society that I would never have experienced otherwise. These relationships were not always easy but I will always treasure them as a defining part of my life and work. I returned to Australia and at the Australian National University (ANU) was fortunate to be supervised by Craig Reynolds, a brilliant teacher—now trusted friend and colleague—who asked probing questions, taught me new ways to think about history, and provided the right balance of praise, criticism, and encouragement. A pair of anthropologists, Andrew Walker and Philip Taylor, encouraged me to think in different ways about my work. Chris Forth left ANU long before the project’s completion but not before shaping many of my ideas about masculinity. I must also thank the Australian government for my Australian Postgraduate Award and the ANU’s Faculty of Asian Studies (later the School of Culture, History, and Language) for generously funding language training and fieldwork.

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Research for this book took me back to Laos and to France in 2006 and early 2007. In Laos, I must again thank Bounnaliam’s family, which provided me with a home and social existence, as well as the directors and staff of the following organizations: the Department of Foreign Relations at the Ministry of Education, which approved my research; the Faculty of Letters at the National University of Laos, where I received an affi liation, studied further Lao, and obtained vital letters of introduction to other organizations; the Department of Archives at the Prime Minister’s Office; the Lao News Agency (KPL); the National Library of Laos; the Maha Sila Viravongs Library; the École Française d’Extrême Orient; and, in particular, the National Sports Committee. Grant Evans, a generous supporter during my research in Laos and since, opened his extensive collection of historical sources to me. In France, I must express my appreciation to staff at the Archives Nationale d’Outre-Mer, the Mémorial de Caen, the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, the Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense, and to my talented sister Fiona, who assisted me for much of that time. Upon returning to Canberra, I benefited from the assistance and acquisitions of Saowapha Viravong at the National Library of Australia and the helpful staff of the ANU’s Menzies Library. A number of others assisted as well. The members of the inspiring Mainland Southeast Asia writing group, convened by Craig Reynolds, provided invaluable feedback and taught me the art of criticism. In addition, I  benefited from undertaking my PhD at a time when ANU had several doctoral scholars working on Laos—including Angela Cincotta, Holly High, Warren Mayes, and Sarinda Singh—each of whom has left a mark on this book. I also depended upon the collegiality and camaraderie of Kelly Layton, Amrita Malhi, and Maylee Thavat. Further afield, I wish to thank Katrin Bromber and Birgit Krawietz of the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and Soren Ivarsson of Copenhagen University for sponsoring opportunities to present work in November 2008. Most tangibly, this book is better for the close reading and incisive comments of Grant Evans and Chris Goscha. After Canberra, the book project moved with me to Kyoto, Japan. At Kyoto University, I must express my deep gratitude to the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, where I obtained a generous research fellowship, and my host institute, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS). In particular, my friends and colleagues Nathan Badenoch, Keith Barney, Carol Hau, Toshitaka Hori, Yoko Hayami, Junko Koizumi, Mario Lopez, Hisayo

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Mizuno, Pavin Chachavalphongpun, and Koji Tanaka inspired improvements to the manuscript and, perhaps more importantly, provided support to my family and me. Being located at CSEAS I also benefited from rich conversations about my work with many visiting scholars, including Chris Baker, Grant Evans, Pasuk Pongpaichit, and David Streckfuss. At the University of Hawai‘i Press, my sincere gratitude goes to acquiring editor Pam Kelley, series editors David Chandler and Rita Smith-Kipp, production editor Deborah Grahame-Smith, and an anonymous reader for the Press. Bruce Lockhart and Kathryn Sweet also read and offered valuable comments and suggestions on the full manuscript. Each of these people has helped to make this a better book and I appreciate their help immensely. In addition, I express my sincere gratitude to the Australian Academy of the Humanities for a generous subsidy to assist with production costs associated with the illustration program. On this point, I register my tremendous gratitude to the Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Defense in Paris for kind permission to reproduce nineteen photographs from the early 1950s, including the striking image which graces the cover. I echo ECPAD’s management in urging other researchers to avail themselves of its wonderful collections. I also express my thanks to the Mémorial de Caen for permission to reproduce an image from the Jean Deuve Collection in figure 3.7, and to the CartoGIS unit of ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific for producing the map. Some parts of this book have appeared in earlier forms elsewhere: chapter 4 is revised from “Sport and the Theatrics of Power in a Postcolonial State: The National Games of 1960s Laos,” Asian Studies Review 34, no. 2 (2010): 191–210; an earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as “Representing True Laos in Postcolonial Southeast Asia: Regional Dynamics in the Globalization of Sport,” in Sports across Asia: Politics, Cultures and Identities, edited by Katrin Bromber, Birgit Krawietz, and Joseph Maguire (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); and chapter 6 is reworked from “Cold War Rhetoric and the Body: Physical Cultures in Early Socialist Laos,” in Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, edited by Tony Day and Maya Liem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010), 103–130. I am grateful to these publishers for permission to use revised versions of these publications in this book. My greatest debts are to those closest to me. While undertaking this project I met Clair Hurford. The same week my PhD stipend expired we had our delightful daughter, Olive, and two and a half years later, when Clair

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was seven months pregnant with Jem, our adorable son, we all moved to Kyoto. These times have been wonderful and full of challenges. In lieu of a commensurate way to convey my appreciation, this book is dedicated to Clair and Olive and Jem, who have made the past seven years infinitely richer and more rewarding. Canberra, May 2014

Abbreviations

AFP Amusporta ANL ANOM ASEAN ASL BCL BIL BORL CCIPPM CDNI CFI CGEGS CGEPSJ CIA CIS CLEP CPV CRIP DRV DSPEAE ECPAD EFEO ELCEPL ELCJL ENCJEP

Agence France-Presse Association Mutuelle et Sportive des Annamites Armée Nationale Laotienne Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer Association of Southeast Asian Nations Association Sportive du Laos Bataillons Chasseurs Laotiennes Bataillon Infanterie Laotienne Bulletin Officiel du Royaume du Laos Comité Central d’Instruction Physique et de Préparation Militaire Committee for the Defense of the National Interest Conseil Fédéral Indochinois Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Générale et aux Sports Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Physique, aux Sports et à la Jeunesse Central Intelligence Agency (USA) Comité Indochinois des Sports Centre Local d’Éducation Physique Communist Party of Vietnam Centre Régional de l’Instruction Physique Democratic Republic of Vietnam Department of Sport, Physical Education, and Artistic Education Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense École Française d’Extrême Orient École Locale des Cadres d’Éducation Physique du Laos École Locale des Cadres de Jeunesse du Laos École Nationale des Cadres de Jeunesse et d’Éducation Physique

xiv

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Abbreviations

ESEPIC FTEO GANEFO GGI IAAF ICP IOC ISEA LAS LOC LPDR LPLA LPP LPRP MESRA MESY NLHS NSC OCM OCT PRC RLG SEA Games SEAP Games SEATO SPA UAR VWP

École Supérieure d’Éducation Physique d’Indochine Forces Terrestres d’Extrême Orient Games of the New Emerging Forces Gouvernement Général de l’Indochine International Amateur Athletics Federation Indochinese Communist Party International Olympic Committee Indochine Sud-Est Asiatique Laotienne Artistique et Sportive Lao Olympic Committee Lao People’s Democratic Republic Lao People’s Liberation Army Lao People’s Party Lao People’s Revolutionary Party Ministry of Education, Sport, and Religious Affairs (LPDR) Ministry of Education, Sport, and Youth (RLG) Neo Lao Hak Sat (Lao Patriotic Front) National Sports Committee Olympic Council of Malaysia Olympic Council of Thailand People’s Republic of China Royal Lao Government Southeast Asian Games South East Asia Peninsular Games Southeast Asia Treaty Organization Supreme People’s Assembly United Arab Republic Vietnamese Workers’ Party

Language Conventions

As is well known, there is no agreed system for Romanizing Lao. Romanization presents additional challenges where a study, such as this one, spans multiple decades, spelling systems, and transliteration trends. The system used in this book is based on the American Library Association-Library of Congress Lao Romanization Table (available at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/ cpso/romanization/lao.pdf ), with two modifications for simplicity: (1) No distinction is made between short and long vowels; and (2) Roman letters are used where the ALA-LC uses phonetic symbols for vowel sounds. Based on these principles, I use eu for the vowel /ɨ:/ in ືມ (meu, hand); ae for the vowel /ɛ:/ in ແມ ່ (mae, mother); o for the vowel /ɔ:/ in ສອງ (song, two); and ມ ( phoem, increase), and their respective short oe for the vowel /ə:/ in ເ່ີພມ forms. To minimize confusion, I retain established transliterations for common nouns, including names of people (e.g., Kaysone Phomvihane), places (e.g., Vientiane, Lane Xang), and organizations (e.g., Neo Lao Hak Sat). In the Lao language, the adjective “Lao” may describe nationality or race/ethnicity. Borrowing from the French distinction between laotien/laotienne and lao, some writers distinguish between Laotian (for nationality) and Lao (ethnicity). As in French, however, such systems are rarely adhered to, as inconsistencies arise from the wide informal usage and ambiguity of Lao in the Lao language. Ambiguous though it can be, in this book I use “Lao” to describe both nation and ethnicity. While conceding that this may cause confusion, such ambiguity often reflects the original sources. In other cases, I hope the context or my explanations are adequate to make clear which one I mean. A similar difficulty is translating du Laos from French. Since “of Laos” can be awkward stylistically, especially in names of institutions, I often prefer “Lao.” All translations are my own, except where otherwise indicated.

Map 1. Laos and surrounding countries, including colonial and postcolonial borders. © The Australian National University, CAP CartoGIS.

Introduction

In February 1936, the semifinal of the annual Bédier Cup football (soccer) tournament in Vientiane ended in a violent brawl between local Lao spectators and the visiting Amusporta team. Amusporta forfeited the match, sending its predominantly Lao opponents, Police-Sport, through to the following week’s final against another Lao team, Laotienne SportiveArtistique (LAS). As cup holders, LAS had organized and refereed the preliminaries. Writing in the Annam Nouveau newspaper a fortnight later, an indignant “Annamite spectator” blamed the “disappointing and farcical spectacle” squarely on the “despotic refereeing” of the LAS referee, Thao (Mr) Bong, and the “aggressive provocations” of the Lao spectators. Lurking beneath the actions of both referee and crowd was racial prejudice, the spectator inferred, stressing the constitution of the teams: “Annamite,” or Vietnamese, in the case of Amusporta, and four-fi fths “aborigines,” by which he meant Laotian, for Police-Sport. Among the LAS members who comprised much of the crowd was an official who “pushed his compatriots to ‘come and knock the Annamites senseless’ or, to put it better, ‘to kill them.’ ” Thao Bong did not appreciate his obligations as an impartial adjudicator: “You must make no distinction on the basis of race, nor of nationality, but be endowed with the noble sentiments of humanity.”1 The scandal did not end there. A few days later, Annam Nouveau’s sports columnist declared that neither teams’ players “yet understand the ‘spirit of sport.’ ” Yes, “Bong’s impartiality was of such poor quality that he should not adjudicate a match of such importance.” But abandoning the match implied the absence of “self-control and above all sporting spirit, conditions that are prerequisites for being a sportsman in the basic sense of the term.” That this absence of sportsmanship “deepened the abyss that separates us [Annamese] from the Laotians”—“our Laotian brothers” as the scribe also called them— was the most regrettable outcome of all.2

2

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Introduction

A month and a half later, Thao Bong published a lengthy rejoinder of his own, in which he meticulously reconstructed the match, including numerous fouls committed by Amusporta’s players, and reminded the Annamite spectator that both teams had agreed to clamp down on rough play. “If I had not enforced the rules so strictly,” he explained, “complete anarchy would have reigned on the field.” Carefully justifying the penalty against Amusporta, he blamed one of its own players, a certain Phuong, for starting the rumble by gesticulating wildly in anger at the penalty and booting the match ball at the Lao crowd, an “insult” made “more serious” because the crowd believed him to be the team captain. Bong stressed that he did not wish to “deepen the rift already dug by certain of your compatriots between the Annamites and Laotians.” But he could not overlook Phuong’s actions, which proved that “the Annamese of Vientiane have generally lacked sporting spirit,” and he listed several other incidents since 1930 in support of this claim. The Annamite spectator’s lack of mettle was reflected in his use of a pseudonym: “If you had a little more courage,” Bong added, “you would sign your splendid article with your real name.”3 The Bédier Cup semifinal and its aftermath constituted a magnificent sporting scandal, the likes of which are a common feature of sport everywhere. Whatever actually took place, the special capacity of sport to animate emotions linked to identities and ideologies, and to give emotional and material substance to these abstractions, still resonates today. Borrowing from sporting ideals typified by the “Olympic spirit,” colonial administrators aimed for events like the Bédier Cup to promote friendship and unity between the people of Vientiane, particularly the Lao and Annamese. At this time, when Annamese immigration and employment in Laos had put great strain on relations between the two groups, sport was meant to promote the imperial objective of Indochinese solidarity. But rather than calming Lao-Annamese relations, the football match instead stoked existing issues of race, gender, and civilization into a frenzy, hijacking the match and fueling the controversy that carried on afterwards. Here was a context where an “Annamite spectator” could call Lao footballers “aborigines” in the administrative seat of Laos, a racist taunt revealing the colonizing presence not only of the French, but also of Annamese officials.4 Not to be outdone, the Lao threatened to beat and even kill their Annamese adversaries. Lest the fact be overlooked, all protagonists in this battle—players, match officials, colonialists, reporters—were men. Together with frequent allusions to sportsmanship and courage, qualities assumed to be masculine, the scene encapsulated junctions between sport, masculinity,

Introduction

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3

and power, both formal and informal. Such motifs of sportsmanship stem from notions of civilization. The “Annamite spectator” was especially incensed that from the sidelines a young scholar, Nhouy Abhay, recently returned from studies in France, “vociferated violently, employing crass terms . . . undignified of an educated and learned man, of a man as elite as he.” A young man of even more noble stock, Prince Boun Oum of the Champasak royal family, was also reported, admonishingly, to be among the protagonists. Laos may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport and related aspects of physical culture. It joined the Olympic movement only in 1979 and has never come close to winning a medal; indeed, it competes in this unique symbol of global sport thanks only to the assistance of the International Olympic Committee and other benefactors. Such a record seems to reinforce erstwhile stereotypes of the Lao as lazy, isolated, and backward. Yet, just as sport could materialize identities, ideologies, and sociocultural realities in the mid 1930s, it has continued to do so throughout the late colonial, royalist-nationalist, socialist, and postsocialist periods since then. Despite stereotypes of indolence and backwardness—or perhaps because of them—the vicissitudes of modern Lao history have been paralleled by developments in sport, physical education, military training, and other physical pursuits. The ubiquity of physical practices in modern Laos demonstrates the extraordinary reach of physical culture in colonial and postcolonial societies and a global interconnectedness that belies the image of an isolated or “untouched” Laos. These practices have arisen from and shaped an everpresent concern with physicality, which has repeatedly been transformed by the cosmologies, epistemologies, and ideologies that have shaped modern Laos. It is precisely this succession of ideologies that makes the country such a compelling place to study sport and physical culture.

Lao history and historiography Laos borders far larger and more powerful countries—notably Thailand, Vietnam, and China—and it is probably true, as several scholars have suggested, that the country exists as a modern nation thanks to the peculiarities of French colonialism.5 For decades this and other anomalies have led observers to question the existence of a “real” Lao national identity, a tendency that continues today, four decades after the creation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR).6 But as Grant Evans has argued, the apparent tenuousness of Lao nationhood arises from the view that nations are

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Introduction

somehow natural entities, what Anthony Smith calls the perennialist view of nationalism.7 If we look past this assumption and accept the modernity of all nation-building projects, Laos’ national history is not so much anomalous as relatively youthful and tumultuous, which makes it a fascinating case study in the formation and consolidation of postcolonial nations. A striking if counterintuitive feature of Lao nationalism is its creation at the intersection of diverse national, regional, and international interests and ideologies. In itself this is not particularly unusual. One of Benedict Anderson’s most important observations is that nationalism came from Europe to the colonial world as a “modular” form, “capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains.”8 Even Anderson’s critics, who stress the local agency underpinning national imagination, concede that postcolonial nationalism involves “selective appropriation of Western modernity.”9 Nevertheless, Laos is noteworthy for the sheer number of ideologies and interests that have been fashioned into creating a modern national awareness, as well as for the ways in which these have intersected with regional factors. Before nationalist sensibilities emerged in mainland Southeast Asia, the Lao kingdoms of Champasak, Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and Xieng Khouang, like other minor vassals in the region, existed by virtue of multiple and shifting tributary relations with their surrounding overlords, especially the courts of Hue and Ayutthaya/Bangkok. Reflected in the local terms songfaifa/samfaifa, literally meaning under two/three overlords, the resulting reality of overlapping sovereignty was a feature of what scholars of the region have called the mandala system, named for the unstable, center-oriented polities of vague and varying size through which political power was organized in Southeast Asia.10 Rather than simply multiplying the level of oppression, this system permitted Lao principalities a substantial degree of autonomy, even in their weakened state as Siamese vassals after Vientiane king Chao Anou’s ill-fated rebellion against Siam in the 1820s.11 Nevertheless, the mandala conception of space was swept aside late in the century, as European imperial power introduced new geopolitical epistemologies, notably a preoccupation with “exclusive territorial sovereignty,” as represented in the modern map.12 These changes climaxed in the Franco-Siamese crisis of 1893, caused by France’s assertion of sole sovereignty over the contested Lao territories. Together with French military might, the clash of mandala and map resulted in the creation of Laos, an “unprecedented territorial entity,” as part of French Indochina.13 With a few notable exceptions, the geospatial makeup of Laos has remained remarkably similar ever since.

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The cultural identity of Laos has been far less fi xed than its geography, however, varying with ongoing efforts of colonial and postcolonial regimes “to standardize features of Lao culture and society.”14 Such yearnings have resulted in ongoing change in what is thought to constitute Lao culture, despite narratives of continuity. In particular, the visions of colonial and postcolonial regimes have been profoundly shaped by the manifold meta-events and ideologies that have impacted Laos in the past century: colonialism, the First and Second World Wars, decolonization, the First Indochina War, the Cold War, the Second Indochina or Vietnam War, Marxism-Leninism, competing Southeast Asian regionalisms, global capitalism, and most recently the reemergence of China as a regional and global power. It is the weight and externality of these events, on the one hand, and Laos’ small size and questionable correspondence to any precolonial entity, on the other, that gives the impression that the country lacks integrity as a nation. Yet just as the borders of modern Laos were forged as a result of the military and epistemological clash between France and Siam, successive concepts of Lao culture have grown from subsequent events and ideologies and the ways in which they have been relocated in the Lao context by differing political regimes. Situating his work within a new breed of studies interested in the complex relationships between colonial and national identities in Indochina, Soren Ivarsson takes up such paradoxes in the context of French colonialism. “French colonialism was instrumental in bringing about a Lao cultural nationalism,” Ivarsson proposes, reversing the conventional view that Lao nationalism emerged from anticolonialism. “The colonial state,” he stresses, following Anderson, “engendered the fundamental grammar that made the imagination of a national culture possible.”15 Ivarsson adds three points of particular significance. First, with roots in “French discourse on the Lao,” even before the formation of Laos as a colonial state, Lao cultural nationalism preceded the anticolonial, political nationalism of the mid 1940s. Second, this sense of a cultural identity was always contested, especially from without, as Siam dismissed Laos as a “non-country” on historical, geographical, and racial grounds, while significant numbers of French officials in what became Vietnam argued that the Lao were a “race on the verge of extinction.” Third, although members of the Lao elite retained a form of agency, “unearthing the cultural elements that a Lao nationalism subsequently identified as its national culture,” their role was marginal to that of the French. Despite the nationalism of the Luang Prabang prince, Chao Phetsarath Ratthavongsa, which Ivarsson examines elsewhere with Christopher Goscha, Ivarsson thus finds that the French were the most influential agents in creating Laos as a culturally coherent entity.16

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Introduction

Ivarsson and other scholars such as Goscha do a fine job of demonstrating the intricate relationship between colonialism and nationalism in Laos. The problem is that little sustained attention of this kind has been paid to the period since 1945. Notwithstanding considerable contemporary scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, this lacuna is especially acute for the three decades of royalist government between 1946 and 1975.17 This is unfortunate because the political and diplomatic events of these decades, which tend to overshadow all else, introduced external forces and ideologies to the country that would produce more subtle cultural notions of Laos and what it meant to be Lao, making these decades crucial for understanding the development of Lao nationalism. Surveys by Martin Stuart-Fox and Grant Evans thus offer much-needed historical perspectives on the post-1945 period.18 While both demonstrate the extraordinary complexity of the decades between independence in 1949 and 1975, when the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) took power, the two authors approach the period in quite different ways. Stuart-Fox is most concerned with political and economic developments, emphasizing alliances and rivalries between the figures and factions that defined the Royal Lao Government (RLG), but offers little analysis of how these ructions shaped the cultural politics of Lao identity formation. In an article paving the way for his History of Laos, he argues that domestic issues in these years, particularly the “struggle for independence and unity” and the “evolution of a genuinely national Lao political culture,” were more important in terms of periodizing Lao history than “events provoked by external intervention.”19 Based on similar sentiments, his introduction to A History of Laos makes an impassioned defense of the need to develop a nationalist historiography of Laos, “before it can be deconstructed” by postmodern critique.20 As a result, Stuart-Fox arguably underestimates the cultural and epistemological impact of Lao engagement with the wider world, leaving the impression that a somewhat essential Lao cultural identity was quarantined from external political and economic forces and adopted by whoever held power, rather than manipulated and re-created by them. Indeed, in the ground-clearing article mentioned above, he argues that stable features of Lao political culture have provided the basis of continuity against waves of political change.21 Reflecting his concern with the cultural and historical processes that produce national cultures, Evans is more alert to the ongoing creation and re-creation of Laos as a cultural artifact in these years. In particular, he points to nationalist politicians of the 1950s, a cosmopolitan elite shaped by French colonialism, and the sprouting of rival nationalisms influenced by

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American links through the 1960s and early 1970s. He explains how these groups formed committees and societies, many of which published on Lao culture and society in newspapers and journals, often sponsored by foreign interests, creating a variety of cultural nationalisms in the process.22 Unlike Stuart-Fox, Evans engages with broader cultural and national issues that have arisen from being a “land in between” several more powerful countries— to quote the subtitle of his book—and the interests and ideologies that flow from this location. In an introductory text, however, he faces inevitable limitations in terms of detail. Evans has paid more specific attention to the politics of national culture since the LPDR was established in 1975. In The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, he argues convincingly that, after the “heady revolutionary days” of 1975, the socialist regime gradually but steadily reverted to the Buddhism-infused nationalism of the previous RLG.23 The key moment in this transformation was the collapse of communism in Europe at the end of the 1980s, which necessitated the creation of new legitimating devices in Laos. Like scholars of China and Vietnam, Evans labels the period since then “postsocialist,” in order to emphasize the regime’s maintenance of power despite jettisoning its Marxist-Leninist program for economic and sociocultural transformation.24 Reinforcing his view of the cultural and historical contingency of Lao national identity, Evans considers how a wide range of state practices and symbolism, including National Day parades, national dress, and the national sports games, buttress the nationalist claims of the postsocialist party-state. At times, however, Evans’ emphasis on continuities between royalist and postsocialist nationalism results in “a somewhat perennialist perspective,” which implies that “the 1975 revolution was only an ‘accident’ and that historical continuity has resumed with the return of Buddhism at the core of Lao nationalism.” Vatthana Pholsena emphasizes one area of considerable difference in postsocialist nationalism, the cultural practices that support official policies and rhetoric concerning the “multiethnic Lao people” (pasason lao banda phao).25 This book extends the work of Evans, Ivarsson, and Pholsena in two main ways. First, it examines national culture over the entire twentieth century. The story begins with the colonial period since, as Ivarsson argues, this was when modern territorial entity and the concomitant cultural identity of Laos was created, but also continues beyond 1946 to examine the period of limited autonomy after World War II, the Royal Lao Governments that followed independence (granted in stages between 1949 and 1953–1954), the period of high socialism in Laos in the fi fteen-year period following the 1975

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revolution, and, by way of conclusion, recent postsocialist history. As such, the book offers insights into how notions of Lao culture have arisen from the diverse ideologies and epistemologies of successive regimes, a common concern among which has been the identification of cultural continuity and political difference. Second, and most important, this book examines the history and culture of sport and physicality in modern Laos. Others have considered aspects of physical culture in passing: Ivarsson and Geoffrey Gunn, another historian, mention that physical training was promoted as part of the Lao Nhay (Great Laos) “movement for national re-awakening” (1941–1945), while Evans and Pholsena consider aspects of material and physical culture in socialist Laos, including the National Games, which Evans introduces briefly as “rituals of modern power.”26 But none of these scholars pay serious attention to these practices, or to the notions of physicality that underpin them. Instead, they and other scholars of cultural nationalism in Southeast Asia, including Anderson, tend to focus on the abstract dynamics that create national sentiment—language, literature, cartography, print media, historiography, and so on.

Physicality and masculinity In a perceptive critique of Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Ana Maria Alonso argues that material and physical forms of culture possess a special ability to transform the abstract idea of the nation into something more solid. She writes: [Anderson] does not go far enough in identifying the strategies through which “the imagined” becomes “second nature,” a “structure of feeling” embodied in material practice and lived experience. Hegemonic strategies, at once material and symbolic, produce the idea of the state while concretizing the imagined community of the nation by articulating spatial, bodily, and temporal matrixes through the everyday routines, rituals, and policies of the state system.27

A partial answer to the classical riddle of why so many people have been willing to die for the nation, Alonso adds, “can be found in the fusion of the ideological and the sensory, the bodily and the normative, the emotional and the instrumental, the organic and the social, accomplished by these

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tropes and particularly evident in strategies of substantialization by which the obligatory is converted into the desirable.”28 For this book, the key message from Alonso’s discussion is that physical or embodied practice reinforces national consciousness and, through it, state power by solidifying it through everyday experience. In responding to Alonso, who does not detail the nature of these practices, this book argues that sport and related physical activities are among the most important strategies of substantialization through which abstractions such as the nation are materialized in everyday action. Further, whereas Alonso is interested primarily in nationalism, I extend her observations to the wide range of cosmologies, epistemologies, and ideologies materialized by physicality, including indigenous cosmologies, colonialism, and socialism, and particularly how physical practices and understandings changed throughout the twentieth century with the ebb and flow of these ideological meta-narratives and the local, regional, and global events that shaped them. Alonso’s emphasis on the everyday embodied practices that substantialize the nation is reminiscent of Michael Billig’s notion of “banal nationalism,” which stresses the “so many little ways [in which] the citizenry are daily reminded of their national place in a world of nations.”29 Yet if in one sense physical culture practices constitute unconscious or banal strategies of substantialization, the rich discussions, debates, and rhetoric—or discourses— that inevitably accompany these practices derive from the intense consciousness of physicality. The relationship between discourse and practice, especially disciplining practices of the body, highlights the Foucauldian modes of selfmaking and subject formation that reside within sport and physical culture.30 It is Michel Foucault’s later work on the “art of government” that is most relevant to this book since it highlights the role of the state in facilitating “ ‘the conduct of conduct’—that is to say, a form of activity aiming to shape, guide, or effect the conduct of some person or persons.”31 The state is especially important where notions of physicality have been corralled into the service of political ideology.32 Susan Brownell discusses “somatization,” the tendency of social tensions to be expressed in bodily idiom, “so that calls for their resolution often center on healing and strengthening the body.” This accounts for the linking of sport, the military, and national salvation, and the “militaristic nature of communist body culture.”33 Although Brownell is writing specifically about body cultures in socialist China, the societies of modern Laos—colonial and postcolonial, capitalist and socialist—have likewise demonstrated conscious concerns with physicality, not just through practices, but in the discourses and rhetoric underpinning them.

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The conscious concern with physicality, whether in the context of subject formation, state building, or scholarship, raises a glaring but revealing paradox. While the physical realm is commonly conceived as the obverse of the cognitive, as reflected in the mind-body split of Cartesian dualism, the concern with physicality is necessarily expressed through linguistic and cultural representation. Although there is more to Lao notions of the person than mind and body—notably khwan, “spirit essences” that can affect physical or mental well-being through their presence or absence—discussions of physical culture tend likewise to invoke a mind-body split.34 In Lao, this is expressed in the opposition of chitchai-kai, formed from a compound of chit and chai, similar words referring to mind, heart, and spirit (as in will), and kai, meaning the body or corporeal. As in Cartesian metaphysics, mind/ heart/will and the body are typically understood as distinct, if related, realms, as captured in the idiom sukkai sabaichai, which refers to overall health but literally means “healthy body, healthy mind.” Although in Laos, as in the West, physical culture is often said to aid both mental and physical health, such practices link the two domains metaphorically rather than metonymically (as in the case of yoga).35 In recent decades, feminist and post-structuralist scholarship has challenged the mind-body split precisely by reexamining how words and language create physical realities. As Philip Hancock et al. reflect: “Once social scientists became uncomfortable with the distinction between nature and culture, the idea of the body as a pre-social object became difficult to sustain.”36 This reorientation led to what the same authors call the “somatic turn” in the humanities and social sciences, the interrogation of “the place of embodiment in social life,” as scholars came to understand the human body as a social, cultural, and gendered object. Drawing from this reorientation, studying physicality—awareness and concern with the physical—demands analysis of linguistic and cultural representations of physical practice and what they say about the societies that produce them. To put this in Lao terms, studying the kai or physical requires analysis of the chitchai, the mental realm in which meaning is made. Reflecting the somatic turn’s roots in feminism, much writing on the body and embodiment employs gender as a primary frame of analysis, and Southeast Asian studies is no exception. Until recently, the vast majority of work on gender and the body in Southeast Asia focused on women. In this vein, as Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz and many other scholars have noted, early Southeast Asian gender studies generally emphasized the “egalitarianism, complementarity, and the relative autonomy of women in relation to

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men.”37 The reason for this focus, in Southeast Asian studies as well as more generally, was quite understandable: with feminist efforts to “ ‘bring the women back in’ to the study of nationalism and national politics,” “gender” was largely conflated with “women.”38 Despite explicit recognition that Southeast Asian gender studies needed to examine femininities and masculinities, the primary focus on women continued until very recently, though this was steadily supplemented by important studies of homosexual masculinities.39 Despite the undoubted importance of bringing women and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender-transsexual issues into the frame of Southeast Asian studies, this emphasis missed “a major, perhaps the major way in which gender shapes politics—through men and their interests, their notions of manliness, and masculine micro and macro cultures.”40 It is only in the past decade or so that regional studies of gender have been seriously extended to heterosexual men.41 As elsewhere, increased interest in heteronormative masculinities in Southeast Asian studies owes much to R. W. Connell’s tremendously influential notion of hegemonic masculinity (or masculinities), defined as the “configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy.”42 In this view, hegemonic masculinity is not the most common or even most dominant expression of masculinity in a given society, but that which is most socially and culturally honored.43 Hegemonic masculinity is a normative value, structuring relations between men via their contending ideas of being masculine, as well as between men and women. Despite Connell’s outright rejection of essentialist understandings of masculinity, as expressed in her use of the plural, concern at the easy slippage between hegemony and essentialism has led some gender scholars working on Southeast Asia to emphasize the diversity of masculine gender identities, or masculinities, rather than the most hegemonic ones.44 Although such scholars echo justifiable concerns that hegemonic masculinity is too often conflated with dominant men, the emphasis on the plurality of masculine identity risks looking past not only the most dominant men, but associated modes of masculinity that are most critical in structuring political power.45 Some of the most important of these modes foment in the military and security ser vices of Southeast Asia.46 A related set of key masculine values, almost completely overlooked in Southeast Asian gender studies, are those associated with sport and physical culture.47 As argued throughout this book, these fields have long constituted a major force behind the creation, performance, and maintenance of hegemonic masculinities in Laos, in common with countries across the world.48

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Academic disinterest in sport and physical culture in Southeast Asian studies (including gender studies) initially reflected a more general situation across the social sciences and humanities. This lacuna was due, firstly, to sport being dismissed as peripheral to the “serious” business of politics, economics, and society, a form of academic snobbery, and, theoretically, to the body’s appearance “as entirely ‘natural’ and unchangeable,” which imbued it with little interest for social scientists.49 Since the late 1980s, however, there has been a pronounced divergence in geographical terms. Whereas physical culture has emerged as a key concern in Western contexts, especially in the disciplines of history and sociology, it has continued to receive far less attention in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia.50 Given broader interest in the body in Southeast Asian studies, this oversight is curious, especially if we define physical culture, following prominent sports scholars Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky, as “those activities where the body itself—its anatomy, its physicality, and importantly its forms of movement—is the very purpose, the raison d’être, of the activity.”51 Including traditional games, sport, physical education, and military training, such practices constitute some of the most ubiquitous physical activities in any modern society. In view of such popularity, it is no coincidence that political regimes of all colors, including those of Laos, have embraced these activities as nationbuilding devices. To paraphrase Alonso once more, this book argues that physical culture, particularly sport, is among the most important means of substantializing notions of the body, masculinity, and the nation in modern societies.

Sport and physical culture in Laos Though possessing old etymological roots, the words kila and kainyakam— the compound of which forms the Lao term “sport and physical culture”— assumed their modern meanings relatively recently. The Lao Literary Committee explained in 1942 that kila was a Pali-Sanskrit neologism, introduced to facilitate the translation of the French (and originally English) word “sport” into Lao.52 Given that Western sports and physical education were introduced to Siam before Laos, it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that kila was introduced to Lao from the Siamese. Although the Lao committee stressed kila was “a Pali word that both the Thais and we have borrowed,” the contemporary dictates of cultural nationalism would have required the committee to say so, regardless of the word’s actual provenance.53 In any

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case, the earliest published references to kila reflect its correspondence to the category of “sport.” The kila columns of the first Lao-language newspaper, Lao Nhay (1941–1945), reported on familiar Western sports while, in 1944, prominent intellectual Pierre Somchin Nginn urged readers to take up kila for health reasons, mentioning the examples of football, tennis, cycling, and  athletics.54 Subsequent dictionaries confirmed the equivalence of kila and sport. Sila Viravong’s original Vatchananukom Lao (Lao Dictionary) of 1960 defined it as “games for fun; games for physical exercise,” while Allen Kerr’s Lao-English Dictionary (1972) glossed it as “athletic games and sports; physical exercise.”55 Over time kila came to include local and regional practices. However, a distinction was increasingly made between international sports (kila sakon) and traditional sports (kila papheni), such as sepak takraw (or what the Lao call kato) and muai (local boxing).56 Other indigenous physical practices occupy a more ambivalent space in the Lao cultural field. Customarily held at the end of Buddhist Lent, the annual canoe races in Vientiane were typically referred to as papheni (tradition), at least from the 1940s. However, this changed during the 1960s, when the races were first labeled kila, and since the 1990s the event has been split into “traditional” and “sport” classes due to improvements to boat design that rendered old-style boats uncompetitive.57 Another physical practice with an ambiguous relation to sport is tikhi, a Lao game resembling field hockey that is played during the annual That Luang festival. Unlike boat racing, interpretations of tikhi as a ritual or tradition have strengthened, a phenomenon examined in chapter one, though it too has been open to interpretations as a sport. This book adopts a critical approach to categories such as sport and ritual, paying keen attention the historical circumstances that produce these as meaningful terms. Another key term in Lao is kai/kainya, which derives from the Sanskrit kāya, meaning body or corporeal. This root gives meaning to closely related key terms that can be glossed as “physical culture,” kainyakam and kainyaborihan, where kam and borihan are, respectively, Sanskrit and Pali-derived words for work or labor. Used in this sense in Laos since at least the 1930s, kainyakam and kainyaborihan can refer to gymnastics, calisthenics, or physical exercise, yet both words also carry broader meanings. For instance, a recent Lao dictionary defines kainyaborihan simply as “caring for the body to make it strong.”58 Kainyakam emerged early in the twentieth century as the main word for “physical culture” when this predominantly European contemporary of English sport was introduced to Laos by the French.59 After 1975 sport and physical culture were increasingly compounded as kila-kainyakam—as in

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the name of the now-defunct National Sport and Physical Culture Committee (1993–2011)—reflecting the adoption of socialist modes of sport and physical culture from the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and elsewhere.60 Given their etymology, both kainyakam and kainyaborihan can also be understood more literally as “work for the body” or “body work.” Indeed, in late nineteenth-century Siamese, well before the colonial state’s promotion of physical culture in Laos, kainyakam already existed as a word meaning “manual work,” a definition it retains in Lao today.61 The twentieth-century development of the key terms kila and kainyakam in the Lao language reflects the colonial and nation-building imperatives behind increased concern with sport and physical culture. Of course, indigenous physical practices preceded the arrival of colonial sport and physical culture, and this book explicitly examines how colonial and postcolonial physical cultures have drawn on precolonial antecedents, including tikhi, boat racing, and muai. However, such modes of appropriation occurred on a different trajectory to precolonial physical practices. Colonialism and postcolonial nationalism introduced a distinct concern with physicality that was tied in various ways, implicitly and explicitly, to the new entity of Laos. I am not suggesting that ideas of physicality shaped by colonialism and nationalism have displaced existing notions of physical health and wellbeing. To the contrary, linguistic clues indicate the absorption of preexisting notions of physicality into colonial and postcolonial practices. The most common term used to discuss the benefits of sport and physical culture, sukkhaphap khaeng haeng, literally “strong health,” is a compound of two components of differing antiquity. The more recent coinage, sukkhaphap derives its meaning from suk/sukkha, a Pali-derived word connoting mental and emotional well-being as well as physical health, and can refer broadly to happiness and even bliss. In this holistic sense, suk (or khwam suk, the state of being suk) is an antonym of thuk or khwam thuk, meaning suffering (in the Buddhist sense) or poverty. Conversely, khaeng haeng is a much older couplet in Lao and related Tai languages, combining separate words meaning, respectively, hard, solid, or durable, and strength, power, or force. Like khem khaeng (where khem means dense), with which it is often interchangeable, or the second element of the idiom yu di mi haeng—literally “live well, have strength” and perhaps the paradigmatic expression of good health in Lao—khaeng haeng refers unmistakably to physicality.62 As this book will demonstrate, official interest in fostering “strong health” has privileged the connotation of strong physical health reflected in the modifier khaeng haeng.

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From colonial times to the present, sport and physical culture have also been promoted in terms of producing bodies that are rich (hang mi), abundant (udom sombun), and, most of all, complete or perfect (sombun). These terms are highly evocative of physicality, implying earthy notions of fecundity, fertility, and plenty—a newborn baby of good weight is complimented for being sombun. While these values are by no means Buddhist in a doctrinal sense, and indeed have a life that is quite discrete from religious practice, Justin McDaniel’s recent work on Theravada Buddhist practice in Thailand demonstrates how they have helped “to give shape and substance to what many Thais cherish and honor.”63 Taking to task clichés of Buddhist nonattachment, he concludes that Buddhist practice and ethics are rooted in materiality and material culture. In building on McDaniel’s work, this book argues that modern practices of sport and physical culture in Laos have incorporated terminology and values that are salient to Buddhism, including wealth, abundance, and completeness. These practices have also been celebrated for promoting discipline (labiap vinai). Locally, of course, this term invokes monastic values, but it also reflects the imperialist character-building ideals of muscular Christianity and the games ethic, nineteenth-century British creeds that shaped French sport and physical culture before being introduced to Laos with colonialism. Over the twentieth century, I argue, the combination of these distinct but fortuitously matched strands of thought produced a hybrid form of “muscular Buddhism.”64 While colonial and postcolonial sport and physical culture stemmed from and informed a new type of physical awareness, it did not facilitate wholesale epistemological transformation.

Early colonial physical culture in Laos Given the emergence of French Indochina “in the midst of war,” it is not surprising that the colonial state’s first efforts to promote physical culture in Laos came as part of efforts to promote physical education and military training.65 Initiated in the 1920s in Paris to address the “general physical inadequacy” of French youth in the colonies, the physical education and military training program was soon extended to give “the creole and indigenous youth the taste for sports” and to “improve fitness” among these groups.66 To promote the policy, the colonial administration established Centres Régionaux d’Instruction Physique (Regional Physical Education Centers, CRIP) and in 1925 formed the Comité Central d’Instruction Physique et Préparation

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Militaire (Central Committee of Physical Education and Military Training, CCIPPM), as well as local committees in Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina, and Cambodia.67 These institutions established an early and lasting link between physical culture and the military, but implementation was uneven. Reflecting Laos’ peripheral position in Indochina, the territory had no dedicated CRIP or local committee in the 1920s, despite the original decree stating the plan to open one there “ultimately.”68 There were nonetheless other developments in Laos during that decade. Sport was organized with a degree of formality by newly established societies in Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and Savannakhet, including Association Mutuelle et Sportive des Annamites (Amusporta) and Laotienne Artistique Sportive (LAS), two of the teams involved in the Bédier Cup football controversy in 1936. Football teams from Vientiane and Pakse also played official “friendlies” against Siamese teams at venues on both sides of the border.69 It was not until the 1930s, however, that “significant numbers” of locals got involved in sport. The “encouraging” results of the administration’s “serious efforts” to promote sport in Laos included the founding of the Bédier Cup in 1934 (for tennis as well as football), which again attracted numerous Siamese teams. Two years later, a Comité Central des Sports (Central Sports Committee) was established in Vientiane, which orga nized competitions and established an annual sporting calendar. By the late 1930s, there were twenty-seven sporting associations offering basketball, athletics, boxing, swimming, table tennis, tennis, and football, the final two of which were most popular, and a municipal sports stadium had been established in Vientiane.70 Physical education also began to emerge in Laos after Vientiane’s first secondary school was founded in 1921.71 From 1922, two French instructors trained at prestigious physical education schools in France conducted gymnastics lessons in a special course for training local teachers, who apparently developed a “keen taste for physical culture and sport.”72 Physical education classes were streamed according to students’ ability rather than school year or age, with participants taking part in various combinations of gymnastics, educational exercises, and games.73 A teacher’s manual for Indochina as a whole explained these activities in considerable detail.74 Early physical education was closely related to medical and health ser vices. In the French method, the manual explained, “the doctor set the limits within which the instructor could choose exercises,” since “he should understand the principal medical indications that serve as the basis of children’s physical educa-

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tion,” growth, breathing, and weight.75 A French doctor would assess the pupils, who were then divided into groups according to “their ability and degree of physical development.” Files were maintained on the “general physical state” of the pupils, which, as well as determining admission into these groups, documented “progressive development in the practice of physical culture.”76 In Lao translation, ideas of physical culture were expressed in metaphors that would make sense to the overwhelmingly rural population. A kainyakam (physical culture) lesson in a 1933 morals text explained that caring for the body was just like farming. Just as the farmer must plough, prepare, and fertilize the soil to make it “attractive in order to reap his rewards,” so pupils were required to “train to make themselves attractive, obedient, and strong.” Training would increase ones size and strength, which had clear benefits for work: Train the body to make your muscles bigger and stronger; never stop training the legs, the arms, the feet, and the hands. Don’t leave your body thin and weak by being idle like some people. Whenever you do anything, even a little, you’ll get tired and not be able to do work properly. Strong people aren’t like that. They’re never discouraged by difficult jobs. Their strength gives them the presence of mind and knowledge of how to reap good results.77

As farmers’ preparation of the soil reaped the benefit of agricultural productivity, working on the body would deliver “benefits” for people’s lives. It is difficult to gauge the impact of sport and physical culture in Laos in the 1920s and 1930s. The territory had no dedicated newspapers, figured only marginally in the Hanoi and Saigon press, and was often omitted from or passed over briefly in otherwise dense colonial reports on the new institutions for sport and physical culture. Still, we can be fairly sure that such programs would have been restricted to urban settlements in the Mekong Valley, the small size of which is indicated by the tiny colonial education system. By 1930, there were only eighty-two schools teaching 6,500 pupils in Laos, and these numbers fell in the depression years.78 The large majority of boys continued to be educated in the monastic system. Even within the colonial education system that did exist, the reach of physical education was slight. In 1935, a French newspaper noted that physical education was limited to “indigenous teachers” and that the system suffered from insufficient numbers of qualified instructors.79

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The colonial state’s concern with physical culture nevertheless demonstrated the physical dimension that characterized early efforts to mold colonial subjects. A particular concern of early colonial physical culture was the amelioration of “indigenous races.” The French perceived the Indochinese to be “deficient mankind, ‘incomplete.’ ” A key deficiency was stature: while the Cambodians were admired for their height of up to 1.7 meters, the small physique of the Vietnamese (1.5m for men, 1.4m for women) caused alarm.80 Unfortunately, this particular source does not mention the Lao, but elsewhere, the Lao were typically cast as heedless, lazy, and decadent. The morals text cited above was unambiguous in emphasizing the need to increase size and strength.81 Perhaps most importantly, early colonial sport and physical culture introduced “corporeal representations” that facilitated colonization.82 Such representations were evident in discourses of health and technologies of measuring and recording the “physical state” of students, which made the body an object of concern and regulation in the creation of colonial subjects.83 The corporeal representations that facilitated colonialism, it can further be stressed, were overwhelmingly concerned with images of the male body. Although it is not clear if sport societies included girls and women, physical education was almost exclusively for boys, given that an average of just one girl a year—16 percent of the total—completed secondary school in Laos between 1921 and 1942. Though less widespread in Laos than elsewhere in Indochina, military training was also restricted to males. To the extent that physical culture provided scope for local agency, as the Bédier Cup rumble demonstrated was possible, this agency was exercised through the male body, associating novel forms of embodied masculinity with emergent modes of political power.

Focus, approach, and outline of the book As should by now be clear, it is not individual sportsmen and sportswomen, nor their athletic accomplishments, but empire building, nation making, and socialist construction that take center stage in this book. My primary interest resides in links between the human body, ideas and practices of physical culture, and the constitution of social, cultural, and political power—in its colonial, royalist, socialist, and postsocialist guises. While individuals and their bodies are implicated in these logics and processes, the

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more central concern is with the body politic as a whole and the knowledge and practices that shape it—or are perceived to do so. Although the sources that shed light on such relations are often produced by the state, the book’s focus on ideas and practices transcends a singular concern with the state over society, social elites over the masses, or the urban minority over the rural majority, even if such ideas have typically been distributed unevenly in Laos.84 Indeed, the book seeks to demonstrate how these categories and many others have constantly been reinvented or, perhaps more accurately, re-substantialized by ideas and practices of physical culture. As a result of the significant and sometimes gaping holes in the historical record left by Laos’ tumultuous path through the twentieth century, I have endeavored not to re-create a comprehensive narrative spanning the past century, but to interrogate striking and representative examples of sport and physical culture, especially those that define key moments of Laos’ modern history.85 In some cases, the chapters are based on fairly conventional sources, such as archival records, newspapers, magazines, and amateur newssheets; in others, I have utilized ethnographic writing, military photographic records, museum exhibits, and other ephemera. As foreshadowed in this introduction, the book frames this material with an eclectic theoretical approach drawing on cultural history, cultural anthropology, sports studies, and gender studies, among other disciplines. Throughout, the book pays close attention to linguistic, visual, and symbolic representations of physicality in order to understand, at a number of levels, the intellectual and cultural significance of ostensibly physical practices. To explore the transformation of colonial ideas into postcolonial physical culture, the narrative proceeds in a largely chronological fashion. Chapter one considers precolonial or “traditional” physical practices in relation to the book’s themes. It does so through a case study of tikhi, an indigenous game resembling field hockey, based on a critical reading of travel and ethnographic sources produced between the late nineteenth and midtwentieth centuries. At issue here is how French writers in particular helped to transform the game, played as part of the annual That Luang festival and on other ritual occasions, into a defining element of what it meant to be Lao. Rather than assuming this “national sport”—as early observers labeled it—was such a thing all along, the chapter analyzes how the colonial encounter cast it with characteristics that were both modern and traditional, unsettling the anticipated distinction between precolonial and colonial physical culture.

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Chapter two returns to colonial physical culture, examining developments in the pivotal Vichy period (1941–1945) of the Second World War. Building upon foundations laid in the 1920s and 1930s, programs introduced in this short period vastly expanded the extent and significance of physical culture in colonial society. The chapter charts the development of ideas and practices of physical culture in the ultraconservative Vichy regime in France, their refinement by the colonial administration in the major centers of Indochina, and their subsequent adoption as a key part of the Vichy “national renovation” or Lao Nhay movement in Laos. This movement, the chapter argues, took place to a significant extent in the body, in seeking to revive the Lao nation/race under the flag of Vichy France. While the Vichy regime was quickly denounced in postwar France, many of these ideas and practices continued to blossom in the newly established Kingdom of Laos, which emerged in various forms after the war. Chapter three examines the physical cultures of military masculinity that emerged in newly formed national institutions, particularly the armed forces and associated organizations, as the country moved incrementally towards full independence in 1954. The following two chapters consider different aspects of Lao sport in the transformative years of the 1960s, as the Kingdom of Laos was drawn inexorably into the escalating conflict between the United States and North Vietnam. Chapter four presents a case study of the Lao National Games, established in 1961 by military strongman Phoumi Nosavan, concluding the event functioned as a form of statecraft framed by local rivalries and the regional conflict. Adopting a regional perspective, chapter five argues that the Lao factions used sport to express membership of regional alliances and ideological blocs. Aimed at representing the authentic “Meuang Lao” (Lao country or Laos) in the emerging and fluid region of Southeast Asia, the involvement of competing factions in regional sports demonstrated how the global culture of sport was experienced regionally and locally in Laos. The final two thematic chapters examine physicality in high socialist Laos (1975–1991), through the mediums of mass sport and physical culture, and elite and spectator sport, respectively. Chapter six pays close attention to the rhetoric and policies of physical culture implicated in efforts to build the new socialist person. While efforts to realize a mass movement of sport and physical culture largely failed, the physical motifs that characterized the rhetoric and cosmology of socialist transformation indicated the pervasive impact of physical culture, which is understood as cultures of the physical. In a related way, chapter seven demonstrates that, by embodying the socialist ideology of perpetual movement, elite and spectator sport was embraced

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as a means of generating perpetual mobilization, which kept the revolution in motion when material constraints and policy failures threatened to grind it to a halt. The book concludes with reflections on the celebrated 2009 Southeast Asian Games in Laos, and how this event grew out of history, both on the sporting field and more generally.

1 Making a Modern Tradition

The basic premise of tikhi is betrayed by its name: ti means “to hit” while khi (or luk khi) refers to the ball that is struck.1 Resembling field hockey, the game is played between two teams using sticks to propel the ball towards a flag, a post, or a more conventional goal. For generations of scholars, interest in tikhi has resided less in the game itself than in its historical or mythological resonance in the ritual complexes of the Lao kingdoms, particularly with reference to ethnic relations. The peerless ethnographer of Lao myth and ritual, Charles Archaimbault, found the game to ritually reenact a series of encounters between rival groups in the various Lao kingdoms: the ethnic Lao conquerors and Mon-Khmer “aborigines” in Luang Prabang; the last king and his usurpers in Xieng Khouang; the government and the people in Vientiane; and the villagers and spirits in Ban Bo, a village outside the capital.2 At first glance, Archaimbault’s findings seem to present two productive lines of inquiry for this book: first, the ways in which tikhi embodied precolonial social relations; and, second, arising from this, a local perspective on the relationship between premodern games and ritual, on the one hand, and modern sports on the other, a perennial question in sports studies which relates to broader questions of cultural change. Importantly, Archaimbault and other writers left a rich record of observation and analysis through which to explore these issues. As we begin to probe these questions more deeply, however, methodological and epistemological issues emerge that complicate the task of researching tikhi. Most fundamentally, while the game initially appears to offer a window into an authentic, precolonial physical culture, it soon becomes clear that extant sources were profoundly shaped by the colonial and postcolonial context in which they were written, creating a tension between the object of study and the way its meaning has been produced. The key question thus shifts from “What did the game mean?” to “How did observers

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understand it?” and, particularly, “What shaped this understanding?” In the process, the temporal focus shifts from precolonial to colonial and postcolonial times, while the epistemological inquiry shifts from what tikhi says about precolonial cosmologies to what it might say about colonial and early postcolonial systems of knowledge surrounding physical culture. These systems, I argue, drew on precolonial knowledge in the ser vice of empire and nation. The classical approach to understanding the relationship between “premodern” physical practices and “modern” sports is developed in Allen Guttmann’s highly influential book, From Ritual to Record. Modern sports, according to Guttmann, are characterized by seven “structural-formal characteristics”: secularism, equality of opportunity to compete and in the conditions of competition, specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization, quantification, and the quest for records. Fundamentally religious in orientation, their premodern predecessors lacked these features: teams were designated, results were prescribed, rules were sacred, dedicated governing bodies were unheard of, and, despite the human will to count and score, statistics and records were unthought of.3 Guttmann stresses that his goal is to understand the historical uniqueness of modern sports rather than to chart the transformation of premodern games into sport. As his book’s title and terminology suggests, however, his model is strongly influenced by modernization theory, and a trajectory of transformation is inescapable in his use of Weberian ideal types and the ways in which they differed from earlier physical pursuits.4 Guttmann’s approach thus resembles theories of “sportification” or “sportization,” the transformation of traditional games into modern sports under conditions of social, cultural, and economic change.5 Such theories are of great interest in postcolonial societies such as Laos, where systems of knowledge first introduced with colonialism have left profound yet uneven legacies. Yet this chapter draws rather different conclusions regarding the tradition and modernity of tikhi to those implied by modernization and sportization theories. Despite undergoing change throughout the twentieth century, tikhi was never clearly transformed from ritual into sport. Indeed, while it was sometimes considered a sport (kila), the game is interesting precisely because ritual interpretations tended to strengthen throughout the twentieth century. This chameleon-like quality and the persistence of ritual aspects of the game resulted from its conceptualization as part of a coherent culture regarded as “Lao.” In this sense, “Lao” could describe at least three things: the precolonial Lao kingdoms, the

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colonial territory or postcolonial nation of Laos, or the Lao ethnic group or “race.” In general, the particular meaning was assumed rather than stated, for observers generally considered race and culture to be contiguous and, just as critically, were less concerned about these things than we are today. The Franco-Lao yearning for things that were specifically Lao arose from the assumed existence of bounded, immutable cultures belonging to par ticu lar groups of people, be they political or racial/ethnic, colonial or national. As the various meanings of being Lao suggest, these cultures of knowing underwent significant changes of their own. The first writings on tikhi came from fin de siècle travellers eager to rescue Lao culture from erasure in the face of Siamese designs on Lao—and now French—territory. After subsequent interpretation from Nhouy Abhay, a young Lao teacher and scholar, researchers from the École Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO) constructed increasingly sophisticated and interpretive readings of tikhi informed by anthropological theory. While the cultures of knowing changed, writers successively enhanced the ritual aspects of tikhi, underplaying characteristics that may otherwise have encouraged categorization of the game as a sport. It was the characteristically colonial and postcolonial genealogy of these modes of knowledge that constituted the modernity of twentiethcentury tikhi, undermining simplistic if intuitive distinctions between traditional and modern sports.

Travellers’ tales The first known accounts of tikhi were by two French travellers to Laos late in the nineteenth century, the Marquis de Barthélemy and Alfred Raquez. While the two visited Laos four years apart and Barthélemy did not even see the game played, they both concluded that tikhi was the “national game.” The importance of this conclusion is explained by the time of their visits, so soon after the founding of French Laos in 1893. Martin Stuart-Fox argues that the French created Laos “not as a political and geographic entity in its own right, with its own unique history and culture,” but rather to bolster French Indochina.6 While this may have been true, the two objectives were not mutually exclusive. In justifying the colonization of Laos, the French focused on the racial distinctiveness and equality of the Lao vis-à-vis the Siamese, by which they meant the Lao were of the same “ ‘branch’ level” rather than a sub-group of the Siamese race.7 This rationale, which placed a premium on locating, defining, and dissecting Lao culture, explained excursions by “colonialists-cum-amateur anthropologists,” who were intent on rescuing Lao

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history and civilization from subsumption into the Siamese sphere, just as the “conqueror of hearts,” August Pavie, had in 1887.8 Tikhi served this colonial project by being linked with the glorious Lao past and especially its most evocative religious monument, the That Luang stupa in Vientiane. The Marquis de Barthélemy (full name Pierre Sauvaire) visited Vientiane in 1896 while on a journey through Tonkin, Laos, and northern Annam. At this time the former royal seat, sacked and depopulated by the Siamese in 1828, remained a city of ruins. Yet on this site of past tragedy, the visitor rapidly discovered evidence of former Lao glory. The major focus of his discovery was “a very important monument, the Thât-Luong.” Spared by the Siamese, the stupa had been toppled and pillaged for its gold leaf in 1873 by bandits from Yunnan known as Ho.9 Still, the Marquis found it “one of the most beautiful manifestations of the riches of the Kingdom of Vien-Tiane.”10 Barthélemy’s homily reflected the first French efforts to revive the glorious past of the Lao kingdoms in imagery of the stupa, which would become the national symbol of successive colonial and postcolonial regimes. In Laos, as Penny Edwards argues for Cambodia, “the very notion of a national culture, let alone its inner core, were products of the colonial encounter.”11 Indeed, if That Luang lacked the size and grandeur of Cambodia’s Angkor, a comparable colonial process of discovery, fantasy, and regeneration characterized French discussion of the Lao monument. Barthélemy added: Situated in the middle of a veritable park of banyan trees, the Thât used to stand about fi ft y meters in height. M. M*** N*** [Pierre Morin, the administrator of Vientiane] has had it reconstructed; always faithful to his idea of the recovery of the Laotian race, he wanted to show inhabitants that France has come to restore them in their former splendor.12

Completed after Barthélemy’s visit in 1900, the reconstructed stupa was later condemned for lacking “Lao characteristics”; implausibly, from today’s perspective, the original curved central chedi structure was replaced by a “Norman tower.”13 At the time, however, efforts to revive the mystique of That Luang in the year Vientiane was made capital of colonial Laos summed up the French impulse to locate Lao cultural symbols to buttress the idea of the Lao race.14 It was in this context of imparting Vientiane’s former glory onto the present that Barthélemy remarked that a “curious remnant of the civilization of the Kingdom of Vientiane is a vast bare site [where] the game of thi-ki [sic] used to take place.”15 Barthélemy apparently did not witness the game and

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seemed to suggest it was no longer played, at least on this site, which would have been explained by Siam’s depopulation of Vientiane earlier in the century. He clearly understood the basics of the game, however, concluding that in tikhi he had discovered the origins of polo, another game played with sticks and a ball, albeit on horseback: [T]hi-ki was no other than polo, much in favor in the region. Legend has it that the game was formerly played on horseback in the upper-classes of society. It was the national game [ jeu national] of Vien-Tiane. The Burmese were therefore only imitators, and it is known that, instructed by them, the English made it fashionable in the Indies. Thus, it is to Vien-Tiane that our sportsmen owe an amusement appreciated today in Paris.16

The implications were clear: as the birthplace of polo, now played in Paris, the center of world civilization, Vientiane possessed a past civilization of unique splendor. As the “national game of Vientiane,” as Barthélemy called it, tikhi was especially associated with the splendid Laotian race he had mentioned earlier. Strictly speaking, this was not the same as calling tikhi the national game of Laos, for he referred only to Vientiane, the name of a former kingdom and now a recovering town in French Laos. But even if he did not refer to Laos explicitly, such a distinction would have been splitting hairs. With the administration moved to Vientiane in 1900, a year before Barthélemy’s book was published in 1901, this sense of Laotian was becoming contiguous with Laos as a whole, at least in official thinking. Discussing tikhi as the national game showed how in cultural terms the French considered the Lao a national group as well as a race. While political nationalism was out of the question, locating and sanctioning icons of national culture was not just acceptable but desirable, for such evidence made the task of rescuing Laos and the Lao from Siam, the French mission’s key conceit, all the more urgent. Barthélemy’s interpretation of tikhi would soon be lost to the vagaries of time and changing interpretations. But by speculating over the history and meaning of tikhi, he had pioneered a genre of Lao cultural analysis: associating tikhi with a glorious and authentic past and the new entity of Laos. Visiting in 1900, the year Vientiane was made the Lao capital, the photographer Alfred Raquez described tikhi in considerably more detail than Barthélemy, no doubt because he actually saw it played, but his description was contextualized by the same fascination with Lao cultural heritage. Again, this was explained by his openly hostile attitude towards the Siamese. As Walter Tips argues, whereas most of France was at peace with its failure

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to take over Siam in 1893, “Raquez clearly was not.” Invited to tour Laos by the French administrator, he would channel his wounded French pride and contempt for the Siamese into a tribute to Lao culture.17 King Sakkharine of Luang Prabang’s preface to Raquez’s Pages laotiennes suggested Lao also detected the benefits of popularizing Lao historiography. The king wrote, “You [Raquez] have witnessed our games, our feasts and religious or official ceremonies and you have been able to experience how much the true Laotian people—be they dignitaries, mandarins or simple citizens—are tranquil and mild in character.” Attaching an extract of the royal chronicle, complete with the historical limits of his kingdom and a map, “so that you will know its borders,” the king finished: “I would be indebted to you if, before embarking on the history of the kingdom of Muong Lan Sang-Hom Khao in your book, you would let yourself be inspired by the extract of the Annals which I send you . . . [b]ecause your book will be the authoritative source for the history of my kingdom in the future, and I cannot but be happy with such a useful publication.”18 Despite his enthusiasm, Raquez was more despondent than Barthélemy at the little remaining of Vientiane’s earlier magnificence, which he recalled from the record of the seventeenth-century Dutch trader, Gérard Van Wuysthoff. He nonetheless detected signs of “former splendor,” again typified by “the That Luang, standing alone, restored thanks to the energy of the government commissioner in Vientiane, M. Morin, who has attached himself to the reconstruction of this historic monument more than anyone else in the country.”19 Impressed by the Lao people’s regard for the monument, Raquez detailed the stupa’s design and the annual That Luang festival, presenting the That Luang as a national symbol for the newly created Laos. Significantly, the game of tikhi Raquez saw was held to mark Vientiane’s proclamation as the new seat of the French résidence supérieure in Laos. His vivid account of the game merits full reproduction: Sunday 11 February, 1900 Today Thi-khi [sic], the national game, and even ritual, as it is de rigueur in the great religious ceremonies. This is oriental polo. The gong sounds calling the crowd onto the esplanade next to the Tât Luang [sic]. Two camps, one called “the government,” the other “the people.” The players face each other, a few hundred well-built lads armed with crosiers. The mandarins check the two teams are equal in number and in strength.

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A ball is in the center of the field. The objective is to get it past the government goalpost, which stands at the very end of the field, or the people’s goalpost, which can be made out at the opposite end. The task of each team is to turn the ball away from their opponent’s post. Placed in the middle of the players, the paya [phanya, noble] and naisan [chief justice], captains of the opposing teams, execute a few passes with their crosiers, each seeking to prevent the other striking the first direct blow to the ball in his direction. It’s a quick game, but a violent clash of crosiers deflects the ball, players soar and blend together; it is a mad tangle of crosiers, torsos, sampots, and ankles trying to avoid the violent blows from a nearby crosier, while other players wait a little apart to grab the ball passing out of the fevered crowd. Hurrah for the government, in the first round. Hurrah for the people in the second. The people’s team wins the decider! They wave their sticks in the air while breaking out in cries of victory punctured by the grave sound of a powerful bronze gong. The crowd is under the trees, dotting an intense and picturesque soft green foliage with the yellow of monks, and the vivid red, blue, pink, orange, and salmon of women’s scarves, the blazing sun intensifying the whole gamut of colors.20

Raquez’s description of tikhi as both a national and ritual game raises three telling points. First, and most obviously, calling it the national game suggested the game was characteristic of Laos as a whole. Second, playing tikhi to mark the founding of Vientiane as the administrative capital— among the most important events in the territory’s short life—suggested tikhi was indeed a national game, but not for the reasons Raquez thought. While he believed the local tradition of the game made it national, extending the colonial creation of Laos into the precolonial past, it was actually the commemoration of Vientiane’s establishment as the capital of this entity that made the game national. In other words, the national character of the game was a modern phenomenon, not an ancient one. Third, this paradox reveals the hazard of considering tikhi a premodern game, even so soon after the 1893 treaty. Although certain aspects of the game, including the teams and the result, may have reflected a precolonial cosmogony (as detailed below), Raquez was apparently unaware of these concepts. Instead, coupling the game to a so-called national event showed that already this precolonial meaning was being transformed by colonial ways of thinking. Played at That

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Figure 1.1. Tikhi in 1900. Reproduced from Alfred Raquez, Pages laotiennes: Le Haut-Laos, Le MoyenLaos, Le Bas-Laos (Hanoi: F. H. Schneider, 1902).

Luang, the emerging symbol of Laos, the ritual of the game served the colonial project of emphasizing the territory’s distinct culture, buttressing the French claim to rule. While later writers would interpret the teams’ composition and game’s result as part of a rehearsed ritual, Raquez had nothing special to say about these aspects. Rather, his account conveyed a picture of willing sportive combat, restricted by little in the way of rules or refereeing, at least once the equality of teams was checked. The key elements of the game appeared to be the large number of players, their well-built bodies, and the violence that characterized play. Raquez’s photographs showed that, while the team captains were dressed formally and some players wore white T-shirts, others were bare-chested

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and wore only a sampot (figure 1.1). Raquez also noted the players’ muscular form and violent technique, presenting a physical characterization of Lao masculinity that was captured in other rudimentary photographs. This image contradicted stereotypes of the Lao as lazy (indolent), which Raquez like other writers of the time emphasized elsewhere in his travelogue.21 Like many travellers’ tales, Raquez’s account produced contradictory images, but from these emerged a picture of the Lao as a distinctive people.

Writing Lao culture in the 1930s By contrast with these first records, subsequent accounts viewed tikhi specifically in the context of the Festival of the Twelft h Month, otherwise known as the Festival of the Stupa or the That Luang Festival (bun that luang).22 Th is association marked a more sophisticated link between tikhi and Lao culture, reflecting an increased emphasis on resuscitating Lao culture at this time. As mentioned earlier, the 1920s had seen extensive debates over the future of Laos, including whether to repopulate it with Annamese settlers. Advocates of repopulation argued that, as the “Lao race” was in decline, Laos needed to import a larger and harder-working population to exploit agricultural and other resources. By the early 1930s, supporters of limiting immigration to specific needs and preserving “Laos for the Lao” had won out. Th is was partly due to a new federal model for Indochina, through which the French could promote local cultures in order to discourage anticolonial activities.23 The resulting decision to nurture the Lao patrie (homeland) fit conveniently with the continuing preoccupation with distinguishing the Lao territories and people from Siam and the Siamese. The intersection of these two concerns saw the EFEO embark upon the greatest expansion of cultural work in Laos’ short colonial history. Monuments were restored, including Vat Sisaket (in 1922–1923 and 1927–1931), That Luang (for a second time in 1934), and Vat Ho Phra Keo (1937–1939). From 1931, moreover, branches of the new Buddhist Institute were established in Vientiane, Champasak, and Luang Prabang, specifically to discourage Lao monks travelling to Siam for further education.24 In addition, Paul le Boulanger’s Histoire du Laos Français and Maha Sila Viravong’s Lao Grammar appeared in 1931 and 1935, respectively, while in 1937 the Lao Friendship Society (Mittasamakhom Pathet Lao, Société des Amis du Laos) founded the Bulletin des Amis du Laos, to prevent “past memories from disappearing, to

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study the history, the customs of this country, and to reattach this branch of the Indochinese family to its origins.”25 In 1936, two pieces of writing emerged from this wave of cultural activity linking tikhi to the Festival of the Twelfth Month. The first was “Douze traditions et des quatorze rites du royaume de Luang Prabang,” an EFEO manuscript documenting the twelve monthly festivals and the fourteen rules (hit sipsong khong sipsi) for commoners and rulers in the Kingdom of Luang Prabang.26 Described as a “Laotian work,” “Douze traditions et des quatorze rites” was probably a French translation from the palm-leaf original in Lao, a common undertaking for the EFEO in the 1930s. According to the manuscript, the Festival of the Twelfth Month featured daily diversions or entertainment on the fi fteenth day of the month, including tikhi, theatre (the Ramayana), a sword and spear dance, the coconut game (nyat mak phao), boxing, and horse racing.27 The manuscript appears to have offered no further details about tikhi; it was simply mentioned as a game that took place, like the others, for the amusement of the crowd. The context was telling in itself, however. Of the twelve monthly festivals described in the manuscript, the Festival of the Twelfth Month was one of the most important, involving the entire community over a long period of time. Taking place on the esplanade of Luang Prabang’s That Luang, or Great Stupa, after which the festival was named, the games were an inherent if indeterminate part of the festival.28 Even with this imprecise reference to tikhi, the national culture project was nonetheless clear. The hit sipsong khong sipsi is not a specifically Lao tradition but a regional one. The same phrase was used in northeast Siam (Isan) while the calendar of twelve festivals was common to Siam more generally as well as to Cambodia. Within Laos, moreover, there were different versions of the hit sipsong khong sipsi; a 1952 edition did not mention the playing of tikhi or other games for the Festival of the Twelfth Month at all.29 Despite these complexities, the EFEO version of the hit sipsong khong sipsi was labeled “Laotian” in the title of an accompanying abstract, “The Royal Laotian Traditions of the Lan Sang.”30 In this way, tikhi and the other activities mentioned were linked to a specifically Lao subjectivity. By referring to the former Kingdom of Lane Xang rather than Laos, EFEO scholars did not follow Raquez in conflating the Lao past with a national tradition. But neither did this title acknowledge the regional heritage of the hit sipsong khong sipsi. Of course, studying the cultures and peoples of Indochina was the raison d’être of the EFEO, with the colonizing purpose of creating knowledge of the Lao as a distinct category of people and culture.

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The second 1936 account of tikhi, which highlights participation in this project by a local scholar, Nhouy Abhay, challenges a straightforward rendering of colonial relations. After studying in France, Nhouy (1909–1963) gained employment first in the colonial administration and then as a graduate teacher at the College Pavie in Vientiane. It was around this time that he was involved in the imbroglio of the 1936 Bédier Cup, recounted in the introduction. As well as his teaching and sporting interests, Nhouy soon became active in the project to write about Lao culture, publishing “Fêtes laotiennes: Fêtes du douzième mois” (Laotian Festivals: The Festivals of the Twelfth Month), in the Saigon monthly L’Asie Nouvelle.31 Like earlier accounts, Nhouy’s revolved around Vientiane’s That Luang stupa, but he knew the monument’s mythical grandeur better than his French predecessors: “It is said that, thousands of years ago in the country of the Hindous, Açoka [Asoka] had 84,000 towers erected, at this time [of the twelfth month], on the relics of the Buddha, which are commemorated on the full moon,” he wrote. On one of these sites, “three kilometers to the east of the City with the sandalwood walls, Vientiane, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Lane-Xang,” a small stupa had been built in the thirteenth century, “which, according to tradition, contained a hair of the Buddha as well as fabulous treasures.” It was on top of this earlier stupa that King Setthathirat (r. 1548– 1571), the great king of Lane Xang who moved the royal seat from Luang Prabang to Vientiane, had in 1566 built the ornate That Luang.32 In a familiar narrative, this period of greatness was followed by one of decline. Although the stupa “miraculously” escaped the “ferocious hoards” of Siam, sent to sack the city in 1827–1828, “Yunnanese pirates completely destroyed” it half a century later. Yet the people were unbowed: Every year . . . the people of Vientiane, oblivious and ignorant of its history, with accepting and smiling consistency, bring to the That of its ancestors and its Buddha tribute of its pity and veneration. Every year, the grandiose festivals are celebrated, always following the same arrangement consecrated by ancient tradition.33

Nhouy’s emphasis on the constancy of veneration, in spite of disaster, established the monument and festival of That Luang at the center of a timeless Lao culture. In recognition that Setthathirat’s unified kingdom of Lane Xang had fragmented into different kingdoms by the nineteenth century, the sense of being Lao had shifted from describing Lane Xang to invoking

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the “people of Vientiane.” The main concern, however, was that both were autonomous of Siam and the Siamese. The stupa’s connection with Setthathirat, one of the great kings of united Lane Xang, ensured that That Luang was by now clearly established as a national monument in modern Laos. It was for this reason that in 1934 the EFEO architect Léon Fombertaux had restored it a second time.34 Nhouy’s article can be seen as an effort to celebrate the history of That Luang as a continuous symbol of a continuous Lao history encompassing premodern and modern times. Nhouy also explained the festival’s rituals in much greater detail than his predecessors. Festivities began on the thirteenth night of the twelfth month at Vat Si Muang, the temple built near the banks of the Mekong on the remains of the tutelary deity of the city. After an all-night feast, the fourteenth day was marked by oaths of loyalty taken by “civil servants of the indigenous Administration and notables, and through them the whole population.” Of course, Nhouy knew that, since 1893, the Lao officials had sworn allegiance to French officials, but he overlooked this fact and the earlier conquest by Siam in emphasizing historical continuity since a time before the Siamese sacking of Vientiane. The oath took place, he wrote, “in Sisaket temple, built in 1818 by King Anou, who, under the gaze of an enormous gilded Buddha, had formerly received the oath of fidelity of his subjects and vassals,” whereupon the royal cortege would make its way to the That Luang.35 Nhouy sketched a picture of color, joy, and playfulness among the common people, suggesting like Sakkharine’s prefatory comments in Raquez’s book that this was another integral part of the Lao culture. The evening of the fourteenth day saw a festival atmosphere, with people laughing, gambling, and milling around: “There is an intense hustle and bustle around the That, shining in the moon light.”36 Nhouy also highlighted flirting between phou bao and phou sao, young men and women, especially love songs and poetry, evoking a romantic innocence and beauty, which he also painted as characteristically Lao. It was against this backdrop of religious observance, official pomp, and lighthearted playfulness that Nhouy described the game of tikhi. As the hit sipsong khong sipsi noted, the fifteenth day of the month was “entirely devoted to public rejoicings,” including bicycle races, a football match, the coconut game, horse races, and tikhi. The last of these deserved “special mention” as “one of the remnants of the civilization of the Kingdom of Vientiane.” Nhouy mentioned Barthélemy’s polo hypothesis, but passed no opinion, and did not cite Raquez. Instead, his account focused on factual details of tikhi. The

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game was played “on foot, with a stick curved at the head, and a ball, the size of a child’s head, made out of a knot of wood, preferably the extremity or more accurately the root of a male bamboo tree.” There were no lines marking the field of play, and “only a hypothetical line marks the end of the rival camps.” The players were divided into two teams, “one the official [officiel], the other the invader [envahisseur],” but unfortunately Nhouy did not elaborate on these terms. He had referred earlier to the Siamese and Yunnanese envahisseurs that sacked Vientiane in the nineteenth century, but did not say whether these were the invaders he meant. Raquez, of course, had said the teams were the “government” and the “people,” making his “people” equivalent to Nhouy’s “invaders.” It would be several years before subsequent scholars reconciled these interpretations. Rather than focusing on such details, Nhouy was more interested in the game’s violent style of play, and what this implied about the Lao character: With beautiful springs and great leaps, these grown-up children, whose bare shins and feet do not fear the vigorous blows of the others’ clubs, run, drunk on the battle and alcohol, anxious to show they are taking part in the Khi, the dangerous game between all requiring nothing less than courage. How to explain? School of courage; a test for men said to be invulnerable or impervious to pain, and for young people who have been to this school? The game is not regulated; neither is there a referee. It is a veritable hunt for the running ball, a frantic race, an ineffable scramble punctuated by the shouts of victory or the good natured laughter of the strapping lads with muscles up to the neck, who obviously take nothing too seriously.37

Three main themes emerged from Nhouy’s description. The first was an image of physicality and masculinity among the Lao men playing the game. Labeling the game a “school of courage . . . for men said to be invulnerable or impervious to pain” resonates with masculine discourses of muscular Christianity and the games ethic, ideals of character-building and colonial subject formation that originated in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century before spreading to France via Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics.38 Ever since C. L. R. James’ seminal Beyond a Boundary (1963), scholars have stressed the ways in which colonized populations appropriated and adapted the games ethic ideology for their own purposes, despite its original colonizing intent.39 In this sense, Nhouy may have been

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appropriating the colonial vocabulary of amelioration through physical education and military preparation programs, introduced in Indochina in the 1920s, producing a defense of Lao masculinity in terms produced by colonialism. If so, however, this was as much a Lao portrayal as a European one given the emphasis he placed on alcohol and laughter—a strict no-no in the earnest character-building games ethic of the British public school. Indeed, this frivolity was the second theme that stood out in Nhouy’s account. By celebrating the Lao as fun-loving people, a recurring theme in stereotypes of the Lao, this aspect of the description downplayed the earnestness that might otherwise have been implied by discourses of subject formation. Finally, Nhouy’s account also represented the game as one of violent disorder, played between children, albeit grown-up ones, with no rules and little self-restraint. This element combined with a defense of Lao masculinity in a layered reinterpretation of colonial values, a characterization that for Nhouy embodied the essential elements of the Lao culture. As Susan Bayly stresses, with particular reference to Indochina, “intellectual life in the colonial period . . . involved much interaction between Asians and Europeans.”40 Recent books by Anne Hansen and particularly Penny Edwards make clear how the French and the French-educated indigenes cooperated in the making of Cambodian culture.41 In the case of Laos, by contrast, the important recognition of French involvement in the project to create a protonational Lao culture has left little space to explore the part played by French-educated Lao. As a result, the Luang Prabang prince, Phetsarath Ratthanavongsa, emerges as a lonely prewar voice among a cacophony of French views on Lao culture.42 Against this tendency in Lao studies, Nhouy’s work reflected a broader Lao agency in early efforts to recover and write a Lao culture. For instance, while French scholars authored major monograph surveys of Lao provinces in the journal Bulletin des Amis du Laos, Lao members of the society, especially Nhouy and Phetsarath’s younger half brother, Souvanna Phouma, penned many articles on Lao culture.43 The benefits of this relationship were mutual. As the French reinforced the mandate for their rule, Lao scholars boosted their credentials as spokesmen for Lao culture and society. This became clear after independence: Souvanna Phouma emerged as the dominant figure in royalist politics and Nhouy served as minister of education in successive governments, as well as deputy prime minister.

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The anthropologists— Paul Lévy From the 1940s, professional anthropologists became fascinated by tikhi, adding symbolic interpretation missing from earlier studies of the game. The first of these was Paul Lévy (1909–1998), who like Archaimbault would become a towering figure in Lao studies. Born in Saigon, Lévy travelled to Paris in the late 1920s to study law, but also took classes in Khmer art, Chinese, and Sanskrit, and studied anthropology under Marcel Mauss.44 After graduating from the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris in 1934, Lévy returned to Indochina in 1937, where he worked with the EFEO and cofounded the Institut Indochinois pour l’Étude de l’Homme, under the auspices of Mauss’ Institut d’Ethnologie, with EFEO director George Coedès and another scholar, Pierre Huard.45 According to his eulogist, Lévy’s “ ‘Indochinese’ destiny” was further enhanced by his marriage to a Lao woman, Banyen, who “contributed every day to his understanding of the civilizations of Southeast Asia.”46 His close relationship with his brother-in-law, the Lao scholar Phouvong Phimmasone, also aided his scholarship. Though interned briefly by the Japanese during World War II, Lévy wrote extensively on Lao culture, particularly Buddhism, as part of the collaborative Lao Nhay cultural renovation movement of the early 1940s (examined in chapter two).47 It was during this period, in 1942, that he conducted research on tikhi, though his research article was not published until 1952. It was with his formal training as an ethnographer that Lévy teased out the ritual significance of tikhi. The game Lévy saw was again played on the fi fteenth day of the twelfth month as part of the That Luang festival. Lévy emphasized that it was played “in the presence of the principal Laotian authorities,” formally linking the game to the pomp and pageantry of the festival. Lévy’s detailed ethnography covered the equipment, the composition of the teams, the preceding rites, and the game itself, particularly the rehearsed result. In sum, he found the game to have “preserved a mystical value that justified a special study.”48 Starting with the equipment, Lévy reported that the sticks were made from lengths of bamboo and were of similar proportions to those used in field hockey. As the means “by which the village maintained its prosperity,” the sticks were considered “somewhat sacred.” Yet the “major accessory” was the ball, known simply as the khi, which was carved roughly from bamboo root into a sphere of approximately fifteen centimeters diameter. The importance of the khi was to be found in a phi, or spirit, that resided within. When not being used, the ball was kept in the That

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Luang village shrine, inhabited by the spirit of Setthathirat, the Lao king who moved the “capital” to Vientiane and reconstructed the That Luang as a great monument. Though Lévy did not confirm if the phi in the khi was also that of the former king, the story established an elaborate link between the game of tikhi, the revered restorer of the That Luang, and the glorious history of Lane Xang.49 The khi itself was treated with respect befitting its association with one of Laos’ most revered kings. Shortly before the “solemn game,” the village notables declared on collecting it from the shrine: “The beautiful season has returned, bring us happiness and prosperity. Come out for us to win the contest [of tikhi].” The ball was then placed in a khan, or silver bowl, on the ground holding a khan ha, a circle of five pairs of candles, and taken in procession to the field of play. This was the rectangular esplanade near That Luang, which, as Nhouy had noted, was marked by no lines. Instead the field was limited by “the vague lines of the opponents’ goals,” which were marked by flags.50 At the center of the field, the notables faced the stupa and presented the ball and offerings. On both sides of the field, perpendicular to the goal lines, the two teams, the “Whites” and the “Reds,” stood facing each other in long lines. The colors worn by both teams represented one clear change from Raquez’s observations, when one team wore white and the other was barechested. Each team had the same number of players, although the number was not fi xed. Altogether, Lévy counted almost one hundred players, an impossibly large number compared to established team sports, but considerably fewer than the “few hundred” Raquez counted. An orchestra stood behind the Reds and beside them a squadron of government lancers. The music began and ended with a drum roll, calling the population “to help with the game and salute the victories of its redoubled blows.”51 Preliminaries over, there was a “final and pious invocation to the ballspirit on the part of That Luang tasaeng [chief].” The two team captains took up position opposite one another, the ball positioned between them on the ground and, on the count of three, executed passes to one another to decide who would take the first hit-off. This process was accompanied by “long cries of provocation” and “alternating couplets” in which challenges were peppered with insults and obscenities. When the hit-off was taken, players rushed behind the ball, “cries ringing out from amidst the dust. . . . With great blows of the stick, the ball rolled from one team towards the other without . . . any precise rules of play,” players passing the ball with feet as well as sticks. Wild melees made it impossible to distinguish one team’s

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players from the other’s, while “the most fainthearted, or most dexterous, were content to wait for a gap, and for the ball to come to them, to make the strike to ensure victory.”52 Despite the violence, Lévy could not agree with Nhouy that the game embodied courage, reserving special ridicule for the crowd: “One can see the sense of panic that appears to take hold of the spectators, when the ball is hit in their direction.” Being scared of the sticks would have been understandable, he suggested, but this was merely “the enchanted ball, home of the spirit whose power bestows victory and decides the good and the bad fate for all and for the year.”53 Lévy was more accepting of the game’s “formative value” for the players. Lévy’s most important contribution to the study of tikhi was his analysis of the teams’ composition and its significance to the result. The Reds and the Whites were, respectively, the latsakan (translated by Lévy as administrateurs) and latsadon (administrés), the officials and the people. The former was made up of government functionaries and captained by the chao khwaeng (governor) of Vientiane province; the latter was comprised of residents of That Luang village, custodians of the That Luang itself, and led by the chao meuang (mayor) of Vientiane municipality. The captains mirrored the hierarchy of the teams—a chao khwaeng was more senior than a chao meuang. There was also a colonial dimension to the teams: while the goal defended by the people’s team was decorated with the Lao flag, created during the Vichy-era “national revolution,” the officials’ goal was marked by the French ensign. It is notable here that Lévy conceived of the goal—the physical goal and the goal of the match (both but in French)—in the same terms as football (soccer): a team’s goal was the one it defended and the primary goal of the game was to defend successfully.54 In these terms, the people’s team was defending the honor of Laos while the officials were defending the authority of France, a critical symbolism that Lévy failed to elaborate upon. Commenting on players’ physique and skill, Lévy believed the teams to be unequal due to the superior build, motivation, and skill of the latsadon. Though “physically well developed,” the latsakan (officials) were in no way trained for the game. By contrast, he said, quoting Nhouy, the latsadon players were “peasants with ‘muscles up to the neck.’ ” Since they played each year and were from the same village, they were “specialists” and knew each other well. The residents had special privileges such as being exonerated from certain taxes, “because they protected and looked after the That [stupa].” But motivation was the latsadon’s greatest advantage, since they

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played “for the honor of this particu lar village and for the prosperity of all.”55 Lévy did not offer reasons for the composition of the teams but emphasized that the latsadon were required to defeat the latsakan for the following year to be one of happiness (bonheur) and prosperity (prospérité). Quoting Phouvong, his brother-in-law, he wrote: “To achieve a happy result, the ‘Whites’ (the People or the Ruled) must win two of the three matches, of which the game consists. The ‘Reds’ must be returned one, ‘so as not to upset the equilibrium.’ ”56 Ideally this should be the final match. The preordained result and order of scoring constituted the most significance aspect of the game for Lévy. Citing Thao Nou, a former chao meuang who captained the latsadon team in 1942, he added that the “ ‘population,’ represented by the villagers, must clearly defeat the government power ‘to have happiness for the whole of the year.’ ” Contradicting earlier descriptions that emphasized the battle (lutte), Thao Nou stressed to Lévy: “It is not necessary that the ball oscillates from one team to the other, nor that the winner is unknown before the young men of That Luang village have scored their goals.”57 It was with these perspectives in mind that Lévy reflected upon the broader meaning of tikhi. In a circuitous discussion, he dismissed the speculative connection with polo and instead discussed jeux de mail (mallet games) in comparative perspective, a common anthropological approach at the time. Such games were “ancient,” “universal,” and in many cases retained “religious value . . . [and] intentions that were very close to those of tikhi: to influence the good coming of cultures and to obtain a happy outcome in the enterprise.”58 Lévy cited one such game in Abyssinia, which, pitting one village against another, had formerly been played by shepherds (bergers) or gens du dehors (people of the outdoors) “dressed in animal skins, in permanent contact with the things of the bush, theatre of initiations, revelations, and visions.” It was easy, he wrote, “to notice resemblances” to tikhi, which maintained “sufficient archaic traits to allow us to comprehend its ancient texture.” Citing Nhouy’s hypothesis that the game was a “test of physical qualities,” Lévy proposed that the latsadon—the broussards or bushmen, or what Nhouy had gone so far as to call “invaders”—were equivalent to the gens du dehors in the Abyssinian game: “The last word must belong to them [the latsadon], in the battle that opposes them to the ‘officials,’ installed in their town, removed from the hard contacts of Nature, and drawn away from the strength and the knowledge it confers.”59 For Lévy, this explained why the rulers lacked the strength and physique of the ruled.

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In summary, Lévy argued that like other games in Laos tikhi was “a medium for ensuring a better future.” However, it possessed an “exceptional characteristic” in pitting “the urban leadership class” against “the champions of the population, the great rural majority”: “The mystical conclusion of a good omen, given the brief revenge taken by those who usually are bent in obedience, and its quid pro quo, the temporary impairment of a class usually dominant in other circumstances, are all revealing facts of the archaic social organization.” While the game’s “evolved and erratic appearance . . . deprives us of knowledge of its past, at least of its Indochinese folklore,” Lévy argued that tikhi was “still charged with important mystical facts, living, functional, and from the comparative point of view, well connected to other known mallet games.”60 In this sense, the game was not so much a battle, as previous observers (and parts of his own description) implied, but an annual rite of reversal to ensure health and prosperity for the following year. Though Lévy did not acknowledge his theoretical influences, his analysis of tikhi as a particular kind of ritual displayed his intellectual debt to Émile Durkheim. In effect, he was saying that the game created and maintained collective sentiments by reproducing the historical conflict between the existing population of That Luang village and the ruling class that had at some stage usurped local power. By temporarily reversing relations between the officials and the downtrodden, the preordained result of the game allowed society to continue to function happily and prosperously. Th is interpretation should come as little surprise given the Durkheimian tradition among French anthropologists in Indochina, though this was particularly pronounced in Lévy’s case given his close association with Durkheim’s “intellectual heir,” Marcel Mauss.61 Although Lévy’s ritual interpretation remains persuasive and was certainly more sophisticated than earlier considerations of tikhi, he was nonetheless working within similar historical processes of constructing knowledge of the Lao. Lévy argued, for instance, that “Vientiane alone” knew of the game tikhi. While he knew that in Thai kli (i.e., khli) could refer to polo or a ball for a variety of games, and that tikhli meant “to play polo,” he argued that tikhi, “in my knowledge, is practiced nowhere else in Southeast Asia.”62 Like his predecessors, therefore, Lévy was able to claim tikhi was uniquely Lao. The game was also ancient, he stressed, citing a claim that the game was mentioned in the Lao version of the Ramayana, Phra Lak Phra Lam, which was “in all likelihood of relative antiquity.” Although the Dutch merchant Van Wuysthoff had not noted the game when he visited in the

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seventeenth century, the game was “too well characterized [characterisé] to not be ancient in this country [pays],” a strange phrasing which appeared to mean the game was well established.63 As an EFEO scholar and later the director of Southeast Asian religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, Lévy had the job of researching and documenting the cultures of Indochina. While his interests were broad, “it is without doubt the material collected in Laos that marks [his] scientific oeuvre.” Or in the words of his obituary, “He never ceased to work on the rituals, the festivals, the beliefs, the texts, [and] the technical and religious culture of the Laotians.”64 Lévy’s palpable passion for Laos and the Lao people inspired his belief in the existence of a distinct Lao heritage, which in turn shaped his analysis of tikhi as a ritual form. Lévy’s emphasis on the Lao character of tikhi must also be viewed in the context of the French-led Lao Nhay renovation movement (1941–1945) in Laos. Based on similar cultural programs throughout metropolitan and colonial France, this movement aimed, once again, to locate a Lao culture that was distinct from that of Thailand (as Siam was renamed in 1939). As discussed in the following chapter, the French believed that encouraging local cultural nationalism would reinforce their legitimacy, eroded by their defeat by Japan and loss of territories to Thailand, and counter the appeal of pan-Thai propaganda.65 Lévy was a key French figure in the Lao Nhay movement, organizing conferences and writing articles on Lao Buddhism.66 His 1942 research on tikhi, a distinctly Lao ritual as he saw it, fit perfectly with the ideals and objectives of the movement. Lévy’s emphasis on tikhi’s perpetuity forced him to overlook recent changes to the game’s symbolic meaning, encapsulated by the presence of Lao and French flags. Denoted by the French flag, the latsakan or officials now represented the French; ipso facto, the latsadon or people, marked by the Lao flag, were representing the people of Laos. In the propitious result, he might have argued, the colonized Lao now symbolically defeated the French colonizers. In this interpretation, the happiness and prosperity bestowed by the ritual reversal would have symbolically reinforced colonial relations, retaining the status quo of French colonialism for the following year. Of course, we have no way of knowing if the French would have perceived such a subtle interpretation, particularly one which, even symbolically and momentarily, broached a reversal of French authority. Despite tikhi’s antiquity, however, Lévy’s emphasis on tradition in interpreting the game prevented him from considering how modern categories—France and Laos, colonizer and colonized—were now figuring in the game.

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The anthropologists—Archaimbault If Lévy’s study placed tikhi on the map of Lao ritual studies, it was the scholarship of Charles Archaimbault (1921–2001) that ensured it stayed there. Archaimbault was born in 1921 in France and educated in art history, primitive religions, oriental languages (Lao, Thai, and Chinese), and ethnology. He translated the Traibhumikatha (Three Worlds) with George Coedès before joining the EFEO in Vientiane in 1951.67 Archaimbault lived in Laos until 1956, conducting the fieldwork that, from later that decade, would result in the “oeuvre [that] constitutes the best ethnography of a Southeast Asian ritual system.”68 Archaimbault’s scholarship was concerned with what he termed the Lao cosmogonies of the principal Laotian subcultures—Luang Prabang, Xieng Khouang, Vientiane, and Champasak—each of which corresponded with Lao kingdoms of the past and/or present. These cosmogonies explained the creation, population, and social stratification of the Lao world.69 Summarizing his work in 1964, he started with Luang Prabang, ostensibly because it was furthest north but also because it shaped the others (besides Champasak). As in other northern Tai origin myths, the ancient world consisted of the heavens, inhabited by deities (then), and the lower world of the earth, overseen by three elders (khun). After a great flood, the king of the deities presented the elders with a buffalo, which, after dying three years later, sprouted a giant vine from its nose that produced an enormous pumpkin. Hearing voices from inside, the elders cut two holes in it, one with a chisel, the other with a burning hot iron. From the first hole emerged the Lao, from the second the “aboriginal” or Mon-Khmer Kha, the burnt hole explaining the latter’s darker skin.70 The ruling clan of the Lao, meanwhile, descended separately from the eldest son of the king of the divinities, Khun Bolom. Whereas inside the gourd “discriminating social distinctions were non-existent,” once outside “rigid distinctions were established between the Laotians and the aborigines.” When the Lao sought to establish the Kingdom of Luang Prabang, there was inevitably conflict with the Kha, who already occupied the plains. The Kha were evicted and relocated to the mountains, where they farmed dry rice, while the Lao cultivated wet rice on the plains.71 Archaimbault argued throughout his oeuvre that Lao religious structures and rituals, including tikhi, stemmed from the structural features of

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this cosmogony. The religious structure embodied a hierarchy descending from the descendants of the ruling line (the royal family) to the Lao commoners and the Kha. Although the game was no longer played in Luang Prabang when Archaimbault did his research, he argued that this particular game of tikhi had replaced “the combat between the Laotian conquerors and the aborigines,” reintroducing “the barbarians [Kha] briefly to the bosom of the community,” thus permitting “the retracing of the evolution of an exclusive land right.” The purpose of readmitting the Kha was to renew the legitimacy of the ruling line by retracing “the establishment of a royal and divine right recognized by the people themselves.” When these and other rites had been carried out, the monarch would reign “over a renewed universe in an eternal present.”72 In one sense, Archaimbault concurred with Lévy’s interpretation that tikhi reenacted past conflict between social groups to ensure stability and good fortune over the following year. However, Archaimbault’s groups and teams were different from Lévy’s, and he said nothing about the result. Instead, the game’s significance was located in the Kha’s restoration to the community to retrace and confirm the royal right to land. These discrepancies pointed to the different theoretical approaches employed by the two anthropologists, to which we shall return shortly. Despite recognizing that history had changed the rituals of the Laotian subcultures, Archaimbault identified similar structural features in other games of tikhi. In Vientiane, he examined the That Luang game already studied by Lévy and a game played until perhaps the 1940s in Ban Bo, a saltmining village in Ban Keun district.73 Much localized, the Ban Keun game was played to honor the spirits of the village’s salt mines by opposing the clan of the “spirits” to “the villagers.” According to Archaimbault, this division represented the classical opposition of sacred and profane, with the victory of the sacred “spirits” team recognizing their prior ownership of the land: In Ban Keun, in the ceremony of the opening of the salt, tikhi consecrated an anterior right through the victory of the priestly clan. It ratified the property rights of the spirits who, long before the exploitation of the pits, had already possessed the salt; the villagers’ rights to the land were only acquired afterwards and maintained thanks to the benevolence of the sprit. . . . This was the function of Ti-Khi. Consecrating an anterior state, it demonstrated the starting point of an evolution, which led ultimately to the rational establishment of exploitation. In this sense, we may say that the game retraced a genesis.74

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Although Archaimbault acknowledged many differences between this Ban Keun game and the That Luang game described by Lévy, he asserted “the ‘people-officials’ [administrés-officiels] opposition noted in Vientiane is ultimately resolved in the ‘sacred-profane’ opposition observed in Ban Keun.”75 Most significantly, both traced the genesis of a land right. In the That Luang game, this was the genesis “of a kingdom, which having won over the bush, the countryside, the habitat of local spirits, is recreated periodically by the victory of Dharma. The primitive law recognized and prior agreements ratified, the order is restored: happiness and prosperity, just consequences of the rites, performed for the inhabitants.”76 In retracing the anterior land right of one group over the other, Archaimbault’s interpretation of the two Vientiane games shared basic structural features with the rituals of Luang Prabang, from which they had (in his view) originally developed. Despite the wars, invasions, and period of separation that stripped Vientiane of its original northern cosmogony, he was thus able to detect a “trace” of the ritual organization from the north.77 The last of the tikhi games recorded by Archaimbault—and the only one he seems to have witnessed—was played in Xieng Khouang, the center of the former Phuan kingdom in the northeast of modern-day Laos. The cosmogony of Xieng Khouang, he wrote, was closely related to that of Luang Prabang, since a teacher (achan) from there had founded the kingdom in the fi fteenth century. The original religious structure and rituals had also been similar, including the tikhi game, which had apparently pitted the aboriginal Phu Theng against the Phuan keepers of the That, the ruling Tai-speakers who Archaimbault called a “subdivision of the Lao people.”78 Thus the traditional ethnic composition of the teams reflected that in Luang Prabang. “This structure was shaken in the nineteenth century” by four disastrous events: opposition among vassal princes to the incumbent king, Chao Noi; Vietnamese occupation; deportations carried out by the Siamese; and finally the Ho (Yunnan Chinese) invasions. “Myth having been replaced by history,” these cataclysms “severed the ritual forms from the cosmogony that supported them.”79 The most serious of these upheavals was the Chao Noi’s betrayal by the clan of criminal vassals from Meuang Kham, which led to the collapse of the kingdom. It was the rivalry between Meuang Kham and Meuang Khun (Xieng Khouang itself, home of Chao Noi), that the religious structures and rituals, including tikhi, came to reflect. The match had therefore morphed into the now-familiar opposition of “champions of the people against the government,” the “little ones” against the “great”: “The agonal activity respon-

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sible for ratifying the rights of the first occupant to allow the establishment of a royal and divine law . . . has been replaced by a competition which, violently opposing clans, is charged with aggressiveness and requires a particular ritual purification.”80 A match consisted of two games: two victories by Meuang Kham, representing the people, would result in “disasters”; two wins for the Meuang Khun officials was “a sure sign of prosperity”; and a drawn result would result in both good and bad fortune.81 The game thus differed from Vientiane in that the result was not predictable and there was no ritual reversal of hierarchy in the propitious result. For Archaimbault, this meant “the little ones cannot overcome the great without entailing misfortunes for the region.” Having adapted to the history of Xieng Khouang, the game performed the vassals’ guilty conscience, thus allowing the “liberating exoneration” of their guilt.82 Archaimbault’s work remains profoundly striking, both empirically and conceptually. His ethnography incorporates a dizzying array of chronicles and oral sources and is fi lled with rhetorical questions and hypotheses. Yet his scholarship also contains a unifying simplicity, for it all discussed and ultimately supported the existence of a related set of Lao cosmogonies. Even when this connection to the original structure had been severed by historical change, Archaimbault never failed to locate a cosmogonical remnant in tikhi. This consistency points to his theoretical approach, and how it differed from that of his predecessor, Lévy. For Archaimbault, the significance of tikhi was not primarily its reenactment of a single clash between two groups, as it had been for Lévy, but its broader reenactment of the Lao cosmogony. Though Durkheimian notions of communal sentiment remained relevant, his study resonated most with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism, which was becoming influential in French anthropology at that time. Archaimbault did not declare a theoretical position—indeed, one contemporary noted his primary aim was “not to make a theoretical point”— but his singular focus on structural features of Lao ritual complexes opened his work to criticism for being slavish to the notion of cosmogony.83 In this respect, Archaimbault’s sophisticated studies of tikhi can be traced to his desire to create a coherent body of knowledge of and on the Lao kingdoms as a particular civilization. At first, this may not seem to have been the case. Unlike his predecessors, he recognized explicitly that the Laotian subcultures, as he called them, “developed from an original T’ai substratum.”84 Foreshadowing later French work on the Tai as a regional culture group, especially by Georges Condominas, such analysis demonstrated how postwar scholars thought in terms of ethnicity rather than race.85 As

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revealed by his extensive use of the term “Laotian,” however, Archaimbault wrote of the Lao cosmogonies as if they formed a coherent ethno-cultural group, which, if sharing similar origins, was distinct from other Tai cultures. His studies of tikhi stemmed from and reinforced this point. While recognizing that history had changed things, Archaimbault associated separate games in Luang Prabang, Vientiane, and Xieng Khouang with a similar origin myth in the three subcultures. Archaimbault was far too good a scholar to conflate this notion of Laotian with modern Laos: he knew as well as anyone that the precolonial subcultures had extended into present-day Thailand, and that the last of the Laotian subcultures, Champasak in southern Laos, did not even play tikhi. Unlike his predecessors, moreover, he found evidence of “tikhli” in the cities of northeast Thailand and Cambodia. Nonetheless, the ritual elements of tikhi, which linked it to the Lao cosmogonies, were particularly Laotian in his view. In Cambodia and Thailand, tikhi had “lost all of its ritual value” and was now just a “plain sport” (sport simple). The game had maintained “some trace of tradition” in Nong Khai, the Thai town across the Mekong River from Vientiane, until the early 1950s, but this city was so close to Vientiane that it was almost synonymous with Laos.86 In short, the traditional elements of tikhi were unique to Laos and uniquely Lao. He summarized this position early in his oeuvre, speculating that, together with Lévy’s then-recent study of tikhi in Vientiane, the “existence of this game in Ban Bo may permit the discovery of the special function of the mallet game [tikhi] within a purely Laotian cultural complex.”87

Tikhi, ritual, and sport In The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, Grant Evans notes changes to the annual tikhi match at That Luang after the 1975 revolution. Rather than maintaining teams of latsakan and latsadon, the officials and the people, organizers simply recruited two unclassified teams distinguished only by different-colored shirts. According to Evans, the socialist state did this to emphasize that “under the new ‘democratic,’ ‘people’s’ regime there is, of course, no need for reversals because there are, allegedly, no hierarchies to reverse and ritually confirm.”88 In a footnote, he adds that the change resulted also from the “transformation of traditional games into ‘sport,’ something increasingly promoted by the Lao state.” The latter observation

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conforms to expected processes of sportive modernization based on Guttmann’s structural-formal characteristics, as discussed earlier, or similar ideas of “sportization.”89 Yet Evans also stressed that prerevolutionary categories and meanings—kasat (king) and latsadon (people)—persisted among spectators, drawing attention to the continued reality of political hierarchy. When I witnessed the game myself, in 2008, the teams had reverted to pasason (the people) versus phanakngan (civil servants), so that old meanings were entrenched once more, but now in the argot of the socialist and postsocialist state. Again, the pomp and ritual followed that described by Lévy. Again, the People prevailed (though the score was 4–2, not 2–1). Again onlookers held that this would ensure happiness (khwam suk) and wealth (khwam hangmi) for the coming year, a belief also reported by Vientiane Mai, a major state-run daily. On the other hand, no one could say the result was rehearsed, and, at least to my eye, the phanakngan team played as valiantly as the victors, beaten simply by a stronger team. In this respect, in other words, it looked like any other sporting match between enthusiastic, if decidedly nonathletic, tracksuit-wearing civil servants in Laos. Indeed, the Vientiane Mai report appeared in the sports section, referred to the game as “tikhi sport” (kila tikhi), and, in sporting idiom, declared without a hint of irony that the “People were too strong yet again.”90 This was not elite sport, to be sure, but was it possible to say tikhi had transformed into a “sport”? Elements of it certainly seemed to suggest so. But whatever the full answer to this question, changes to tikhi since 1975 serve to emphasize that, in the period studied in this chapter, the opposite tended to happen, as interpretations strengthened over time of tikhi as a ritual. Looking back at early accounts of the game, this outcome was not inevitable or perhaps even most likely. Though Alfred Raquez and Nhouy Abhay stressed that the game featured at religious festivals, neither mentioned tikhi’s ritualized result and, while both named the teams, they did not elaborate on their significance. Their emphasis was rather on the way the game was played, its frenetic pace, and the violence it contained. Most importantly, Nhouy suggested that the game was a “school of courage” for young men, an interpretation that suggests parallels with modern sports. Lévy also alluded to the game’s roughness and other sportive elements, implying that reaching the predictable result involved the suspension of disbelief. Despite knowing in advance that the People would win, he noted, “it appeared to me that they wanted to win.”91 As when I saw the game in 2008, this feature of the game reinforced the impression of willing physicality and fair competition.

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Although authors emphasized that tikhi provided evidence of a distinctive Lao culture, such descriptions showed the game was also open to a sportive interpretation; that it possessed key features enabling it to be understood as and transformed into a modern sport, as many traditional games around the world have been. Highlighting this potential, a 1942 article on “sporting activities in Laos” in the magazine Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine explained tikhi purely in sporting terms. As one of several “ancient sports,” tikhi was described as simply “a type of ball game . . . played with two teams of equal number; the players contest for the ball, the one who succeeds in taking possession and putting it in the opposition goal—a kind of small round hole dug in the soil—wins a point for his team; the final victory goes to the team which scores the most goals.”92 The brief and factual nature of this description— published the very year Lévy conducted his research—highlights that ritual was not the only way of viewing tikhi. In an important sense, this was the exception that proved the rule. While the game boasted sufficient qualities of a sport to be considered as such, it was almost always interpreted as a remnant of Lao history, tradition, and ritual. This tendency strengthened over time, especially once EFEO anthropologists developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the game as a ritual. To borrow terminology from Guttmann’s discussion of “the sacred and the secular,” such observers saw tikhi as a cultic practice with utilitarian goals rather than a “modern sport” (or even just a “sport”). Studies of tikhi were similar to ethnographic field reports produced under colonialism, which, in describing physical practices in terms of ritual, carefully avoided the term “sport” so as not to confuse these non-European practices with European ones.93 Rather than the specific category of sport, the more general French term jeu (game or play) was used to refer to tikhi. The choice of terminology helped to consolidate the status of tikhi as a “ritual,” as it was also described, and inhibited its transformation into a “sport.” Yet, in a broader epistemological sense, the Sports-Jeunesse article suggested the sport and ritual perspectives were not diametrically opposed but ultimately revealing of two distinct aspects of modernity. If, on the one hand, tikhi was a sport, it provided an indigenous foundation for the sport and physical training programs promoted in Laos during the early 1940s, which had the intention of building a strong and hardworking Lao subject with equal loyalty to Laos, French Indochina, and the French Empire, as discussed in the following chapter. If, on the other hand, tikhi was a ritual, it

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supported the foundation of Lao cultural nationalism, which was also promoted in the early 1940s, extending this subjectivity into the past and granting it a noble and glorious history. In short, both interpretations served the modern concern with locating a Lao subjectivity stretching from precolonial Lao kingdoms to modern Laos. This analysis challenges binaries such as sport-ritual and moderntraditional, central not only to Guttmann’s seminal study but implicit in studies of tikhi. Despite their conceptual allure, such binaries say less about the object of study than the mode of analysis. As Susan Brownell argues, Guttmann defines “primitive” or “non-traditional” sports as “what ‘modern sports’ are not,” convinced like modernization theorists of the fundamental difference between the premodern or traditional world and modern societies.94 In this formulation, physical activities in Laos and other colonized societies are automatically considered premodern because they are non-European—or, more specifically, because they existed before the European presence. Th is approach will always emphasize such games’ sacred qualities, ensuring they are placed in a separate conceptual category to sport. Rather than starting with assumptions of difference, Brownell suggests all kinds of sports are constructed of rules and practices, which are inevitably negotiated and must be “analyzed as an ongoing process of social interaction.” She continues: “The conflict between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ is ultimately not one between abstract structural forms—it is between groups of people fighting for the power to control the future. . . . [T]radition doesn’t die out; it is reinvented and reincorporated into new forms, which is one more reason why it is difficult to clearly separate the ‘traditional’ from the ‘modern.’ ”95 While traditional games inevitably change, they do not necessarily become modern; they may, in fact, become more traditional as required by modernity’s historicism, the need for a coherent past to make sense of the present and the future. Tradition and modernity are not simply start and end points of an evolutionary continuum, but are mutually constitutive of and dependent on one another. Of course, all scholarship is informed by prevailing intellectual concerns, and as Guttmann has countered in a “laconic response,” power inequalities need not necessarily constitute the focus of every study of sport.96 But it is worth asking, as Brownell suggests, what aspects of power are downplayed or omitted from the modes of analysis that have shaped understandings of tikhi as a ritual and tradition. First and most obviously, writing about tikhi as a tradition and ritual served the colonial project of creating

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knowledge of the Lao, which helped to justify the French imperial incursion that formed modern Laos. The agents in this project included traveller-writers, young Lao researchers like Nhouy and Phouvong, and, most prominently, EFEO scholars Lévy and Archaimbault. Regardless of their backgrounds, such writers created an idea of the Lao race and culture that corresponded in some way with the entity of Laos, justifying its constitution as a French colony and later as a distinct and independent nation, even when this was not the most immediate concern. The meanings of Lao were multiple, referring variously to a race, precolonial kingdoms, and the subjects and culture of the modern colony and, later, the nation of Laos. In practice, however, the different meanings of Lao collapsed unproblematically into a relatively unified one that stretched, anachronistically, from ancient times to the present. Unlike today, authors were once largely unconcerned if these categories referred to an ethnic or geographical group. Even skilled scholars like Archaimbault spoke of “Laotian subcultures” that included “Lao” or “Laotians,” often used interchangeably, Kha (speakers of Mon-Khmer languages), and other groups.97 If the result of the game continued to recall premodern cosmogonies and hierarchies, understanding it as a ritual reflected colonial epistemology and power. Though barely noticed by observers, colonial power was integrated into tikhi early in the twentieth century, first by marking Vientiane’s establishment as the Lao capital with a game, and then by using French and Lao flags to mark the goals. These changes modernized the ritual meaning of the game, even as the game itself was increasingly perceived as a timeless tradition. The other key element of power involved in understandings of tikhi concerned the body and gender. Although the game retained a ritual purpose throughout the twentieth century, it also provided opportunity for male physical expression: it was a “school of courage” for young men, as Nhouy memorably labeled it, which demonstrated and developed masculinity. Whether tikhi was a school of courage or a ritual reversal designed to ensure happiness and prosperity, the game reflected the privileged social role of men. In the ritual explanation, male bodies possessed greater ritual power than those of women. While all benefited from the happy and prosperous year that would follow, only men could participate in the highly public ritual that, as a result, bound the dynamic male body to the annual restoration of political power. A similar modality of gender and power appears to have existed in the annual boat races in Luang Prabang, though the event has yet to be seriously studied in this way.98 In the school of courage view, women could not be schooled in courage; it was a male trait. Both aspects of embod-

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ied masculinity and power continued to resound in colonial and postcolonial sport, highlighting similarities in the ways that precolonial and colonial physical culture were understood in the early twentieth century. These similarities are lost if we focus on distinctions between ritual and sport created in the colonial encounter.

2

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The French may have laid foundations in the 1920s and 1930s, but it was during the Lao Nhay cultural renovation movement of 1941–1945 that colonial sport and physical culture effloresced into a major feature of local culture and politics. This expansion occurred as part of the so-called National Revolution, an ultraconservative program for national renewal that originated in the southern French spa town of Vichy—the seat of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Nazi-collaborationist regime (1940–1944)— before sweeping through the French Empire. Sport and physical training, key features of this cult of rebirth, arrived first in the major centers of Indochina before emerging as a key instrument in efforts to build “pro-French nationalism” in Laos.1 Many ideas, practices, and institutions failed to make it to Laos, the remotest of the Indochinese territories, and the intent and nature of other innovations were adapted to the Lao situation. Nevertheless, the flow of ideas and practices through the Vichy French Empire explains the rapid growth of sport and physical training in the middle of the twentieth century, and the masculine body’s emergence as a key site for the expression of early cultural nationalism in Laos. Recent scholarship emphasizing the continuity of French (as opposed to Japanese) rule during these years recognizes the fundamental importance of sport and youth programs inspired by the metropole. Historian Eric Jennings argues that the Vichy regime “cloned itself overseas,” adding that colonial leaders and local elites in Indochina went further even than Vichy in emulating “fascist and Nazi youth leagues.”2 Historical sociologist Anne Raffin similarly describes the “transnational policy process” that saw Vichy’s youth mobilization policies and institutions not simply replicated, but adapted to “Confucianism and Buddhism in Vietnam, Buddhism in Laos, and Buddhist Kingship in Cambodia.” She labels these twin processes

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“Westernization” and “Easternization.”3 However, Raffin adds, “Laos lagged behind Cambodia and Vietnam in the development of sports and youth organization. Sporting activities were ultimately much less significant in their impact than the Lao Nhay movement,” especially “cultural and linguistic nationalism.” A major cause of this focus, she reasons, was the greater concern of Thai irredentism in Laos compared to racial degeneration elsewhere. As a result, sport and physical culture “were secondary” to cultural renovation for the Lao; sports and youth movements were more popular among the ethnic-Vietnamese than the Lao; and there was “probably a division of labor” between youth corps and sporting activities, which aimed to develop an Indochinese identity, and the Lao Nhay cultural movement, which promoted a Lao identity through cultural means.4 Utilizing Lao-language sources absent from these studies, this chapter reaches rather different conclusions. While Raffin is right to argue that Laos lagged behind other parts of Indochina, this was a simple function of its remoteness. Likewise, although Thai propaganda was indeed a greater factor in Laos than elsewhere, sporting and cultural activities were not in competition but complemented one another. Indeed, far from being distinct from the Lao Nhay movement, as Raffi n suggests, sport and physical training were central elements of it, involving large numbers of urban Lao elites as well as Vietnamese. Similar to other parts of Indochina, motifs of laziness, decadence, and racial degeneration were persistent themes in the Lao Nhay movement, and physical culture was implemented expressly to counter them.5 In explaining this reality, this chapter argues that Vichy sport and youth programs did not arrive in all parts of the federation as one modality, proceeding to be adapted to local cultural spheres, but were first introduced to the major Indochinese centers before being disseminated to smaller centers like those in Laos. This trajectory is reflected in the chapter’s structure, tracing ideas and practices in their travels from Vichy, to the Indochinese centers of Saigon, Hanoi, and Phan Thiet, and finally to Laos. This double movement highlights the imperial as opposed to transnational character of the sport and youth programs. While the Lao renovation carried out activities in and for Laos, it did so as part of the pan-imperial and pan-Indochinese national revolutions, accounting for Vietnamese and French involvement. The Lao Nhay movement may have given Lao elites more of a “stake in the imperial system,” as Frederick Cooper might say, but Laos remained part of the French “imperial space,” ensuring that protonational, federal, and imperial subjectivities remained tightly entangled.6

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The National Revolution in Vichy France’s startling defeat to Germany in mid-1940 sparked a period of profound national introspection, resulting in efforts to stamp out “decadence” and foster moral renewal.7 The newly established Vichy regime of Great War hero Pétain framed these objectives under the rubric of the Révolution Nationale, or National Revolution. As these goals attested, and the regime’s motto—travail, famille, patrie (work, family, homeland)—confirmed, this so-called revolution was really an ultraconservative backlash against perceived sins of prewar society. As well as notoriously assisting Germany to target French Jews, the Vichy regime paid special attention to “the two bulwarks of the social order, the church and the family,” nourished a leadership cult around Pétain, and promoted the revival of rural life and local traditions.8 As part of its heightened concern with youth and education, the regime implemented widespread sport and physical training programs for the purpose of national amelioration. Together with the church and family, the main means of overcoming “moral degeneration” was education reform. In place of the Third Republic’s bookish system of “instruction,” the Vichy system sought to implement more rounded “education” to produce the “whole man.” Although this was hardly a new concern, once in power conservatives were able to implement the ideology of “general education,” which included civic, social, and moral education, as well as sport and physical training.9 For many in France at the time, the idea of renewal through physical education was connected to the concept of race. For others, recovering masculinity was the main benefit, as “physical culture and manliness went together.” Whether race or gender was the focus, sport aimed to counter decadence and foster renewal by promoting health, courage, discipline, and virility.10 Such themes closely resembled what was called muscular Christianity or the games ethic, ideologies developed in English public schools in the mid-nineteenth century to build character, develop leadership skills, and bring schoolboys closer to God, which rapidly became synonymous with organized amateur sport in France.11 In 1940 Pétain appointed the former tennis champion and artillery captain, Jean Borotra, to the new position of General Commissioner for General Education and Sport, in effect making him “the world’s first minister of sport.”12 On the court, Borotra had been a great player and even greater performer: “With his beret screwed tight on his head, he became ‘the bounding Basque,’ the tightrope artist of the tennis courts, whose spectacular

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leaps delighted the crowds.”13 Off the court, he “fit the image of the cosmopolitan Frenchman: a spectacular, debonair personality, a gallant kissing ladies’ fi ngertips, a host of elegant parties aboard the Ile de France or at his fashionable residence in Paris.”14 But beneath his debonair exterior, Borotra had developed a deep conviction in the formative aspects of sport, particularly during many years spent in England, which he called his “second mother country.”15 “It is on the sports field that the child is most likely to acquire the taste for effort, loyal and tenacious combat, and team spirit which makes a community meaningful,” he later wrote.16 Less benevolently, Borotra believed sport and general education could foster French remilitarization by stealth. Borotra’s Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Générale et aux Sports (CGEGS) oversaw the establishment of a dense sporting bureaucracy that would later be replicated in Indochina. These included the Charte des Sports (Sports Charter), which aimed to reorganize sport under the aegis of the state, requiring sports clubs to register with sports federations and to be vetted to ensure they were “not political.” These federations were in turn combined under the Comité National des Sports. The charter “much profited” the sporting movement with participation in amateur sport increasing markedly compared to prewar levels.17 The CGEGS instituted nine hours of general education and sport per week in secondary schools, including physical education, sport, manual work, singing, religious observance, and cultural excursions.18 The commission also implemented standardized tests of physical fitness, including the Brevet National Sportif (National Sports Certificate) and swimming certificates at the primary and secondary level, and made physical tests part of the baccalaureate and other school examinations.19 The CGEGS also sought to develop personnel and facilities. General education and sport cadres were trained at exclusive national leadership schools (écoles des cadres) and went on to work in one of fi fteen regional centers of general and sports education, where schoolteachers received supplementary training. The École Nationale des Cadres (National Cadre School) at Uriage implemented the “natural method,” known as Hébertisme, after its founder General Georges Hébert, a “rough and ultramasculine” form of physical training that openly celebrated virility.20 Concerning facilities, the CGECS aimed to build playing fields, swimming pools, and sports centers in every commune. Even as the war strained the budget, considerable resources continued to be allocated to sporting facilities.21 The most spectacular deployment of the body in Vichy France was the Pétainist festival, which combined patriotic pomp and physical activity in a

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striking state spectacle. These festivals typically included a flag-raising ceremony, recitation of the athlete’s oath, singing of “La Marseillaise,” marching, and mass calisthenics displays involving up to thousands of youth. Participants wore uniforms of white shorts and singlet or T-shirt, or remained bare-chested according to the “natural method.” While formations of barechested and uniformed adolescents evoked fascist youth rallies elsewhere, Borotra apparently “had in mind the Greek rather than the Nazi ideal.”22 True or not, these displays were a hybrid of many influences, including the Olympics, patriotism, and fascistic nationalism. Whatever “ideal” Borotra had in mind, orderly rows of marching young men, chests puffed outwards as they saluted Pétain in the official box, bore a strong resemblance to the body cults of Nazi Germany and other fascist states, particularly as the official “Olympic salute” used at such events was identical in appearance to the Nazi salute. Despite implementation problems, the unprecedented scale of sport and physical culture in France during this period had widespread sociocultural ramifications, especially in terms of gender. Based on “all the facets of the myth of the eternal feminine,” the role of women in Vichy sporting movements was defined according to concerns with feminine physiology and “female frailty.”23 Given the objective of developing “grace and agility” among women, “rhythmic exercises, basketball, and swimming were all thought especially suitable.”24 According to the National Revolution’s biological metaphor of making France “healthy” again, the primary importance of women’s bodies was their role in increasing the birthrate.25 The nation’s salvation, by contrast, would occur through the remasculinization of the male body. The resultant “quest for masculinity” came to typify representations of national amelioration.26 This “cult of virility” owed much to the militarization of manliness that had occurred in the wake of Germany’s defeat in 1918, and spread throughout Europe with fascist and other reactionary movements.27

The National Revolution in Indochina Just as the National Revolution in Vichy aimed to reawaken the French spirit in the wake of defeat to Germany, French policy in Vichy Indochina during the 1941–1945 period sought to restore the image of France in the wake of its accommodation with Japan. The Franco-Japanese agreements of 1941—permitted by Vichy’s collaboration with Germany, a Japanese ally— may have avoided prolonged military conflict and left routine administra-

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tion in French hands, but they shattered any myth of colonial superiority and protection.28 In aiming to restore its legitimacy, the Vichy Indochina regime aimed to “enroll the support of the local population—especially the local elites—to keep French Indochina under French suzerainty.”29 To achieve this end, colonial officials promoted Indochinese and local patriotisms under the auspices of the French Empire, a policy that remained in place until the Japanese coup de force of March 1945, when colonial officials were imprisoned and the Lao, Cambodian, and Vietnamese monarchs were forced to declare independence. The Indochinese National Revolution took place under the leadership of Rear-Admiral (later Admiral) Jean Decoux, the “hard-nosed disciplinarian” and former head of the French navy in Indochina that took over as governor general in mid 1940.30 Although French Indochina still consisted of five separate territories, Decoux conceived of it in terms of three culturally defined petites patries (little homelands), namely Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. As he explained afterwards, each “had the right, and even the duty, to claim a local patriotism openly, [and] to remain faithful to its religion, to its history, to its sovereign (if it had one).” This duty was “on the condition, however, of never forgetting that beside and even above the petite patrie, the thoughts of all were to go unceasingly to the great French homeland, guardian and tutor of the Federation, to which the Indochinese had still more obligation to remain faithful.”31 Decoux made explicit distinction between local patriotisms and nationalism, the latter tending to be “xenophobic and anti-French.”32 Although discussion of petites patries reflected Vichy’s firm conviction in the objective fact of racial/cultural difference, ethnic minorities were not recognized as having their own patries, and were rarely even acknowledged. In addition to local and imperial patriotisms, the colonial administration sought to develop an Indochinese “personality” incorporating Confucianism, Buddhism, and elements of Western civilization. Given that Indochina had for decades been predominantly a “Franco-Annamese experience,” plans to include Laos and Cambodia as equal members of a newly conceived federalism were ambitious and bound to be regarded with suspicion by the inhabitants of those countries, given their history with their Vietnamese neighbors.33 Nevertheless, efforts to promote three local, federal, and imperial identities were the defining motif of Decoux’s regime. Sport and youth activities provided a key means of promoting Vichy’s multiple patriotisms. In April 1941, Decoux established the Comité Général aux Oeuvres de Jeunesse en Indochine under Jacques Lebas, deputy principal

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of Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi.34 With delegates drawn from scouting, the military, education, and the medical profession, the committee recommended the formation of two separate organizations: the Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Physique et aux Sports and the Commissariat Général à la Jeunesse.35 While Lebas himself headed the youth commission, his counterpart in sport and physical education was Captain Maurice Ducoroy. A naval captain, Ducoroy was a keen sportsman who had studied under Georges Hébert in France, making him eminently well qualified for the position.36 Just as important, he had arrived in Hanoi in May fresh from the famed battle of Ko Chang, where the French navy had defeated the Thai in what Decoux considered its “greatest naval victory in the war.”37 Ducoroy rapidly proved himself in establishing the institutional framework of the sports movement. In September 1941, he opened the École Supérieure d’Éducation Physique d’Indochine (ESEPIC), a Hébertisme center for civil and military trainees in Phan Thiet, which would emerge as the key site in the Indochinese sport-youth movement. Like the écoles des cadres in France, ESEPIC was intended to train cadres to work in schools, stadiums, and other sporting organizations throughout Indochina.38 In November, Ducoroy established a sports association in each of the five pays and the Comité Indochinois des Sports (CIS), based on the Comité National des Sports in France.39 Ducoroy’s “rapid and indisputable success” made a strong impression on Decoux, who wasted little time in appointing his naval colleague head of the newly merged Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Physique, aux Sports et à la Jeunesse (CGEPSJ), which combined the separate commissions for physical education and sport, and for youth.40 Officially formed to create “a unity of doctrine, a unity of impetus,” the new commission was situated in the military office, suggesting the merger might also have been intended to foster the militarization of youth movements.41 In any case, the figures of Decoux and Ducoroy—pictured side by side in starched naval officers’ uniforms—reinforced the impression of militarization as they became the public faces of sport and youth in Indochina. Shortly after his promotion, Ducoroy outlined his ambitious vision for the “physical education of youth” as an urgent “matter of moral and social order,” in a long report to the Conseil Fédéral d’Indochine. While recognizing that “the educational importance of physical education and the rational practice of sports” had been known for many years, the commissioner believed official efforts had failed to achieve “appreciable results” due to the lack of consultation with authorities in France. He thus wished to remodel Indochinese sport, physical education, and youth activities based on those

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implemented in Vichy, and proceeded to describe the role of the Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Générale et aux Sports in Vichy and the centralized organization of national sport under the Comité National des Sports.42 Although he stressed that the program would be adapted to the “local conditions of races, customs, climate, general material situations, all different in each pays of the union,” there was actually very little to distinguish Ducoroy’s vision of sport and physical education in Indochina from that of the metropole.43 For a start, the CGEPSJ would oversee the same three areas as its metropolitan equivalent: general and sporting education, sport and outdoor activities, and sporting infrastructure. Although Ducoroy’s plan would not be followed to the letter, it provides an excellent overview of sport and youth institutions in Indochina. General and sporting education was to be promoted in schools, businesses, rural centers, and provincial sporting societies, while physical examinations would be required in schools and workplaces, including the Brevet de Capacité Physique (Certificate of Physical Aptitude), for admission into administrative posts (for those under thirty years of age). Cadres would be trained at ESEPIC in Phan Th iet, which opened the previous September, while another school would be established in Dalat for female monitrices. Graduating trainees were expected to conduct physical education classes, referee sports matches, guide youth “morally and in a national sense,” and become leaders of sporting groups in each province. Concerning “sport and outdoor activities,” Ducoroy outlined the administrative structure he had already started to implement: the federal CIS, sports associations in each territory (pays), and provincial sports societies in the provinces. The following March, the newly approved Charte Sportive de l’Indochine, once again based on the Vichy version, added local sports societies.44 Regarding the final task of the CGEPJS, Ducoroy outlined ambitious plans to build physical training fields and swimming ponds at the local level, football fields, basketball courts, and athletics tracks at the provincial level, and Olympic-style stadiums, velodromes, municipal swimming pools, and indoor sports centers in the capital of each territory.45 Ducoroy’s blueprint triggered exponential expansion of sport and physical education over the following few years. Between 1940 and 1944, the number of sporting societies increased from 260 to 1,129; the number of licensed athletes (sportifs) from 10,200 to 86,075; the number of sports fields from 120 to 1,111; obstacle courses from 4 to 290; and swimming pools and ponds from 22 to 210. Meanwhile, the number of male physical education instructors leapt from 44 in 1940 to 1,061 in 1944, while female instructors

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increased from just 3 to 52 in the same period.46 By mid 1942, the CGEPSJ had overseen construction of 272 “new stadiums” and 218 pistes Hébert. It had also founded a weekly sports magazine, Sports d’Indochine, and a bulletin for ESEPIC graduates.47

The objectives of sport in Indochina Vichy-era leaders in Indochina believed sport and physical culture had a major role to play in colonial governance and subject formation. One of the most pressing objectives of the sport and youth movement was to promote unity among the youth of Indochina. “Nothing can better cement this union,” Ducoroy wrote, “than the practice of physical education and sport.”48 A series of grandes manifestations sportives, or great sporting events, were established expressly for this purpose. The first of these was a torch relay covering more than 2,000 kilometers from Angkor Wat to Hanoi, stopping in thirty-three cities and towns en route. The Olympic torch ( fl ambeau Olympique), as correspondence referred to it, “represented a symbol, the nascent sporting idea,” according to Ducoroy, one of many ways in which the colonial administration exploited Olympic mythology.49 The following January, a Hanoi-Saigon-Phnom Penh team cycling race was held, paving the way for the Tour d’Indochine in following years. Like their French counterparts, these tours were epic events, the 1943 version covering over 4,000 kilometers in twenty-five stages, including stops in all five territories. The two teams of thirty riders included cyclists from throughout Indochina, as well as from the army, air force, and navy.50 Another important event was the Pétain Cup, a football tournament involving the five Indochinese territories.51 Besides the theme of federalism, which was adapted to the political organization of Indochina, most of the regime’s other aims for sport drew directly from those in Vichy. Most notable was the objective of achieving national renovation through the body. An ESEPIC textbook, Méthode indochinoise d’ éducation physique, summed up these benefits in defi ning physical education as: [E]xercise, the rational and methodical practice of which helps to make the human reach the highest degree of physical development permitted by his nature. Its purpose is to increase the potential of the race by improving it physically and mentally. In effect, growth in physical qualities: relaxation, speed, strength, stamina, harmony of form and proportion accompanied

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by good health, the spirit of solidarity and discipline, and the taste of responsibility.

The physical and moral benefits of exercise had both ideological and instrumental elements: “The practice of physical education must, therefore and above all, teach to discipline movement and get in touch with the muscular habits best adapted to the useful applications of life.”52 Likewise, Ducoroy explained to the Conseil Fédéral d’Indochine in December 1941, sport “must enable the Indochinese youth to acquire sporting spirit, team spirit, practical spirit, the desire to do well, to do better, and to do more quickly; it will give the Peoples of the Federation the necessary strength to master the future.”53 These benefits were repeated time and again, especially in the sport and youth magazine Sports d’Indochine, which often invoked Pétain by name. An early article titled “Marshal Pétain wants a robust youth” recalled the leader’s advocacy of physical training as a means of shaping the “whole man”: “School and military cadres have a common mission to develop physical value, soak the heart, forge the will.” With Pétain now head of state, it was possible to apply these principles, and “in a year or two the allure of the young generation can and must be transformed by physical culture.”54 Other articles took up issues of sportsmanship. One issue of Sports d’Indochine defined sporting spirit as “the sense and the love of selfless effort that is, in the words of the Marshal, the essential part of human dignity and effectiveness . . . the equality of all, politeness, loyalty, honor.”55 Such values closely paralleled those of the British games ethic. The same article continued: “Sports erase social difference and require perfect courtesy. The proper sportsman abstains from all uncouthness and brutality. In all circumstances, he shows loyalty. . . . He fiercely defends the honor of his team. The battles he supports develop in him the principle qualities of man: will, perseverance, endurance, coolness, courage.”56 These characteristics aimed ultimately to serve the National Revolution. Ducoroy might well have been talking about sport as a whole when he recalled the purpose of the official magazine: “By creating Sports d’Indochine we wanted . . . to help the vast human movement intended to give France and its empire physically renovated men, who in this way will more easily achieve the total Renovation: muscle, will, virility, moral virtues, intelligence; altogether harmonious and highly useful.”57 As these excerpts attested, the sporting programs of Vichy Indochina were founded, above all, on the link between masculinity and empire. The

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Pétainist virtues of strength of body and mind and the constant references to virility stemmed from an ideal of manhood and regeneration that, in Indochina as in France, made the male body the primary agent of the National Revolution. More practically, it was expected that training men in this way would produce patriotic and productive subjects to carry out the renovation of empire and society. As Raffin notes, scouting and Hébertisme sought to discipline colonial subject populations in love for the “imperial nation,” an objective reflected in the motto “to serve.”58 Sport was similar. By contrast with men’s training, women’s physical culture prioritized aesthetics and reproduction over strength and stamina. As opposed to earlier methods of training, which were criticized for giving women “unsightly muscles,” rhythmic gymnastics was embraced as a method “uniquely adapted to the particular physiology and destiny of the woman.” This destiny was motherhood. The method aimed “to cultivate suppleness, grace and at the same time to forge a resilient abdominal waistband, which must protect in all circumstances the integrity of the precious but fragile organs.”59 A textbook published by the founder of rhythmic gymnastics in Indochina, Madame Parmentier, outlined a series of dance exercises with accompanying music.60 Even the location of the monitrices training school in Dalat, in the cool climes of the highlands, reflected the concern for protecting women’s anatomy. There was little specifically colonial about these objectives; similarly gendered ideas of subjectivation characterized sport in Vichy France. Not surprisingly, one theme that was noticeably more pronounced in Indochina than in France was race, as the perceived physical inadequacy of the Indochinese was put down to racial factors. “How is a race rebuilt?” Decoux asked in 1943, proceeding to recount his own success in doing just this: Physical education and sport have not only improved the race, they have literally transformed it. As a result, a new type of man is being born; or, rather, the true type of Indochinese man is being reborn after centuries of indifference to physical development. At the same time slender and highly muscular with a sharp and straight gaze, [he is] an odd contrast to the puny young man of the past, who cared only for intellectual speculation and disdained everything else.61

While French bookishness was blamed on the education system, Indochinese puniness and intellectualism was viewed as a racial problem.

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But who were the “Indochinese”? A couple of years earlier, Lebas had declared that “three different youths” coexisted in Indochina—namely, the French, Eurasian, and Indochinese—each of which “required [their own] particular solutions.” Compared to the first two of these, which Lebas considered rather small and homogenous, he found Indochinese “racial elements” to be “extremely varied, requiring nuanced directives adapted to various mentalities and taking account of local conditions.”62 In this sense, Decoux’ racial characterization of the “Indochinese man” referred unmistakably to the Vietnamese, who, like the French, were criticized for being overly intellectual. By contrast, the Lao and Khmer were normally stereotyped in different terms as lazy and insipid, and indeed for lacking the literary traditions of the Vietnamese. If notions of race and racial diversity were pronounced, practice and even policy typically failed to reflect such discourses of difference. That is, all three of the major “racial” groups in Indochina—the Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer—were subjected to largely similar physical training programs. The same institutions and practices were founded to foster physical and moral renovation no matter what the race and its so-called racial deficiencies were. In this respect, racialist discourses of difference and adaptation were most significant because they consolidated ideas of race that were central to Vichy ideology. The constant assertion of racial difference justified state disciplinary intervention in different ways, granting the logic of state intervention great malleability. While cultural aspects of the National Revolution were certainly adapted to local conditions and cultures, the similarity of physical training across the empire suggests this was not true of physical culture. Most importantly, Decoux’ conflation of the Vietnamese and “Indochinese man” reflected the concentration of Indochina’s sport and physical education programs in the Vietnamese territories. With the exception of the Pétain Cup, Laos played a minor role in Indochinese physical culture, as typified by its spasmodic involvement in the celebrated grandes manifestations sportives. The team cycling race and torch relay did not include Laos at all while the first Tour d’Indochine stopped only briefly in Pakse, Savannakhet, and Thakhek, and included just four riders from Laos out of a total of sixty.63 Laos’ involvement in ESEPIC in Phan Thiet, another key federal initiative, was also minimal. Laos sent just seven schoolmasters to the opening promotion (intake) of the school in September 1941, by far the smallest delegation, while subsequent Lao delegations were often even smaller.64 Ducoroy attempted to rectify Laos’ marginality in a March 1942 tour of the

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territory to promote the role of sport in the National Revolution.65 But while this tour was widely covered in the local and Indochinese press, it was an isolated occasion and appeared to do little to promote a “federal awareness.” Despite rhetoric, policies, and spectacular grandes manifestations championing federalism, Vichy Indochina remained a largely Vietnamese experience. As Christopher Goscha writes, the “Indochinese personality” was never much more than a “fiction.”66 This did not mean, however, that the physical renovation that was such an important element of Pétainism failed to reach Laos. To the contrary, by incorporating key elements of the federal program, leaders of the Lao Nhay movement ensured it was as much a physical awakening as it was a mental or cultural one in Laos, too.

The Lao Nhay movement Formally called the rénovation nationale du Laos, in French, or kan feunfu sat lao (literally, “Lao national restoration”), in Lao, the local version of the National Revolution in Laos was known colloquially as le mouvement lao or the Lao Nhay (Great Laos) movement.67 In Laos, as to some extent in Cambodia, colonial legitimacy was dealt its greatest blow not by France’s accommodation with Japan but by the brief Franco-Thai war of 1940–1941 and its aftermath. Most painfully, the Japanese-brokered armistice that ended the conflagration forced France to concede to Thailand a number of provinces on the right bank of the Mekong, including the Lao provinces of Xainyaboury and Champasak. In addition to these humiliations, the Thai military regime of Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram assailed the Lao with propaganda on the irredentist project of building maha anachak thai, a Greater Thai Kingdom.68 Given the Lao’s proximity—both geographical and “racial”—to the Thai, the propaganda caused great anxiety among the French. Decoux later recalled his concern that “Laotian protégés, troubled and unsettled by the defeat of France, would yield to the solicitations of Bangkok, and turn their gaze towards their racial brothers of Siamese Laos [northeast Thailand].”69 His fears were not without foundation: Prince Phetsarath of the Luang Prabang royal family made overtures to Thailand in 1940 about forming a “Thai-Lao confederation,” students in Vientiane planned a coup against the French, and the traditional rulers of Champasak in the south sided with Thailand in the conflict with France.70

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Figure 2.1. Laos and the “Bangkok monkey”: the caption on the left reads “Bangkok monkey imitating a soldier”; on the right “The Bangkok Government’s trying to grab the moon [labeled ‘Greater Thailand’]. Can it succeed? (Doesn’t it see the precipice at the tip of its toes?)” (Lao Nhay, 1941)

French-Lao efforts to counter the appeal of pan-Thai irredentism were encapsulated in anti-Thai propaganda, such as that which featured in the first issue of the Lao Nhay newspaper—founded for this purpose—in January 1941. In one cartoon (figure 2.1, left) a “Bangkok monkey imitating a soldier” stood upright, hands on hips, regarding himself in a mirror. Staring back at the monkey was a uniformed Joseph Stalin. With a map behind Stalin showing a divided Europe, the cartoon equated Thai and Soviet expansionism.71 In a second cartoon (figure 2.1, right), the same monkey stood on the edge of a cliff reaching for a moon labeled “Greater Thailand.” “Can it [the Bangkok Government] succeed?” posed the caption. “Doesn’t it see the precipice at the tip of its toes?”72 Although the French strategy of boosting Lao patriotism under the French flag may appear to have been risky in hindsight, it was preferable to the risk of Lao being drawn to Thailand. With the explicit objective of restoring faith in France, the colonial administration promised to improve infrastructure, expand education, and increase Lao representation in the Annamese-dominated local administration. But the most important and enduring elements of the Lao renovation

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were those aiming to promote a distinctive Lao identity. As Soren Ivarsson argues in examining the cultural aspects of this program, “a specific Lao cultural heritage was to be unearthed, reformed, and resurrected in order to communicate the common identity of the Lao people as defined through a specifically Lao cultural identity.” Though never stated, this vision referred to an exclusively ethnic-Lao identity, “to which the other ethnic groups were to be assimilated.”73 In highlighting the cultural aspects of national renovation, Ivarsson pays little attention to the physical renovation that was pursued simultaneously. But, as Decoux himself recalled after the war, physical and cultural renovation were considered part of the same program: “[I]n getting the help of passionate civil servants who sincerely loved the Laotians . . . I decided to rely on Sports-Youth activities in this country to launch ‘le mouvement lao.’ ”74 The language that accompanied the national renovation in Laos is striking for its references to Laos and the Lao as national categories. The most important of the French civil servants in Laos was director of public education Charles Rochet, who upon arriving in Laos had “developed a deep affection for the Lao, and become embittered at the French for their neglect of the country.”75 Writing after the war, Rochet recalled that he had seen the Lao Nhay as an exclusively Lao undertaking, which he hoped would “trigger across the country an intensive campaign of moral action based on youth. . . . Such a movement should have a mystique and a mystique accessible to all. It would find there a national ideal: it would be a ‘Lao’ movement.”76 As one of his Lao protégés recounted, Rochet “never felt Laos was a colony of France but a country to be helped in guidance and education.”77 If Rochet and Lao subjects were able to draw such conclusions after the war, French officials made clear at the time that the Lao Nhay movement was to be nested within imperial solidarities. As Résident Supérieur Louis Brasey told an audience at Collège Pavie in 1943: “You are Lao, which is to say you are Indochinese, you belong to this even greater community which is the Federation. . . . I am sure that you will acquire the ‘federal sense’ if you don’t already have it. . . . Work together for the prosperity and grandeur of the French Empire.”78 As Ivarsson argues, it would not be until the Japanese coup de force against the French in March 1945 that “the idea of Laos became associated with a political and anticolonial nationalism.”79 This realization cautions against assumptions that French officials or even Lao subjects equated official patriotism with anticolonialism. Conflating these two sentiments risks “doing history backward,” that is, working back from our knowledge of Laos’ subsequent independence.80

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The physical renovation in practice Based on Ducoroy’s sport and youth blueprint for Indochina, an extensive sport and youth bureaucracy emerged in Laos from late 1941. The Association Sportive du Laos (Lao Sports Association, ASL) was formed in November with the assistant administrator of Vientiane, Monsieur Faure, appointed president.81 In mid-1942, provincial sporting leagues were formed in Vientiane, Xieng Khouang, Thakhek, Savannakhet, Pakse, and Luang Prabang.82 In addition, more than twenty local sporting societies were established or reaccredited under the new regime. The most active of these, Laotienne Artistique et Sportive (LAS) and Cercle Lao, expanded and formed the bedrock of the Lao Nhay movement.83 Other groups were aimed at Vietnamese and Chinese youth, civil ser vice groups, and educational institutions. Sporting clubs and societies organized their own events and took part in provincial leagues. Like the Lao Nhay movement more generally, sport and youth activities did more to consolidate Lao patriotism and even protonationalism than any “Indochinese personality.” The sporting activities of local and provincial societies appeared increasingly often in the pages of Lao Nhay and, from 1943, its sister publication in French, Le Nouveau Laos. An important feature of both papers was “News from Laos,” a section containing brief stories categorized by province. Football (soccer) was by far the most popular sport, though basketball, volleyball, table tennis, cycling, athletics, and swimming were also mentioned frequently. Following Benedict Anderson on the role of vernacular presses in producing national imagined communities, Ivarsson writes that these pages presented “a symbol of the new space in the making.”84 For readers of the papers, sporting events similarly came together on one page in the first signs of an emergent national sporting culture. Likewise, interprovincial competitions foreshadowed national championships. In March 1942, the Tennis Cup of Laos was held in Vientiane to mark the restoration of Vat Phra Keo, not only showcasing the best talent from around Laos, but demonstrating how sports events could be tied to important cultural occasions.85 Another event, the Vientiane-Luang Prabang cycling tour in May, symbolically joined Laos’ administrative and royal capitals, foreshadowing the completion of Route 13 between the cities the following year. In swimming, most provinces assembled in Vientiane the following year for Laos’ first championships.86 Most prominently of all, the first Lao football championship took place in late 1943. The final between

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Vientiane and Thakhek, which had respectively qualified through north/ central and southern pools, symbolically bridged the division between the protectorate in the north and the directly ruled southern provinces. Vientiane won the match, presided over by Résident Supérieur Brasey and an entourage of civil and military authorities, making it the “number one team in Meuang Lao.”87 The use of the term Meuang Lao (Laos or Lao country) to refer to the colonial territory demonstrated how sporting championships could consolidate the modern cultural and geopolitical idea of Laos. According to the “plurality of official identity construction” in Vichy Indochina, such categories still existed in an imperial framework. In February 1942, Lao Nhay hailed a Savannakhet-Thakhek football friendly in Savannakhet as the first interprovincial football match in Laos. Ironically, this “first” for Laos was first was held to mark Tet (Vietnamese New Year) and involved mostly Vietnamese players. Although the team composition was not surprising, given the large Vietnamese populations in the two cities, it was did nothing to diminish Lao Nhay’s enthusiasm for an interprovincial match bringing together Lao provinces.88 Similarly, the Vientiane-Thakhek teams in the final of the first football championships consisted of Lao, Vietnamese, and French players. Although there is no way of knowing if interethnic tensions existed within the teams, the ethnically diverse image of Laos that emerged from the renovation of Lao sport was a creation of the imperial system that remained ascendant in Laos. This can be contrasted with the focus of Lao Nhay’s cultural activities on the ethnic-Lao. Another example of ethnic diversity in Lao sport was the Pétain Cup football tournament between the five territories of Indochina. In the 1943 event, Laos’ players were drawn from just three provinces—Thakhek, Vientiane, and Savannakhet—and again consisted of twice as many Vietnamese (nine) as Lao (four), as well as one Frenchman. Once again, this did not prevent Lao Nhay celebrating the event as evidence of an emerging Lao sporting identity. Although Annam crushed Laos 12–5 in 1943, coverage highlighted the athletic rivalry and, through it, implicitly raised historical tensions between Laos and Annam.89 In some ways, atomized local identities of Laos and Annam undermined the federalist motives behind the football tournament, but such tension has always existed between universal and nationalist themes in the Olympics and other international sports events.90 That the Pétain Cup mirrored such international events further reinforced the protonational basis of the event. As elsewhere in the French Empire, the most spectacular element of the sport and youth movement in Laos was the great sports day (grand journée

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sportive). Consisting of parades, singing, flag-raising ceremonies, sporting events, and mass gymnastics displays, three such events were held to mark Ducoroy’s tour of Laos in early 1942. Lao Nhay and Sports Jeunesse d’Indochine captured the pomp and excitement of the Vientiane event as follows: A most beautiful athletics event took place in Vientiane on 19 March, chaired by Commandant Ducoroy. At 7.30 a.m. all sporting youth in Vientiane arrived, group by group, at the Municipal Stadium. Students from Groupe Tafforin [a school], Collège Pavie, and the French Primary School, sportsmen from LAS and Amusporta, Lao youth, and Scouts entered the field, at a firm pace and in good rhythm, in song, and aligned themselves behind their flag masts, facing the official box. Soon after that arrived Résident Supérieur Brasey, His Highness Chao Maha Ouphahat Phetsarat, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Savang, and General Commissioner Ducoroy. The young sportsmen were immediately reviewed by General Commissioner Ducoroy; then took place the flag-raising ceremony and the performance of the sportsman’s oath . . . They then acclaimed the Maréchal [Pétain], the Governor General of Indochina, and H.M. the King of Luang Prabang . . . After that, students from Groupe Tafforin and College Pavie performed an admirable mass gymnastics display, the crowd of spectators sparing nothing in its applause. It applauded more even enthusiastically when Collège Pavie students executed several beautiful human pyramids, under the execution of their devoted teacher, M. Lê-duy-Luong, whose competence and ingeniousness everyone was pleased to recognize, and who received the congratulations of the general commissioner.91

Borrowed from Olympic and Vichy traditions, such rituals demonstrated how Lao Nhay’s themes of patriotism, discipline, and order were embodied in the ordered regulation of the human corpus. Such techniques of the body served the colonial objectives of subjectivation, efforts to mold loyal and productive subjects of the French Empire. This sense of imperial order emerged from the unlikely source of colonially sanctioned Lao patriotism. The assembly of sport and youth groups under the gaze of senior colonial and Lao officials symbolically unified Lao sporting culture, creating a unified representation of Laos on the stadium field.92 The diverse cultural identities that were materialized in such events, summed up so eloquently in the acclamation of names, confirmed the imperial rather than national provenance of this colonial subjectivity. In this context, it is also worth noting the

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Vietnamese background of the instructor and the likelihood that many students would also have been Vietnamese. Although it would take but a small stretch of the imagination to envisage how such technologies could mold national subjects, for now such features of the display demonstrated that Lao patriotism was a product of imperialism.93 Finally, Hébertisme institutions based on ESEPIC in Phan Thiet were also established in Laos. Although Laos had originally shared Annam’s center in Hue, a Centre Local d’Éducation Physique (CLEP) was established in Vientiane in March 1943. As well as overseeing physical education in schools, assisting sporting associations, and managing its stadium, the CLEP offered forty-five day courses in sport and physical training for teachers, civil servants, public and private employees, and members of sport and youth societies.94 Later that year, the École Locale des Cadres de Jeunesse du Laos (ELCJL) was established on the bank of the Mekong River near the Wattay airfield. This school conducted regular one-month courses for assistant youth leaders, the first of which commenced in May 1943. Two ESEPICtrained Lao instructors later replaced the French founding director.95 Lastly, the Hong Hian Khu Kainyakam Pathet Lao (probably École Locale des Cadres d’Éducation Physique du Laos in French, or ELCEPL), was established on the east side of Vientiane’s municipal stadium in June 1944. This “modest” school consisted of a single building with dormitory, offices, and classrooms; fields for sport, training, and saluting the flag; and “sufficient” exercise equipment for trainees. Of the first intake of fi ft y-nine physical culture trainees, thirty-two from six provinces graduated in early August. Of these, eighteen were Lao, thirteen Vietnamese, and one Chinese, again showing the multiethnic nature of the sport and youth movement in Laos.96 Based on ESEPIC, the regulations and training programs of the Lao cadre schools emphasized discipline and regimentation under the aegis of the Lao renovation. At ELCJL, trainees wore a uniform of white shorts, blue shirt with Lao youth emblem, white socks, black shoes, and a khaki cap in the style of a scout hat. The youth emblem was composed of a simple shield emblazoned with the Lao letter lor (L) for Laos. Appearing regularly in Lao Nhay (figure 2.2), images of the Lao moniker and a uniformed “Lao youth” symbolized Lao patriotism and reinforced the military culture of the youth movement. Reflecting the context of war and military-colonial rule, such militarism paralleled the creation of uniformed youth movements elsewhere in the region, including in Thailand.97 Though physical culture was not the primary focus of ELCJL, the curriculum included it as one part of youth training.98 A former student recalled fondly that “every student had to get

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Figure 2.2. The uniform and emblem of the Lao youth movement: symbols of Lao patriotism and the military culture of youth and sport activities. (Drawing of uniform from Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, 1942; drawing of emblem from Lao Nhay, 1942)

up early in the morning, salute the flag, and do drilling exercises,” adding that students would even “march in single file” into the dining room each morning.99 Values of order and regimentation are also evidenced by the study timetable at ELCEPL. Trainees studied, exercised, and worked six days a week according to the following schedule: Morning 7.30–9.00 9.00–9.15 9.15–10.10 10.10–10.30 10.30–11.45

Salute the flag and physical training Breakfast Housework and meditation Shower Study activities

Evening 15.00–17.30 Physical training exercises 17.30–18.00 Study, singing, dancing, and games 18.00 Salute the flag

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The inclusion of meditation raises parallels between monastic discipline, to which most ethnic-Lao boys would already have been exposed, and the militarized discipline that underpinned the Lao Nhay movement.100 Still, the greatest priority was placed on physical training, since “physical exertion greatly increases physical strength and skill in physical culture.”101 Although the precise nature of the physical training undertaken in Laos is unknown, it would logically have resembled that undertaken at ESEPIC in Phan Thiet, which not only provided the model for all such institutions in Indochina, but provided training for their directors and instructors. ESEPIC emphasized marching, gymnastics, and sport. According to the principles of the “natural method,” trainees completed these activities bare-chested in sandshoes and shorts. Striking photographs in Sports-Jeunesse show barechested trainees marching in formation, carrying out elaborate group exercises, standing to attention at flag-raising ceremonies, and executing the “Olympic salute”—identical in appearance to the fascist salute. Although the Olympic salute had a separate history from the fascist salute and was regularly praised for embodying Olympic ideals, Ducoroy did nothing to disown its fascist associations until after the war.102 Such resemblances capture the resonance of Vichy Indochina’s cult of the body with the fascist aesthetics of wartime Germany, Italy, Japan, Thailand, and elsewhere.103 These aesthetics, Susan Sontag argues, flow from values of social control, submission, effort, and endurance: “The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry.”104 More recently, some scholars have argued that such aesthetics actually define fascism, which rather than “an ideology that is based on belief . . . is an ideology that is performed.”105 If elements of the Lao Nhay movement mirrored fascist aesthetics, however, it seems unhelpful and perhaps intellectually lazy to label Vichy Laos as fascist. Although the regulation of bodies in state performance certainly characterizes an ethic of authoritarianism, a definition of fascism that is reduced to aesthetics alone is too imprecise to distinguish it from different political ideologies exhibiting similar aesthetics. Given the context of war and imperialism, it was not surprising that regimented physical training made its way to colonial Laos. As sports historian James Mangan writes of wartime Europe, “sport develops muscle and muscle is equated with power—literally and metaphorically.”106 More surprising in colonial Laos was the attachment of such metaphorical power and possibility not only to France, but also quite explicitly to Laos and Lao patriotism. At the graduation of the first ELCJL intake, named promotion

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Pavie after the French “conqueror of hearts,” youth chief Monsieur Larcher told trainees: You have initiated yourselves in a discipline that, for you, is all new. . . . You have received from your instructors an energetic education demanding selfsacrifice and great will. The test was tough and for many of you truly painful. . . . But you must believe that it was not too much since it is you who emerge winners in this test of physical and moral endurance. . . . Youth training has been called on to play a primordial role in the moral formation of a new Laos. I sincerely believe that for this country, lovable but indolent, the movement born today will be a powerful element of dynamism, solidarity, and discipline.107

Likewise, when commencing as Résident Supérieur in 1942, Louis Brasey emphasized the link between youth, sport, and renovation: “The implementation of this program involves the active participation of youth. The youth of Laos, like that of all the empire, must be trained, through sports, in the physical and moral discipline that makes people stronger.”108 These and countless other articles referred to Laos as Pathet Lao or Meuang Lao, meaning Lao country or Laos, and a pathet sat, or nation. As I have stressed, using such terms did not equate with anticolonial nationalism, as the imperial context required that duty and discipline in the name of Laos also served colonial subjectivation in the name of France. Nevertheless, the forceful and experiential embodiment of officially sanctioned Lao patriotism linked the qualities of strength, discipline, and character to the future of Laos, whatever its geopolitical status.

Franco- Lao ideas and agency Despite originating in Vichy and being introduced to Laos by French officials, the Lao national renovation attracted strong support from Lao populations. The political culture of Vichy Indochina was not clearly divided along lines of colonizer and colonized. One of the most prominent pro-French figures was Pierre Somchin Nginn (1889–1971), whose education in Vientiane, Saigon, and the École Coloniale in Paris—as well as his name— encapsulated his cosmopolitan background.109 During the Lao Nhay years, P. S. Nginn (as he preferred to be called) authored the first Lao-language

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novel, Phra Phutthahup Saksit (The Marvelous Buddha Image, 1944), and edited the Lao Nhay newspaper. In an afterword to Phra Phutthahup Saksit, he summarized the rationale and purpose of the Lao Nhay movement in what can only be read as an impassioned ode to Pétainism.110 Nginn began by discussing the duty to organize and work hard: “Lao Nhay is a reminder for us to draw from within to carry out our duty to renovate the nation/race [sat]; that is, to cooperate in guiding Laos towards civilization [khwam sivilai].”111 The unwieldy double of “nation/race” is used here to retain the ambiguity of the Lao word sat, which can mean both. While Ivarsson is right that the French were careful to avoid connotations of nationalism that might be confused with anticolonialism, racial renovation and national renovation were considered to be the same thing, and thus equally desirable, as long as they referred to no more than the building of culturally defined petite patries.112 This ambiguity had the consequence of conflating the fortunes of the ethnic Lao with those of Laos, omitting nonLao ethnicities from the picture or, more precisely, assimilating them to the Lao majority. Lao brethren, Nginn continued, could renovate Laos “by organizing anything of use to our country [ban meuang],” including “literary groups, theatre groups, friendship groups, Lao women’s groups, Lao youth groups, etc.” This would require hard work: “Every woman and every man . . . should strive to do some kind of work . . . these people can be considered to be helping the nation/race.” By contrast, anyone who “does nothing, thinks nothing . . . anyone who has food in their mouths thanks to the hard work of others lives a life without purpose.”113 Nginn’s enthusiastic embrace of Pétainism extended to diligence, self-reliance, discipline, and hierarchy. Such traits were characteristic of advanced societies, he expounded: “[D]iscipline leads to progress [khwam charoen]. As long as our Laos does not know of government, does not respect elders [phu nyai], does not know of telling the truth, does not run on time, our Laos cannot be Great Laos [Lao nyai].”114 Nginn also expressed Pétainist ideas concerning women and youth. He urged women, whom he defined as “people who do housework and manage the household,” to join the Lao women’s group to learn the “modern system” of housework. A housewife must “listen to her husband as he is the head of the household . . . rise early, take care of the house and children, welcome guests with a gentle manner and speech, and smile brightly.” Nginn also maintained the need for women to uphold “our Lao customs and traditions.” As in similar ideas contained in the cultural mandates or state edicts (rathaniyom) of the early 1940s in Thailand, such starkly gendered guidelines

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and division of labor was novel to Laos.115 Nginn’s final section emphasized the virtue of education for youth. At school, children would not only gain knowledge but learn how to behave: “[Y]oung Lao must conduct themselves in a modern way in order to be called a patriot [phu haksat]. We must endeavor to make our children into well-mannered people.” “Young Lao,” he concluded, “are the hope of the nation [pathet sat]. Laos is depending on them to renovate the nation so it continues to progress.”116 Most importantly, Nginn included a lengthy section on health and well-being (sukkai sabaichai) in the Lao renovation. In order to work productively, he wrote, “we must have bodies that are complete [hangkai sombun] with no disease, injury, or illness. As such, we have a duty to care for our bodies in order to keep them well.” Forming such bodies required attention to matters of public health: rising early, washing one’s face, keeping the home clean, and seeing a doctor in the event of illness. In this context, Nginn also stressed the importance of sport and physical exercise: “Doing physical exercise and playing various sports helps you eat and sleep well. People who participate diligently have greater energy, which can protect you from bacteria. Important sports include football [soccer], tennis, cycling, athletics, etc.”117 Like Vichy rhetoric on the body more generally, Nginn’s argument for doing physical exercise combined instrumental and ideological factors. Renovating the body would allow one to remain strong and healthy, which would permit one to work for the renovation of Laos. Nginn’s was one Lao voice among many; the Lao Nhay newspaper, in particular, continually reinforced the virtues of sport and physical culture. A 1941 column called on Lao leaders to “organize the renovation of sports,” complaining that a focus on other aspects of the renovation, such as poetry and singing, “promotes weakness of spirit and consciousness at all levels.” Sport, by contrast, “promotes abundance [khwam udom sombun] in our bodies.”118 Likewise, in mid-1942, the chao meuang (governor) of Savannakhet and vice president of the local LAS, Phagna Pholithat, told a group of sportsmen to “sacrifice body and soul for the national revolution . . . emphasizing at length loyalty and discipline in the practice of sports and promising severe sanctions against wrongdoers.”119 The following year, Lao Nhay endorsed Decoux’ order that “all civil servants and the general public should pay attention to regular exercise.” If the government was to depend on them, civil servants had to develop “strong physical substance.”120 Such accounts demonstrated how Lao members of the Lao Nhay movement drew on local ideas of physicality. In Lao, as mentioned in the introduction, the terms sombun and udom sombun respectively possess earthy

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connotations of perfection or completeness, and abundance. Nginn also cited the Buddhist teaching that “one’s self is one’s support” (ton pen thi phoeng khong ton), a lesson in self-reliance in which “one’s self ” (ton) contained implications of one’s own body (another gloss of ton). “Wealth is born from diligence,” he added, meaning destitution (khwam thukchon) resulted not merely from karma (kam) and sin (ven) but one’s own actions. Here he cited another “ancient saying”—“Hell is in the soul, fire is in the mouth, poverty is in the hands”—conveying one’s personal responsibility for poverty and, by implication, wealth.121 Such sentiments demonstrated the pervasiveness of values such as wealth, abundance, and completeness in local Buddhist practice and, most importantly, implied the way in which these could be enhanced through physical culture.122 Though seemingly out of step with the austerity of Pétainism, the idealization of wealth and abundance stemmed from local concepts of prosperity, a nuance reflected in Nginn’s use throughout his essay of the word charoen, meaning “to progress” and “to prosper.” Indeed, Nginn combined modernity and tradition throughout his essay. While stressing the need to preserve tradition and framing his ideas about the body in “ancient” teachings, he repeatedly championed being charoen, sivilai (civilized), and than samai (modern, up with the times). Reformulation of physical culture according to such local terms made Pétainist ideas legible to the subject population; such language has been used to describe the benefits of sport and physical culture in Laos ever since this period. To the extent that Nginn and other commentators drew on Buddhist values and teachings, the practices promoted by Lao Nhay could be viewed as a kind of “muscular Buddhism,” which—as discussed in the introduction—drew on the character- and state-building logic of European muscular Christianity but was also enmeshed in the local ideas and practices of Buddhism.123 One can imagine differing official responses to the Franco-Lao agency that characterized physical culture in the Lao Nhay movement. On the one hand, Lao talk of discipline and diligence must indeed have pleased the French colonial regime to no end. The active participation of Nginn and other contributors to Lao Nhay demonstrated the extent to which they internalized physical culture discourses and practices that, like health and medical interventions in India and elsewhere, “colonized the body” and facilitated the creation of loyal and productive colonial subjects.124 On the other hand, Lao appropriation of such discourses demonstrated the potential to bypass or at least downplay imperial objectives, and not all Lao Nhay members were such Francophiles as Nginn. Many years after the Lao Nhay move-

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ment, a Lao participant recalled: “We will never forget that we used to wear our blue shirts and white shorts with a Lao emblem on our pockets, which is a symbol of young Lao. We were well disciplined which gave us the feeling that the Lao can rule themselves rather than [be ruled by] the French or the Vietnamese, and also we speak the same language.”125 As elsewhere in the colonial world, such sentiments reflected the assimilation and appropriation of the subject forming potential of physical culture for nationalist purposes.126

Race, bodies, and modernity Lurking beneath the more celebratory and assertive elements of national renovation were pervasive anxieties, especially concerning race. Although the concern with race was common across Indochina, the putative racial deficiencies of the Lao were different from those of the Vietnamese. While the latter might have been “puny,” they were at least considered industrious; on the other hand, the Lao (like the Khmer) were viewed, more worryingly, as lazy and disinterested. According to Lao Nhay, such characteristics were summed up in the term seu seu, which literally means “just” or “only” and is typically used in phrases such as yu seu seu, “to live idly” or “just hanging around.” Lao Nhay writers deconstructed seu seu in meticulous detail, adding that the term could mean carefree, skeptical, honest, frank, idle, impassive, and imperturbable.127 Though not all of these traits were necessarily negative, seu seu summed up “the peaceful character of the Lao race, which lacks industry in terms of work and is indifferent to its own physical and mental well-being. This is due to habitual indifference. Lao people live life in an ad hoc manner [ yu tam bun tam kam], seeking only what is sufficient for their basic needs.”128 Literally meaning “living according to merit and karma,” this final idiom suggested Buddhist indifference and fatalism was responsible for the Lao malaise. Lao Nhay discussed seu seu as a racial characteristic but called it a nisai, which means “habit” as much as it means “character,” suggesting being seu seu was as much a way of life as anything. Discourses of seu seu provided the Lao Nhay movement with rhetorical structure. In one sense, it was deployed to critique past division among the Lao, underpinning calls for protonational solidarity in the Lao Nhay movement.129 In a rather different way, the seu seu stereotype served as the rationale for disciplining the colonial population in the importance of work and other “necessities of contemporary civilization.”130 Either way, the racial anxiety

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Figure 2.3. The aesthetics of diligence: note the porter’s bulging biceps. (Lao Nhay, 1942)

expressed in seu seu discourse demonstrated the pro­cesses of somatization that defined the Lao Nhay movement, meaning social problems ­were perceived in physical idiom and therefore countered through physical training.131 As well as explicitly highlighting indifference to health as a feature of seu seu, the article was accompanied by a pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of diligence: a small cartoon of a busy port with bare-­chested men lugging heavy sacks onto a cargo boat (figure 2.3).132 Readers knew the sacks ­were heavy because, as the men braced themselves in a bent position to counter the weight on their shoulders, their biceps and shoulder muscles bulged. Diligence was not just a racial characteristic in this repre­sen­ta­tion, but a habit of physical exertion. Cartoons dramatized images of physicality especially vividly. A well-­ known cartoon from 1943 (figure 2.4) features two men, an emaciated man in traditional pha salong (sarong) and a muscular man in modern exercise wear. Whereas the former slouches grimly beneath a sign reading “dissipation” (khwam sutsuai), a grave next to him reinforcing the message of racial mortality, the latter gestures towards a rising sun, labeled “L” for Laos, with

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the path in that direction signposted khwam charoen (progress or prosperity). The caption reads, “Do physical exercise for the progress and prosperity of the nation/race (compete and win).”133 The linking of exercise, health, and body size to racial amelioration and the progress and prosperity of the petite patrie was unmistakable, an accomplishment represented in sporting idiom as victory. Other cartoons resembled “before and after” representations. A 1942 Lao Nhay cartoon compared an opium-addicted man in the past to the muscular and hardworking man of the present (figure 2.5).134 “In the past, he lived with Miss Black Gold; now he has divorced her,” reads the caption. Although the most immediate message concerned opium addiction, the parallel between physical size and health was just as clear. The same cartoon appeared again in Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine the following month, accompanying an article on the progress of Lao sport. Now captioned “In the past and present day,” the cartoon illustrated the benefits of sporting programs for ameliorating the body and renovating the race and nation.135

Figure 2.4. “Do physical exercise for the progress and prosperity of the nation/race (compete and win)”: such cartoons indicated how racial amelioration and national progress could be fostered through the body. (Lao Nhay, 1942)

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Figure 2.5. “In the past he lived with Miss Black Gold; now he has divorced her”: originally condemning the evils of opium addiction, this same cartoon subsequently illustrated an article discussing sport in Laos. Comparing “the past and present day,” the new caption reinforced the benefits of sport for the body and, through it, national renovation, as well as for attracting women! (Lao Nhay, 1942)

The metaphor of growth not only captures notions of progress and modernity that guided the Lao Nhay movement, but demonstrates the material dimensions of such ideas. We have already seen how Lao Nhay construed hard work to be a necessity of “contemporary civilization.” Such statements demonstrated local appropriation of the philosophy and language of the civilizing mission. This resonates with Thongchai Winichakul’s analysis of an earlier period in Siamese history, when “a geographical discourse of civilizational thinking,” with Europe at the apex, dislodged the “older world order” of cosmic and tributary power, in which “India and China [had] remained the axis mundi of the world.”136 As in Siamese, the Lao adopted the loanword sivilai(s) from “civilized,” which became a key linguistic device for ordering ideas of temporal and moral progress. Indeed, it seems likely that the term came to Lao via Siamese rather than French—besides anything else, the French (civilisé) would have been transliterated differently.137 Invoking sivilai in relation to overcoming seu seu implied that Laos’ progress involved physical transformations.

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Th is idea was made more explicit in the physical exercise cartoon (figure 2.4), discussed previously. The key term used in the cartoon, charoen, was the most ubiquitous marker of modernity at that time (and in many ways remains so today). Deriving from old Khmer and originally invoking nonmaterial improvement, such as cultivating Buddhist merit, charoen took on connotations of “secular or worldly development, material progress, and technological advance” in nineteenth-century Siam that made it synonymous with siwilai.138 Likewise, in Laos in the 1940s, charoen referred to the superiority of the present over the past, in terms that ranged from material infrastructure and education to notions of politeness.139 The physical education cartoon demonstrated that such notions of progress also resided in the body. The dress of the two figures—the man on the “dissipation” path in traditional clothes, the man heading towards “progress/prosperity” in shorts and singlet—and most of all their drastic difference in size, reinforced the dialectic of weak-traditional-Lao versus strongmodern-European. Despite the “back to the soil” rhetoric that defined the Vichy national revolutions, a mix of modernity and tradition was evident throughout the empire.140 Yet, even by these standards of ambiguity, the Lao Nhay movement’s ideology of modernity was unusual. Despite its well-known efforts to restore Buddhism, revive Lao cultural practices, and standardize the Lao language, the rhetoric of modernization was at least as strong, a tendency that was especially pronounced in discourses of race and physical culture. Rather than being opposed to one another, the modern and traditional reflexes of the movement were—as discussed in chapter one—two sides of the same coin. The intrinsically modern framework of cultural nationalism informed the need to recover tradition. In this sense, the ideology of modernity defined the Lao Nhay in a way that contrasted with the national revolution in France. It is ironic, then, that this divergence from the Vichy National Revolution drew on civilizational modes of thought placing France at the apex of world civilization. The final and key theme of Lao Nhay physical culture was its feverish pursuit of masculinity. As elsewhere in Indochina and France, women were largely marginal to the physical culture movement in Laos. “Suitable sports” such as swimming and basketball were reported in the press from time to time, including a celebrated story on a women’s basketball team in Luang Prabang, started by Princess Khamla.141 Likewise, the ELCEPL in Vientiane once offered a seven-week course for women, and the press reported on the École Supérieure des Monitrices d’Indochine in Dalat.142 But such

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instances of female participation were comparatively rare. Even the article on Khamla’s basketball team focused on the players being the first in the city to wear shorts rather than any benefits for Laos. As P. S. Nginn’s treatise on the Lao Nhay movement had shown so directly, women were principally included in the Lao Nhay movement as modern housewives and mothers, a message Lao Nhay’s regular women’s column reinforced by offering tips on personal conduct, recipes, and housework. By contrast, men’s contribution the National Renovation of Laos— practically and symbolically—was strikingly physical. Besides the predominantly male participation in physical culture institutions, almost every pictorial representation of physical aspects of the movement was of men. It was this physical dimension that made masculinity a core element of Lao patriotism in the Lao Nhay movement. If muscles would save the Lao petite patrie from Thailand and renovate the Lao nation/race, it was men’s muscles that would do the job. Discourses of renovating Laos by regulating, disciplining, and strengthening the male body had militarist connotations, which bestowed men and particularly the military with the practical and symbolic power to shape the future. Hatched during the early 1940s, this theme would return time and again in the years and decades to come.

The promise and limits of cultural nationalism By late 1944, the male Lao body—marked with the “L” symbol of Lao youth—had become a powerful symbol of a brighter Lao future. Despite room for slippage permitted by Vichy’s plurality of identity construction, this future was officially structured by imperialism, in which terms the petite patrie of Laos, known in Lao as Pathet or Meuang Lao, could exist only as a unit of greater France. As the former student cited earlier made so clear, however, it took little imagination for the physical symbolics of power and possibility to be transposed to a truly national future. As he would subsequently recall, the disciplining of Vichy-era sport and physical culture allowed the Lao to imagine self-rule rather than submitting to French or Vietnamese control. The trigger for change, when it came, was the Japanese coup de force of March 1945. As French officials were interned and the Lao king forced to declare independence, the French imperial order, crumbling even in 1941, collapsed almost completely. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the imag-

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inable future of an independent Laos had arrived. The rapidity with which elite Lao embraced the new reality suggests the Lao Nhay movement had done far more to stoke Lao patriotism than to restore faith in French imperialism, even if by necessity it remained subject to the latter. By August, when the Japanese surrendered, few Lao were willing to countenance France’s determination to return.

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Embodying Military Masculinity

VIENTIANE. —CEREMONIES ON THE OCCASION OF THE TRANSFER OF POWERS The afternoon on this day of 13 April 1950 was perhaps less ceremonial than had been the morning, but certainly no less joyous, which is natural given that the youth of Laos was the star. At 4.30 p.m., in fact, numerous delegations of sport and youth groups in various uniforms assembled at the municipal stadium and paraded before the Laotian and French Authorities occupying the stand. For the occasion, H. E. the Prime Minister, [who also held the position of] Minister of Sports, made a brief but beautiful speech in which he exalted the moral and practical virtues of sport. Then a football match, between the LAS Lycée selection and a selection of military and civil servants, enthralled the many fans of this game who, despite the bad weather, had come to applaud both teams. . . . Finally, as any great day of celebration must end with a ball, almost the entire town was invited, in the evening, to dance on the illuminated forecourt of the Chambre des députés, while a torchlight procession wound through the city and fireworks appeared to carry towards heaven the recognition and joy of the Lao people. Nouvelles du Laos, April 15, 1950

The April 1950 ceremonies transferring powers from France to the Lao government formalized the previous July’s Franco-Lao General Convention. This was not the first agreement granting self-determination to the young country; a modus vivendi creating the Kingdom of Laos had devolved limited powers in 1946. Nor did it provide complete autonomy, let alone independence; the Associated State of Laos, as it was officially known,

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remained subordinate to France, which retained important strategic powers.1 In popular perception, however, the convention marked the emergence of Laos as an “independent state” and produced an outpouring of pride and optimism. In a commemorative volume Prime Minister Prince Boun Oum declared, “We have come of age, attained independence, and are now building towards progress.”2 Featuring military-style choreography of human bodies, in a style unmistakably reminiscent of the Vichy era, the grandiose transfer of power ceremonies consummated this transition to nationhood. The morning’s formal handover ceremonies at the House of Representatives featured a parade of soldiers, gendarmerie, and schoolchildren and a saluting-the-flag ceremony. In the afternoon, as reported in the Nouvelles du Laos, the “joyous” sport and youth event at the Vientiane stadium (figure 3.1) opened with an assembly of sport, youth, and school groups. At the center of the neat lines a “guard of honor” of young men in white crisp uniforms presented a “huge Lao flag,” extending their taut right arms slightly above perpendicular in the so-called Olympic salute. The other groups did likewise before parading past the tribune of honor, saluting again as they passed the Lao and French leaders installed there. The remainder of the afternoon was devoted to sports. Performing national arrival through the orderly deployment of human bodies, the transfer of power ceremonies served as a physical analogue to Laos’ legal-juridical constitution the previous year. At this liminal moment between colonialism and independence, the star was not just Lao youth, as reported in Nouvelles du Laos, but the Lao body. The emergence of Laos as a new nation in the period following World War II was not only a legal and juridical question; it was a social and cultural process in which corporeal aesthetics took center stage. Represented as agents of the country’s arrival as an independent nation, the regulated Lao body exemplified national independence. Such physical technologies of gender and identity were hardly new to Laos, having already featured prominently in the Lao Nhay movement. But while Laos had remained an imperial space in those years, these technologies now symbolized the national future, even if for several more years the place of France in this destiny remained ambivalent. Such scenes stemmed from the militarization and masculinization of Lao society after 1945. Although Laos’ first military units were formed during the war, it was during the First Indochina War, into which Laos was inexorably drawn, that the Lao army blossomed. Rapid militarization not only produced abundant new career opportunities for Lao men, but also created new notions of what it was to be a man in Laos. A critical aspect of this

Figure 3.1. A youth and sports manifestation marks the transfer of powers from France to Laos in 1950: the emergence of Laos as a nation was not only a legal-juridical question; it was also a social and cultural process incorporating the corporeal aesthetics of military masculinity. (Photos courtesy of Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense, 1950) .

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masculine ideal concerned the body—its size, strength, and solidarity with others. The development of these characteristics was promoted in military training and military life more generally. The militarization of Lao physical culture did not exclude females entirely—schoolgirls took part in the handover ceremonies, for instance. But adult women hardly ever participated in this way and were excluded from the armed forces altogether, where this culture was strongest. Instead, the female body came to be represented as the preserver of customs and culture, which in newly independent Laos could, more convincingly than before, be labeled “national tradition.” The emergence of militarized masculinity during these years revealed the critical junction of gender and nationalism. Ideals constructed as specifically masculine—diligence, courage, friendship, dependability, strength, proficiency, spirit and discipline, love of nation, love of duty and danger, trust, solidarity, and sacrifice for nation and self—mirrored the masculinity of the male-dominated state. Such values represented real change compared to precolonial Laos, when Lao soldiers had typically been conscripts, criminals, and the unfortunate. In that world, being a soldier was hardly something men aspired to, or an image others looked up to. Instead, the main cultural sources of power were bun (merit), barami (Buddhist charisma), and kiat or kiattinyot (honor), the highest levels of which were associated with sacred kingship and monastic life. Providing a new source of merit and charisma, military masculinity and other perks of military life would come to dominate national politics for periods of the early 1960s, when military leaders Phoumi Nosavan and Kong Le fought for ascendency in Vientiane, and even more so after the long civil war between the Royal Lao Government (RLG) and communist Pathet Lao brought the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party to power. Already planted in the 1930s and particularly during the Lao Nhay era, the seeds of military culture and associated modes of military masculinity bloomed from the late 1940s, as the gradual assumption of independence bound it to the nascent Lao nation. As scholars across the humanities and interpretive social sciences recognize, military masculinity does not emerge from some dubious “biological proclivity” among men to be aggressive, but from social, cultural, and historical processes.3 Despite the regular involvement of women, military institutions are invariably a key site for the production of hegemonic masculine ideals. This paradox can be explained by the strategies undertaken within military institutions to “construct and maintain a combative identity and solidarity” among soldiers, which produce binary distinctions associating men and masculinity with war, strength, military, uniformity, defender, and

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friend, and women and femininity with peace, weakness, civilian, diversity, the defended, and enemy.4 Despite its localization in other respects, Lao military masculinity fundamentally accorded to such binary distinctions. As Chris Forth argues, the “accomplishment of masculinity” almost always involves some kind of physical or symbolic process.5 Such processes are particularly evident in the corporeal features of military institutions: uniforms, prescribed haircuts, drills, and the grim reality of physical susceptibility, when “physicality may become finality.” Indeed, few would disagree with sociologist David Morgan that “war and the military represent one of the major sites where links between hegemonic masculinities and men’s bodies are forged.”6 Yet Lao military masculinity also differed from that of the West, where Forth suggests a deep ambivalence in the relationship between the male body and modernity simultaneously reinforced and imperiled what it meant to be a man. In this respect, the “double logic of modern civilization” heralded several “corporeal disadvantages of modern life”—manners and self-control, education and culture, material comfort and luxuries, and sedentary lifestyles—that have challenged masculine patriarchy and civilization.7 In Laos, by contrast, embodied military masculinity figured unambiguously as a positive symbol of modernity. Just as the constitution of Laos as an independent nation was considered a historical watershed, the modern militarized body was represented as the dynamic agent of this progress.

Decolonization and militarization Although the ceremonies of April 1950 were celebrated as the moment of national arrival, they were in fact just one event in an episodic process spanning almost a decade. On top of foundations of cultural nationalism laid by the Lao Nhay movement, the 1946 modus vivendi, struck after France’s return earlier that year, granted a degree of self-government including the formation of Lao military institutions. Despite criticism that nothing had changed, Lao military forces had already reached substantial numbers by 1950, when the Lao National Army was formed.8 Further confirming that 1949–1950 was not a singular moment of national arrival, France retained certain strategic powers after 1949, when the Franco-Lao Treaty created the Associated State of Laos. Most of these powers were handed over in 1953, when another treaty was signed, but French colonialism did not completely end in Indochina until the 1954 Geneva Agreements, and even after that French officials and especially teachers remained in Laos.

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Compounding ambiguities created by the episodic nature of decolonization were domestic divisions in Laos. At the same time that the Royal Lao Government (RLG) was emerging, the revolutionary wing of the Lao independence movement was fighting alongside Vietnamese communists for a different national future.9 As a result, the RLG unified neither the national population nor the territory of Laos, nor even established a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. The performance of nationhood, modernity, and masculinity through physical culture offered one of the few expressions of nationhood available to the royalists, even as the continued presence of the French blurred distinctions between the authentically national and persistently colonial. These anomalies, so critical to the years that followed, can be traced to the dizzying events of 1945–1946 in Laos, and the key personalities that emerged in these years.10 Although the Francophile King Sisavangvong declared independence only “under considerable Japanese pressure” in April 1945, Lao nationalists rapidly embraced the unexpected turn of events.11 The most prominent was Prince Phetsarath Ratthannavongsa (1850–1959), the second son of the former uparat or second king (from a rival branch of the royal family to that of the king) and a high-ranking civil servant. In 1941, the French had appointed Phetsarath prime minister of Luang Prabang and bestowed upon him the title of Chao Maha Uparat (the Great Uparat), granting him authority that could rival the king’s.12 When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, Sisavangvong revoked his earlier declaration of independence and reasserted Laos’ allegiance to France. Ignoring him, Phetsarath unilaterally proclaimed the unity of Laos before receiving Chinese representatives assigned to accept the Japanese surrender in Laos. Although the king stripped Phetsarath of his position and title, the Lao Issara (Free Lao), a diverse group of nationalists with similar goals to his, proclaimed Lao independence and unity on October 31, establishing a new government and provisional National Assembly. Whereas Phetsarath conferred his authority upon the new administration as an adviser, the king was deposed after refusing to become its constitutional monarch. With the presence of Chinese troops preventing France’s return, the Lao Issara government established loose control over central Laos. It was less successful in Luang Prabang, however, where French officials remained encamped with the king, and in the south, where Prince Boun Oum, scion of the Champasak royal family, also remained loyal to France. Another key Issara figure was Phetsarath’s half brother, Prince Souphanouvong, who had worked in Vietnam during the early 1940s, was fluent in

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Vietnamese and wed to a Vietnamese woman. After consultations with Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, Souphanouvong returned to Savannakhet in October 1945. With Oun Sanannikone, the Lao Issara’s southern leader, he then formed the Lao Army of Liberation and Defense and signed an agreement to cooperate with the Vietnamese communists’ Vietminh forces.13 Soon after, the departure of the Chinese permitted the return of French forces from the south, where they had remained with the support of Boun Oum. Between March and May 1946, French troops supported by Lao auxiliary units regained Savannakhet, Thakhek (in a bloody and decisive battle), Vientiane, and Luang Prabang. Accompanied by their families and supporters, the Lao Issara government decamped to exile in Thailand, and the French returned to the welcoming arms of the king. It is not difficult to see why Martin Stuart-Fox would conclude that the “first flowering of Lao nationalism had met with ignominious defeat.”14 Although the 1947 constitution following the Franco-Lao modus vivendi officially created the Kingdom of Laos, fully uniting the protectorate of Luang Prabang and the directly administered provinces of the south (which had previously remained outside the scope of northern royal authority), administrative changes were on one level “largely cosmetic.”15 As in other parts of Indochina, the “autonomous” Kingdom of Laos was incorporated into the Indochinese Federation and the French Union. France retained control of “federal ser vices,” including such fundamental jurisdictions as defense, finance, foreign relations, federal justice, and secondary education.16 In addition, French forces retained unfettered access to Lao territory, French advisers were appointed “beside” Lao ministers, and the résident supérieure was replaced by a French commissioner, who retained the power to veto royal decrees. Not surprisingly, the exiled Lao Issara labeled the Vientiane administration a “puppet government.”17 A rather different picture emerges, however, if we consider the broader sociocultural consequences of the 1946 modus vivendi. While this and related agreements were unacceptable for nationalists seeking independent government, they nonetheless laid crucial foundations for the transformation of Lao society. The “Lao ser vices” stipulated in the agreement included responsibility for the National and Royal Guards, local justice, prisons, police and immigration, information, primary schools, sports, religious instruction, public health, certain public works, agriculture, water and forests, livestock, and fine arts. Despite the presence of colonial advisers, the nascent Lao bureaucracy and other institutions enhanced educational and career opportunities among the growing urban population of Laos, partic-

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ularly men. Also increasing local opportunities was the exodus of Vietnamese after the return of the French in early 1946.18 By one estimate, the number of Vietnamese in Laos—who had previously dominated the colonial administration—fell from 40,000 in 1942 to just 8,000 by 1955.19 Education was also important. The existing high school in Vientiane, the Collège Pavie, became a full lycée, allowing students to complete their secondary education in Laos, junior high schools (matthanyom) were set up in other major cities, and a teacher-training school was established in Vientiane. The number of schools in Laos tripled between 1945 and 1950, while total enrollments leapt from less than 15,000 to over 38,000.20 As the First Indochina War led to military buildup across Indochina, the most significant area of growth, particularly for young men, was the armed forces. Despite the subordinate position of the newly established Lao forces within the Forces Terrestres d’Extrême Orient (Far-Eastern Land Forces, or FTEO), the vast numbers of Lao men who signed up hinted at the potential significance of these changes. At first, existing rudimentary units of “Lao chasseurs” (Fr. chasseurs laotiens, L. thahan phan lao), established during the war, were expanded into full-sized Bataillons Chasseurs Laotiennes (BCL). These were followed by formation of the 4th, 5th, and 6th BCLs by November 1946, and the 7th and 8th BCLs in 1949.21 Commando companies in four of the BCLs were also trained during the late 1940s while parachutist companies, which became regarded as the military elite in Laos, were formed in 1948 and 1951. In all, up to 50,000 Lao men are thought to have served with the FTEO between 1945 and 1954.22 In addition to the army, the modus vivendi of 1946 established civil policing forces, known as the Lao National Guard and Royal Guard. Created to replace local sections of the largely Vietnamese Garde Indochinoise (Indochinese Guard), the Lao National Guard (Fr. Garde Nationale Laotienne, L. Thahan Haksa Meuang/Thahan Siu) was to be “exclusively composed of Lao nationals.” With a company stationed in each province, the new force was charged with safeguarding “internal security and public order.” In addition, a special unit of 120 men and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) comprised the Royal Guard, attached to the palace in Luang Prabang.23 The Gendarmerie Laotienne (Kong Truat Lao), as the National Guard became known, answered formally to the Lao minister of the interior, but autonomy was clearly symbolic rather than practical. The head of the French mission was to advise the minister and the local French military command could direct units in times of war.24 Nonetheless, a commemorative volume published after independence in 1950 celebrated the “entirely new form” of Lao security

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forces after 1946: “At this time, the evolution of Laos towards independence commenced and the forces of internal order, reborn under the name of the Forces de Gendarmerie Laotienne, were composed exclusively of Laotians.”25 Like the Lao units of the FTEO, the broader significance of the gendarmerie was the concomitant expansion of career opportunities for Lao men. The new force numbered 1,000 men in 1947, the year after its formation, and 1,200 in January 1950.26 Notwithstanding these developments, a series of factors—not least Anglo-American pressure to give more credibility to the noncommunist Indochinese states—convinced France to establish the Associated States of Indochina in 1949.27 The promulgation of the Associated State of Laos convinced most Lao Issara exiles to return to Laos and, in many cases, to join the new government.28 The two most notable exceptions were Phetsarath, who remained in exile in Thailand, and Souphanouvong, who committed to the revolutionary movement created and guided by the Vietnamese. Despite France’s continued responsibility for defense matters after 1949, one of the most palpable sources of national pride at this moment of national arrival was the creation of the Armée Nationale Laotienne (Lao National Army, ANL). Bolstered by compulsory military ser vice, the ANL was officially charged with maintaining internal order, protecting the country against external threats, and educating the nation through “moral, civic, military, and technical training.”29 If these tasks would be difficult to achieve, the formation of the ANL intensified the process of militarization that was already underway. The 1st Bataillon Infanterie Laotienne (Lao Infantry Battalion, BIL) was formed in July 1950 and the 2nd BIL a few months later, in Pakse.30 A further four battalions were formed the following year, as Jean de Lattre’s arrival in Indochina as chief of the French armed forces heralded the “veritable take-off of the ANL.” Thanks to American aid, which the French increasingly relied on to continue the war, the army numbered more than 12,000 men by 1952.31 In addition to raw numbers, a trainee-officer school (École d’ÉlèvesOfficiers) was established in 1950 at Donghene, near Savannakhet in southern Laos. This town occupied a special place in Lao military lore since one of the first Lao companies, formed there in 1941, had taken to the bush with French forces upon the Japanese coup de force in March 1945, and was later celebrated for repelling the Japanese. Although most training continued to be carried out by the French, a training camp for noncommissioned officers was also set up at Chinaimo on the outskirts of Vientiane.32 By the cease-fire in 1954, troop numbers had reached more than 21,000, and a total of 30,000

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to 40,000 had served since 1950. These men served in twelve infantry battalions, seven light infantry battalions, three heavy weapons companies, one parachutist battalion, sixty-two companies of the National Guard, twelve commando units, six escort companies, two reconnaissance companies, one artillery group (not yet operational), seven engineer companies, three transport companies, one transmission company, three gendarmerie companies, an embryonic air reconnaissance company, and a river squadron.33 While this chapter focuses on royalist Laos, these years also saw the creation of Lao communist forces under the officially disbanded Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), which in 1951 was renamed the Vietnamese Workers’ Party. Together with Souphanouvong, the leading figures on the Lao side were Kaysone Phomvihane and Nouhak Phoumsavanh. With a Vietnamese father, near native language proficiency, and experience in nationalist politics in Hanoi, Kaysone was “a trusted agent of the ICP” and worked on propaganda and recruitment near the Lao-Vietnam border after the First Indochina War broke out in December 1946.34 In January 1949, he formed the Ratxavong Brigade, an event that was later celebrated as the birth of the revolutionary Lao People’s Liberation Army (LPLA). Also fluent in Vietnamese from his days driving trucks between Laos and Vietnam, Nouhak headed the Lao Issara’s Committee for the East, founded under ICP auspices in late 1947.35 In addition, Souphanouvong split with the Lao Issara in early 1949 over his close relations with the Vietminh and strong disagreements over the political direction Laos should take. Soon after breaking away, he again consulted with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, who wanted to create its own Indochinese alliance in competition with the French-created Associated States of Indochina. Souphanouvong then joined Kaysone and Nouhak in the Lao Resistance Government, formed with ICP impetus and support in August 1950. Around the same time, the ICP oversaw the creation of the Neo Lao Issara (Free Laos Front), a broad-based front based on the Vietminh.36 The tragedy of Laos’ postcolonial history was that the rival forces of the ANL and Pathet Lao, as leftist forces became known after the 1954 Geneva Agreements, would fight in a civil war lasting until the early 1970s.

Militarization outside the military The militarization and masculinization of society and public life extended beyond military units to the police, scouts, and other institutions of the new state. The Lao National Police force was formed in 1950 under Jean Deuve,

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a French intelligence officer who had served with the French forces in Laos between 1946 and 1949, and would later write prolifically on the country. In his book on the history of the Lao police, Deuve recalled that physical education and sport were “considered part of the officer’s life,” and that “a minimum of 90 minutes had to be reserved each day for sports activity, [such as] close combat, judo, athletics, or team sports.”37 At the newly established Police College (École de Police) in Vientiane, recruits undertook military-style training that included physical education, self-defense, close combat, and shooting.38 Established during the Lao Nhay years but closed down by the Japanese, the Association des Scouts Lao (Lao Scouts Association) was also active during this period.39 In 1952, for instance, Nouvelles du Laos celebrated a “great rally” of Vientiane’s six scout troops outside of the city. The Lao scouts retained the activities introduced from France the previous decade, including first aid, signaling, and cooking, and the motto “be prepared” (triam phrom).40 The persistence of colonial values was also evident in the scout’s leadership: the scouts commissioner was none other than Deuve while the positions of president and vice president were fi lled by Pheng Phongsavan and Bong Souvannavong, members of parliament who had opposed the exiled Lao Issara in favor of a more gradualist nationalism under French guardianship.41 The militarist history and ethos of scouting is well known, but in Laos the movement served military objectives in a particularly practical manner.42 In Luang Prabang in early 1953, FTEO troops used local scouts as auxiliaries in what became known as the first battle of Laos, a drawn-out counteroffensive against communist forces. In his capacity as general commissioner of the scouts, Captain Jean Deuve recalled: “At the time of the Vietminh assault, those who really worked were the people of Luang Prabang. Psychological preparation over, they had to orga nize the reception of French Union troops. . . . In a country that had never so much as seen troops . . . the scouts were the oil that greased the engine.”43 The scouts “made arrangements” along the Nam Ou and Nam Suang rivers, where boatmen had refused to venture, “rendering possible missions of war that would have been doomed to failure without them.” The report likened the scouts’ efforts to those of the young cadets who assisted army units during the siege of Mafeking, the event that inspired Robert Baden-Powell to found scouting.44 Deuve’s involvement in this episode further highlighted the scouts’ links to the military and military culture. Perhaps the most striking illustration of the militarization of Lao society was the École Nationale des Cadres de Jeunesse et d’Éducation Physique

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du Laos (National Youth and Physical Education Cadre School, or ENCJEP), founded by the Ministry of Defense in 1950 and located in the grounds of the That Luang stupa (figure 3.2).45 With its purpose of training youth and physical education teachers, ENCJEP was modeled on the Vichy-era cadre schools in Phan Thiet and Vientiane. Further recalling Vichy themes, the candidates, aged between nineteen and thirty-five, were to be “of irreproachable behavior and morality.” With free transportation, meals, and lodging, they were drawn from all over Laos. Many trainees were schoolteachers, presumably explaining why courses were often conducted in the summer break. By the end of the 1954 intake, more than 200 trainees—all male—had graduated from the school with a diploma or certificate.46

Figure 3.2. Trainees march onto the training field at École Nationale des Cadres de Jeunesse et d’Éducation Physique, situated in the cloister of the That Luang, or Great Stupa. (Photo courtesy of Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense, 1951)

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Like the Vichy-era cadre schools, ENCJEP promoted patriotism in a wide variety of ways that were now tied exclusively to the nation. Each intake or promotion was given a name: Promotion Setthathirath in 1952, named after one of Lane Xang’s great kings, and Promotion Santi (peace) in 1954, perhaps to mark the end of the First Indochina War. Each intake was divided into teams (Fr. équipe/L. nuai) of around eight or ten trainees, several of which memorialized Lao kings—for example, Nuai Fangum and Nuai Sourinyavongsa.47 The school’s shield also incorporated nationalist themes, juxtaposing images of the national symbol of Erawan, a threeheaded elephant drawn from Indian mythology, an Olympic torch held aloft by one of the elephant’s trunks, and a line of silhouetted trainees performing the Olympic salute. Printed above and below the images were the youth motto, “always serve” (hapsai samoe), and the words “Lao youth” (nyuvason lao) (figure 3.3, top left). Perhaps the most potent symbol of all was the school’s location in the cloister of the That Luang stupa, the country’s most important religious monument and national symbol. Although the spacious grounds of the temple complex had long been utilized for the annual tikhi game and more recently for sport and military parades, the stunning visual backdrop of the stupa bound the school’s militarist activities to the nascent Lao nation. According to a note introducing the school in French military media archives, ENCJEP’s program was “inspired by the methods of scouting,” but military methods were perhaps more important.48 The school’s forty-fiveday courses included marching, physical training, general education classes, manual work, self-examination (examen de conscience), and discussion of themes set by instructors (figure 3.3).49 These activities aimed to prepare trainees “to then carry out, in the best conditions, the role of educators, advisers, and leaders of youth.” In an adaptation of the Vichy-era uniforms, instructors and trainees wore white shirts, blue shorts, white socks, and black shoes, while trainees wore a neckpiece similar to a scout scarf. Reinforcing the military ethos of the school, instructors wore the youth movement badge and stars denoting their rank on their left breast pocket. Further highlighting the military principles of ENCJEP, the director of the school was Phoumi Nosavan, a rising lieutenant in the ANL (figure 3.4). A keen boxer in his youth, Phoumi had joined the Lao Pen Lao (Lao for the Lao), an anti-Japanese movement that collaborated with Thai resistance forces during the Second World War, before fleeing Laos with the Lao Issara in 1946. As Souphanouvong’s chief-of-staff in exile, Phoumi had collaborated extensively with the Vietminh.50 In 1948, however, Phoumi’s work with the Vietminh had “triggered a serious rupture within the Lao

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Figure 3.3. Scenes from the École Nationale des Cadres de Jeunesse et d’Éducation Physique, inside the That Luang cloister. The school shield (top left, partly obscured) incorporated the motto “Always Serve” and the Olympic salute. (Photos courtesy of Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense, 1951)

Issara,” leading the Vietnamese to cut ties with him. Angered, he crossed over to the French side, joined the new ANL as a lieutenant, and emerged as a fierce critic of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).51 By the end of the decade, Phoumi would rise to be the country’s most powerful man and most trenchant anticommunist, and a renowned proponent of national sport (see chapter four). Most striking—even shocking—in terms of the school’s militarist ethos and aesthetic was the continued use of the so-called Olympic salute, identical to the Nazi salute. Although it seems unimaginable that such a notorious

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Figure 3.4. Phoumi Nosavan, director of the École Nationale des Cadres de Jeunesse et d’Éducation Physique, who would later emerge as one of the Lao National Army’s most powerful and feared generals. (Photo courtesy of Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense, 1951)

symbol was retained after the Second World War, physical practices change in their meaning as they move around the world, just as other cultural ephemera do. Using the salute in Laos after the war indicated the appropriation of Vichy Indochina’s militarist symbols for the new task of building the postcolonial nation. In this sense, it was similar to other Vichy symbols adopted at the time, including the Olympic torch, youth uniforms, and most of all, the male body itself. A striking photograph of uniformed trainees saluting the national flag in 1950, with the That Luang stupa filling the background, brought into perfect relief the militarized ensemble of the male body, the Lao nation, and

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Figure 3.5. The École Nationale des Cadres de Jeunesse et d’Éducation Physique brought together, in striking relief, the male body, the Lao nation, and Buddhism, the state religion. (Photo courtesy of Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense, 1951)

the national religion, Buddhism (figure 3.5). Equally, the picture testified to the fi ne composition of French war photographer Raoul Coutard, who would later emerge as a famous director of photography with the French New Wave.52

The militarization of Lao masculinity Inasmuch as they have considered this period of militarization in Laos, military historians have focused on the poor standard of Lao soldiers.53 Reflecting similar ideas to the seu seu critique, discussed in the previous chapter, such

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critics aim to explain soldiers’ poor military performance, but a very different emphasis emerges if we consider militarization as a social and cultural phenomenon. In the latter respect, the militarization of Lao society helped to make military manliness a mode of what R. W. Connell has famously called “hegemonic masculinity.”54 While Connell defines hegemonic as the model of masculinity that most effectively upholds patriarchal relations, she and other scholars stress that hegemonic modes of masculinity also order relations between men. Military life emerged as a locus of male aspiration, a form of masculinity that attracted widespread social approval. Th is ideal did not dislodge existing measures of masculine status and achievement such as merit (bun), honor (kiat), and Buddhist charisma (barami). Instead, the ideals, culture, and cash associated with military life came together with these virtues, in some cases emerging as new sources of them. An outstanding example was Captain Kong Le, a popular and charismatic young paratrooper commander of Lao and Bru (a Mon Khmer group) background, who would rise to fame in 1960 by taking Vientiane in an audacious coup with just 200 men. Kong Le was not only considered a phu mi bun (man of merit) with special powers, but was renowned for being “clean”— meaning that he didn’t smoke or drink and was not corrupt. Despite his diminutive stature, he was also known for his discipline, restraint, and physical prowess—a quality he displayed in physical party tricks like one-handed push-ups. The only exception to Kong Le’s ascetic image was his reputation for sexual promiscuity, which enhanced his image further.55 Though lacking Kong Le’s genuine popularity, military men such as Phoumi Nosavan boosted their prestige via the wealth, power, and again the sexual opportunities bestowed by military rank. Although aristocratic leaders also retained magnetism, the militarization of masculinity was critical for two reasons: First, these ideals were far more attainable than existing modes of masculine success, particularly for those from rural areas and nonaristocratic backgrounds (such as Kong Le); and, second, it established a new nexus between masculinity, martiality, and nationalism, which would remain a key feature of Lao political culture in decades to come. An effective way to chart the emergence of military masculinity as a desirable social attribute is through press and pictorial representations. While “representation” is sometimes framed disparagingly as the opposite of “reality,” such criticisms privilege the currency of experience (“reality”) without examining how this too is experienced through language and representation. Rather than submitting to what we might call the “propaganda argu-

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ment,” which tends simply to stop discussion of how communication informs and is shaped by society, we gain more from investigating the shared set of meanings reflected in representations, which make them powerful cultural ephemera in their own right. Dismissing propaganda—which aims, after all, to mobilize people—also overlooks its importance in shaping ideas and values. This is especially true in the military, one of the most explicitly coercive institutions in modern society. An abundant source of martial representations in postwar Laos was Naklop Lao or Le Combattant Lao (The Lao Soldier), a bilingual newssheet founded in 1947 to publicize the life, exploits, and battles of Lao soldiers among comrades and civilians.56 Beneath the general banality of the magazine’s content, ranging from hagiographic histories of the Lao forces to Lao festivals and culture and the evils of the Vietminh, was a consistent articulation of the ideal qualities of the Lao soldier. Founded by Captain Jean Deuve, then the head of the press and information ser vice of the French forces in Laos, there was obviously a propaganda purpose behind these standards, as the newssheet sought to promote these traits among Lao troops and civilians in the ongoing battle for hearts and minds.57 Far from rendering these ideas unimportant, the object of mobilization distilled their social significance. The fact that many articles were written by Lao soldiers suggested that, regardless of whether the values were met, they were internalized within the ranks. In two speeches glorifying the first battalions of Lao chasseurs, the first edition of Naklop Lao neatly summarized these qualities. The first address was by Colonel de Crèvecoeur, commander of the forces in Laos, who in offering the Lao chasseurs his “warmest thanks” catalogued their heroic qualities: “Due to your common effort, your courage, and your camaraderie, you have created strong and hardened units, which, in heroic guerrilla warfare, in the liberation offensive, in expeditions and battles, have accomplished the tough and glorious tasks that have been entrusted to them.”58 The Laolanguage section of Naklop Lao likewise revered soldiers for their mutual persistence, courage, friendship, steadiness, strength, and proficiency. De Crèvecoeur’s short address ended by stressing the Lao soldiers’ “spirit of discipline” in the jungle, which he attributed to their “attachment” to France and Laos, their “strong and fearless trust,” their “solidarity,” and their love of “difficulty” and “danger.” Just as eff usive, Lao leaders rendered the merits of military life slightly differently, often according to Buddhist principles. Speaking at a merit-making

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day dedicated to fallen Lao NCOs and chasseurs, Prince Boun Oum of Champasak, the newly appointed inspector-general of Laos and soon-to-be prime minister, considered the nobility of sacrifice: We are certain to confront adversity and danger. We’ve already done it. We have had our deaths and casualties, for whom we are making and dedicating merit on this occasion. And from now on we must have the will and perseverance to suppress the enemy’s rebellion. Each and every one of you should recognize that, even though you are a fighter with the blood of a fighter, you are also a man. Let us recall that [as] we have birth, we have death—it belongs to the righteous and, for us, dying honorably [is] dying for the nation, dying for our birthplace.59

As a key component of the ideology of military manhood, the honor of sacrifice that pervades military culture represents a quid pro quo for soldiers required to risk their lives in return for little but the abstract idea of a nation.60 The interesting thing about Boun Oum’s speech was his framing of sacrifice in Buddhist terms. He reminded recruits that death inevitably follows birth, not only as an objective fact but as part of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara). This cycle was inevitable for fighters, as it was for all men. By stressing that the ceremony accrued merit to the dead, Boun Oum reminded soldiers that they would benefit in their next life if they died in this noble pursuit. This emphasis on individual gain did not displace collectivist notions of sacrifice. In more familiar nationalist terms, Boun Oum represented dying for one’s country and birthplace as righteous and honorable, wedding Buddhist concepts of death to collective duty to the nation. A similar blend of individual, religious, and national virtues resonated in the next section of Boun Oum’s speech: Although I’m not a soldier, if I actually died there would be someone to invite me up to heaven. But I wouldn’t agree to go. Instead, I would go around inspiring our comrades to get angry, and vanquish the rebellion to bring peace to the country. In the end, our brethren would attain health and happiness and, as a result, I would benefit in my next life and be proud.61

Here, Boun Oum again drew on Buddhist principles by evoking his passage to heaven, the intermediary destination for men of sufficient merit to await

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rebirth. Showing a pragmatic nationalist-inflected understanding of his religion, he added an extra intermediary phase before going to heaven, one in which he would recruit comrades to defeat the enemy. Besides bringing peace to the country, the resultant health and happiness of his brethren would, via the resultant karma, bestow benefits in his next life and make him proud. The idealized traits of the Lao soldier presented by de Crèvecoeur and Boun Oum—Buddhist virtue, diligence, courage, friendship, reliability, strength, proficiency, spirit, discipline, attachment to nation, trust, solidarity, love of duty and danger, and sacrifice—were repeated time and again in Naklop Lao, particularly in repeated articles celebrating the first Lao chasseurs. An interesting feature of the newssheet’s early editions were fictional dialogues between soldiers, civilians, women, and other people. Authored by a certain Sergeant Bouakham, an officer at Donghene, one such dialogue involved a Lao chasseur called Mr. White and a villager called Mr. Black— hardly neutral names—in a discussion of bravery.62 Mr. Black began by asking Mr. White where he could get the beautiful badge the soldier was wearing on his shirt pocket. Riled, Mr. White countered that it wasn’t a simple matter of getting the badge, it was the insignia of the parachutist, literally “a soldier that jumps from a plane,” and had to be earned. “But why would you jump from a plane?” Mr. Black inquired. “Aren’t you afraid of dying and leaving behind your children, your wife, and your parents? Why risk your life for a piece of metal, an image of a bird spreading its wings? I’d only understand if it was gold to make jewelry for my children or my wife. Ah, you’re not so special!” Incredulous, Mr. White retorted: “You really are stupid. . . . What I have is unprecedented. Take a little look at the men in other countries, who risk their lives for their homeland. This serves as our example. If the population lives in peace and prosperity, it is thanks to our courage. You . . . you are scared of dying. Can you live to be 200? Everyone dies, young or old.” Mr. Black could only counter that, soon to marry, he was afraid of leaving his future wife behind. In Laos as in the West, white (khao) represents virtuousness, beauty, and cleanliness, while black (dam) stands for undesirability and inhumanity— chai dam literally means black-hearted or cruel. As with the opposition of their names, a number of binary characteristics emerged from the dialogue between the two men. While Mr. White was motivated by ser vice to the country, Mr. Black was driven by selfish concerns, particularly his desire to get married; while Mr. White and his comrades were courageous, resulting in peace and prosperity for all, Mr. Black was afraid; while Mr. White was

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aware of and comfortable with his mortality, Mr. Black yearned for a long life. In all of these oppositions, the former trait was associated with the soldier and the latter with the civilian. By implication, the soldier was portrayed as the masculine man doing what men did elsewhere, while the civilian was feminized. It was at this subtextual level that Mr. Black was most ridiculed. The above summary is taken from the French version, as the text is clearer than the Lao. Where legible, additional subtleties emerge from the Lao text. Instead of the “without precedent” remark, Mr. White says that soldiers are khong than samai, or up with the times. The modernity implied by than samai stood in implicit contrast to the unsophisticated life of the villager, which was rendered with the denigrating term thai bannok (country bumpkin). To the oppositions mentioned above, we can thus add urban modernity versus rural unsophistication. The Lao version also emphasized national filialness by contrasting the selfish motivations of the villager to the nation-building and patriotic qualities of the soldier. Mr. White implored Mr. Black to look to other countries and to take their example, the underlying purpose of which was to “give birth to and build the nation.” A second dialogue in this 1948 edition of Naklop Lao, penned by Chief Corporal Onchanh Prasouk of the 4th BCL in Meuang Sing, was noteworthy for negative images it evoked of soldiers.63 This conversation, entitled “People don’t understand soldiers,” took place between a soldier, Sithat, and an “uneducated” villager, Thongthet. Asked by Thongthet to define what a soldier was, Sithat was immediately defensive: “Soldiers are not as unfortunate as you think. These are men of goodwill, who are faithful and who are misunderstood by the population. These are the soldiers who defend our homeland against pirates and protect them [the people] from misfortune that arises in our homeland.”64 The Lao version was even stronger, with Sithat asserting soldiers were not lowly or inferior (tam toi), as believed, adding that although soldiers had a name for “not appearing honorable or renowned,” they were actually kind and patriotic. Unconvinced, Thongthet declared that, in his experience, soldiers simply walked around the village in nice clothes with an air of superiority, like a phu nyai mai sung (lit. big man, tall tree): “When they change into these clothes, it’s like they’re promoted three ranks from when they were villagers.” “What do you think, my friend?” retorted Sithat. “Do you think that soldiers are the same as coolies? You misunderstand. Soldiers have to act proudly and be here to preserve our men’s honor.”

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A number of things were going on in this discussion. First, Sithat the soldier seemed to have been responding to erstwhile stereotypes associating military life with the lowly and unfortunate. Second, his interlocutor Thongthet suggested such images remained just as relevant in the present day. Soldiers were unworthy of their superior air, he implied, and would need more than a uniform to rise above the level of a villager and become a true phu nyai, or elite. Third, this accusation permitted Sithat to justify soldiers’ arrogant air of superiority in terms of being selfless protectors of the nation. He did not deny that soldiers acted in this way, just as he did not deny the existence of a social hierarchy. Instead, the superior air of soldiers was justified by the importance of their mission: protecting the honor of Lao men. If pride could be confused with arrogance, he seemed to be suggesting, it merely reflected Lao soldiers’ high position in the social hierarchy of independent Laos. This hierarchy was also conveyed in the opposition of educated soldier and uneducated villager. The third dialogue sought to reverse negative stereotypes by invoking sex, particularly the heterosexual desirability of the soldier. The article, titled “The dreams of three girls,” featured Miss Su, Miss Pha, and Miss Son discussing marriage. “Who among the husbands we seek will be worthy of us?” Miss Su wondered aloud. Miss Pha suggested that they should “search for men of high rank, like government officials,” while Miss Son said that, if this was not possible, she’d marry a businessman. Her rationale was simple enough: By marrying a wealthy businessman, she’d be able to afford the luxuries of life: makeup for her face, curls in her hair, elegant shoes on her feet, and perfume on her skin. Miss Su had another idea: “Why do you want officials and wealthy merchants, and not our Lao soldiers? Have you forgotten them? Who would you leave them to? Are they not also public servants? They may even become officers, from second-lieutenant to commander, and then they’d be senior officials for sure. We live in peace thanks to whom? It is thanks to them. I would be happy to marry a Lao soldier, my friends.”65 As this exchange implies, the militarization of society after 1945 further entrenched the gendered division of urban society that was characteristic of the Vichy years. According to this familiar division, men would pursue careers while the women’s sphere was domestic. A product of this division, as shown in this exchange, was women’s desire to marry men they considered worthy of them, for this would elevate their own social status and wealth. A critical aspect of male desirability—of male worthiness—was the prestige

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and earning potential of one’s career. Nang Su’s point was that military men were equally desirable as products of existing bastions of male success, the civil ser vice, and business. The Lao version of the text reinforced this point of comparison, adding that officials and businessmen could thank Lao soldiers for living a good life (yu yen pen suk). In the implicit hierarchy that emerged, a military career was portrayed as not only equal to one in government or business, but even superior to it. Indirectly, the dialogue invoked the wellknown generosity of the military pay packet: “The pay was so high that even a Private could get married,” Captain Kong Le once told a Soviet reporter.66 Such images representing soldiers as the object of female affection were common in Naklop Lao.67

Picturing the military body The remainder of this chapter turns to visual culture, ranging from simple line drawings and sketches to quality photojournalism. By contrast with the limits of the written word, which tends naturally to emphasize the abstract over the concrete, the cognitive over the physical, visual representations are aptly suited to capturing the physical side of military masculinity, making explicit the visceral connections between character, the body, and masculinity.68 The agency that emerges from such connections provides a surprising contrast with the established critique of colonial photography as the instrument, expression, and product of the colonial gaze.69 While recognizing the historical role of the camera and photography in wielding colonial power, we must also consider the variety of colonial conditions under which images were produced and the differing cultural meanings that resulted. Visual technologies produced militarist representations of men and the male body as the agent of Laos’ national future. Given France’s continuing colonial role and its anticommunist alliance with royalist Laos, there were obvious political reasons to portray the Lao army and soldiers in a positive light. But to repeat my earlier point, dismissing such images as propaganda would overlook the image of the nascent nation-state that they projected, and the social context which made such images meaningful. At a time when the Kingdom of Laos was being challenged by alternative factions claiming to provide the authentic avenue to Lao nationhood, mediatizing the male body served the RLG’s claim that it alone exercised legitimate control over the destiny of national Laos. Most intriguingly, in this respect, it was French artists who produced these images of Lao masculine agency.

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Visual representations of the Lao during this period were starkly gendered. By contrast with the martial representation of men as powerful agents of a propitious future, women were associated with tradition, the past, and vulnerability, a common element of national visual cultures since the late eighteenth century.70 Such imagery reinforces the contrast between men as “metonymic” of the nation—an embodiment of the nation itself, “standing alongside each other and the ‘nation’ ”—and women, who “float above the nation, as metaphors of what the nation is, and not what women are.”71 According to this division, women will always be inferior in the national context because, although they may symbolize the nation, the masculinity of men is equated with it. While scholars have expended considerable energy examining the female side of this binary, masculine representations have been relatively overlooked, particularly in Southeast Asian contexts. The technical simplicity of cartoons in Naklop Lao, obviously intended to be humorous, conveyed the physical dimension of military masculinity with unmistakable clarity (figure 3.6). An image published in late 1947 compared a skinny new recruit and an impossibly thickset “veteran of two months.”72 Whereas the pathetic new recruit had spindly limbs, a tiny waist, and a miserable face drawn of life, the veteran sported limbs of railway sleepers, a neck that was broader still, and a face so well fed it was more an ellipse than a moon. Unlike the sorry new-boy, the veteran was a happy man. Size clearly defined the soldier here. The good news for the new-boy was that physical size was not innate. Rather, the transformation from sorry new-boy to happy veteran could be accomplished within just two months! A cartoon the following month also took a lighter look at the first days of enlistment. With his ears poking out beneath his clipped hair and a pensive look of concern, the “new soldier who’s just visited the kit shop for the fi rst time” was identifiable as such by his oversized uniform and

Figure 3.6. The body of the Lao soldier. (Naklop Lao, 1947)

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discomfort in his new skin.73 Beneath the joke was the same message that a soldier’s body defines him as such. Unlike the previous “before and after” image, this was an in-between one, the new-boy caught in a phase of transition, sporting the soldier’s clothes but not his bearing or size. The recruit had begun the metamorphosis of becoming a soldier by donning his new kit, but more time was needed to complete the transformation from civilian to soldier. When this change did occur, it would take place in the body. A third sketch, comparing a Lao chasseur “of the past” with one “of the present,” invoked continuity as well as change through the body.74 While the old-timer was defined by symbols of backwardness—bare torso and feet, spear, and sarong—his contemporary was denoted by a trim uniform, shoes and socks, beret, and modern weapon. The two soldiers’ bodies and accouterments suggested modernization. The first soldier’s bare feet had been replaced by shoes and socks, his sarong with a uniform, and, most importantly, his spear by a rifle—a vivid symbol of modern technology. The accompanying article drew similarly on the theme of progress: “The jungle era has passed. Lao chasseurs with modern weapons will achieve victory and drive out the enemy.” At the same time, the image emphasized continuity between the “renowned” Lao soldier of the past and his contemporary successor, for the text explained that the Lao chasseur of the past was a member of the celebrated Donghene company that, just two years earlier, had vanquished the Japanese. The article urged today’s Lao chasseurs to repel their enemies as their ancestors had, and to adopt their patriotism, courage, and diligence in fighting for the nation. Other cartoons represented the Lao soldier as physically proficient, even ruthless in vanquishing his enemy (figure 3.7). In a simple 1947 cartoon, a Lao chasseur chased away a Japanese soldier, illustrating an article that praised the “courage, friendship, trust, and joy” of the famed 1945 Donghene units “towards our Lao brethren.”75 A 1950 poster presented a similar image of proficiency, urging the people of Laos to report theft so that the local Lao soldiers could “kill the Vietminh bandits.”76 A final example, published in Naklop Lao the same year, employed much improved artistic and production quality to present a similar image of ruthlessness. Identified by his slouch hat, a Lao chasseur sank his bayonet into the midriff of a Vietminh combatant. As blood oozed gorily from the Vietminh soldier, raising his hand meekly in surrender, the caption read: “They’re going to invade . . . Absolutely Not!”77 The improved visual quality of the latter cartoon foreshadowed photographic representation of the aesthetics of military masculinity in Laos. In

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Figure 3.7. The proficient Lao soldier. (Cartoon of Lao soldier repelling the Japanese, from Naklop Lao, 1947; cartoon of Lao soldier beating Vietminh bandit © Mémorial de Caen, Fonds Jean Deuve; cartoon of Lao soldier killing a Vietminh adversary, from Naklop Lao, 1950)

1950, a splendid bilingual commemorative volume entitled Pathet Lao 1950 (Laos 1950) was published, incorporating text and photographs in a largeformat design.78 Celebrating this year as the moment of national arrival in Laos, the volume was divided into two major parts: (1) the text of the 1949 Franco-Lao General Convention and the amended constitution, and (2) lengthy chapters on the five Lao ministries. The latter section was impressively illustrated with dozens of photographs of Lao institutions, demonstrating how visual technologies were used to represent the aesthetics of national emergence and progress. In a manner that the written word could not so readily convey, particularly in a country that remained largely illiterate,

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these photographs made the statement that Laos possessed the material requirements to succeed as a modern, independent nation. Of most relevance here, a chapter on the Ministry of National Defense highlighted the importance of military masculinity in the emergence of modern Laos. The chapter’s opening sentence stated, categorically, that the armed forces were “the most important thing for the independence of Laos.”79 Four plates of photographs reinforced the sentiment pictorially, presenting some sixteen photographs of chasseurs, parachutists, and gendarmes carrying out their duties. In some, the men were pictured in formation, marching or standing to attention, conveying a picture of orderly military discipline. In others, the soldiers were engaged in dynamic activity: parachutists training and leaping from a plane, soldiers doing military exercises on horseback and in the bush. These aesthetics testified to the competence and proficiency of Lao soldiers, the beating heart of independent Laos. The emerging genre of photojournalism represented such themes with similar force. One of the most important publications was Indochine SudEst Asiatique (ISEA, Saigon, 1952–1954), a magazine “whose color photos, slickness, and presentation,” according to famed war correspondent Bernard Fall, “stood in no way behind those of Life magazine.”80 Just like Life, ISEA employed advances in photographic and production technology, notably Kodachrome (color), to produce photojournalism that integrated text and photography on the same page. Whereas previously pictures illustrated the story, now they were the story. These advances were employed in the service of military propaganda. According to Raoul Coutard, the former French military photographer who freelanced for the magazine, ISEA was published “under the guidance” of French commander, General Jean de Lattre, who considered the management of public imagery a crucial element of the war.81 Despite, or perhaps because of, such high-level involvement, photographic coverage of the war changed not only how information was produced and consumed, but also how history was made. As de Lattre must have recognized, war photography possesses a particular ability to create “national symbols of patriotism, solidarity, death, and sacrifice.”82 Although subsequent events ensured these images would be superseded by those of the victorious Pathet Lao and forgotten, coverage of indigenous troops in Indochina—including those of Laos—offered striking evidence of the emerging nation and of military masculinity as a hegemonic cultural force within it. In particular, these photographs represented the Lao soldier as

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physically adept, dynamic, and hardy, an image that contrasted with impressions of poor martial quality. Exemplary were those illustrating an ISEA article of late 1952, entitled “The blossoming of the new Lao army.” The author gushed: These lively, well turned-out and alert soldiers who pass by, red cap or amaranth beret tilted over the ear, are the slightly ungainly, welcoming and peaceful farmers that we knew in the old days! These committed, active and serious soldiers are the players of the Khène [a distinctively Lao instrument], runners of the boun [festival] and the playground of love in the past. Who believed possible such a transformation in an essentially pacifist and debonair people?83

Praising the transformation of the Lao farmer—previously lazy and lacking initiative, according to a familiar lament—into “the rural soldier, warrior par excellence,” the writer stressed his impressive physique: “Strong, medium-sized but stocky, legs muscular, face open, the stare straight-ahead and frank, always smiling, he is a remarkable marcher.”84 Substantializing such opinions were accompanying photographs representing Lao soldiers on the march through jungle, parachutists boarding a plane, an officer receiving his epaulets, naval officers in the newly formed Lao Navy, and trainees marching in formation at Chinaimo. Such images not only provided evidence of the soldier’s role in forging independence, but reinforced the physical elements of military masculinity. Read today, such sentiments appear as efforts not only to represent, but more importantly to restore masculinity among Lao men, who the French had previously feminized, particularly in comparison with the more dynamic Vietnamese. Perhaps the most striking images of militarized masculinity were two ISEA covers featuring Lao soldiers in full-color action (figure 3.8). In one, a Lao parachutist propped himself atop a high wooden fence, his gaze fi xed intently in the distance as he gripped the wall with one hand and an automatic weapon with the other. In a similar vein, the March 1954 cover captured a trainee BCL officer, marked as such by his khaki slouch hat, lining up a target in the sight of his rifle. These photographs, displayed on the front cover of the best-quality source of photojournalism in Indochina, captured the changes taking place in representations of Lao men, especially the physical characteristics of military masculinity. The Lao soldier now stood as a model for all indigenous troops in Indochina to follow.

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Figure 3.8. A Lao parachutist scales a fence (left) and a Lao chasseur takes aim (right): in images such as these 1953 and 1954 covers of Indochine Sud-Est Asiatique, the Lao soldier emerged as an ideal for all of Indochina to aspire to.

Training and transformation The preceding section has demonstrated the ways in which being a soldier was perceived in physical terms: the size and dress of the soldier’s body, the orderly way in which he marched, his physical proficiency at carrying out military tasks. Beneath these representations was an underlying recognition that soldiers were defi ned not only by their character, but, perhaps even more so, by their physique. The soldier’s body was not innate; a man became a soldier—and a soldier a man—through transformations that occurred in his body. The keys to effecting such transformations were physical training and testing, practices that emerged as key elements of being a military man. As in modern military institutions elsewhere, the Lao armed forces codified physical requirements and the disciplinary techniques for achieving them. The handbooks that were used in military training institutions, such as one published for the officer training school at Donghene, provide a record of these requirements and techniques.85 As the new trainees were told in the foreword, they were at this elite school because they were elite sol-

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diers: “The National Army, symbol of the HOMELAND and guarantor of INDEPENDENCE, is becoming greater and stronger by the day. The command’s honor goes to you, the elite youth.”86 The prerequisites for entry into the school were clear: as well as being of Lao nationality, unmarried, aged between eighteen and twenty-five, of “good reputation,” and possessing a primary school certificate, candidates had to “be physically fit for military ser vice and for the employment of the Officer of the Troops.”87 Likewise, the physical component of the entrance examination reveals what was considered to constitute physical fitness. Days three and four of the four-day examination were fully devoted to testing physical aptitude (the first two were for written tests). On day three, candidates completed the 100 meters flat, high jump, and climbing, while on the fourth they performed the long jump, shot put, and 1,000 meters. The regulations governing the test were as exacting as those of an official sporting competition. In the high jump, candidates nominated three heights, their best successful jump being counted, while in the long jump they recorded their best of three jumps. The shot put component used the Olympic-regulation 16-pound (7.257-kilogram) shot, thrown twice with each arm. The climbing exercise required recruits to scale a “smooth rope,” without using the feet, as high as possible. Finally, the 1,000 meters was run after the other tests on the afternoon of the fourth day, presumably when candidates were most tired.88 Scores awarded for each activity were used to calculate a “coefficient” determining whether the candidate passed the physical aptitude section of the entrance examination. Again, visual representations offer a unique perspective on how physical training fostered physical transformation. In one of the more striking exercises, typical of the “natural method” employed during the Vichy years at Phan Thiet, trainee parachutists carried out ensemble exercises in which two men walked behind one other, raising a third aloft in the air (figure 3.9). Walking in formation, their bare chests lean and muscular, their left legs uniformly in front of the right, the men represented a picture of discipline and cooperation. Just as the trainees’ toned and muscular biceps spoke of martial strength, so the picture of cooperation provided a visual metaphor of military solidarity. A similar picture emerges of physical training at ENCJEP, where the natural method also remained in vogue. Bare-chested trainees began their physical training classes by marching in formation out of the That Luang cloister onto the sports field (figure 3.2). The backdrop of That Luang, symbol of the nation, symbolizes how these disciplined lines of bodies moved in

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Figure 3.9. Parachutist training: just as the trainees’ lean yet muscular bodies spoke of martial fitness, so the cooperative nature of such exercises painted a picture of military and masculine solidarity. (Photo courtesy of Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense, 1952)

time with the nascent nation, or at least in step with the disciplined and regulated version of the nation that leaders imagined. Training began with ensemble exercises. Trainees stood in neat rows with arms outstretched, heads erect, legs straight, heels together, and feet splayed outwards in a V-shape (figure 3.10). Slight but muscular, trainees performed running exercises in the same long lines, arms outstretched above their heads as they emulated their instructor. Like the parachutist exercises, such formations painted a picture of choreographed discipline and unity. In a third ensemble exercise, performed on a long horizontal bar, trainees lifted the weight of their bodies with their torsos vertical and legs horizontal so as to form an L-shape. The instructor demonstrated this position neatly with his arms bent perpendicularly at the elbow, but in practice trainees had not mastered this test of strength and grace. Here the stylized image of national emergence was compromised, ironically portraying a more realistic picture of the chaos and disunity that defined the times.

Figure 3.10. On the training field: elements of the training regime undertaken at the École Nationale des Cadres de Jeunesse et d’Éducation Physique. (Photos courtesy of Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense, 1951)

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After the group exercises, trainees carried out a number of individual exercises—discus, shot put, javelin, and high jump—photographs of which presented an image of technical proficiency. Again, the photos tell the story best: A trainee prepares to put a shot, forming a straight line from the bent elbow of his throwing arm to the fingertips of his nonthrowing arm, as he points towards his target; the same trainee readies himself to throw a discus, maintaining balance as he rocks back, gracefully extending his nonthrowing arm, hand straightened, pointing towards its anticipated trajectory; a high jumper is caught in midair with muscles taut, his face a picture of concentration. Such photographs attest to an active and animated citizenry, embodying the hope of independence. Although these cadets were to become youth and physical education cadres rather than soldiers, the muscular tone of their fatless bodies captured the physical dimension of military masculinity in Laos, and the physical transformations through which a trainee became a man in newly independent and increasingly militarized Laos.

Shared agency in the almost- nation The history of these images illuminates the cooperative production of military masculinity during Laos’ transition to independence. Taken by Coutard, the former military photographer who was now a freelancer, the photographs of the ENCJEP captured, on one hand, France’s continued stake in Laos. As mentioned earlier, the French military deployed photojournalists with military units to record physical training for posterity, indicating the perceived importance of these activities in terms of achieving French policy. During and even after the spectacular transfer of power ceremonies in April 1950, France’s continued responsibility for cultural production reinforced the limitations that continued to be placed on Lao autonomy in this period. Yet, on the other hand, such images represented the Lao military man as the agent of Lao independence, symbolizing the promise of national freedom. If these photographs were undoubtedly stylized, as productive of a cultural idea as reflective of it, they did not conform to simple clichés in which the camera was wielded as a weapon against colonial subjects. Yes, the camera possessed a certain kind of power, but in deploying this power to fight communists and retain a French stake in Laos, it also produced a cultural equivalence to the political and legal processes—conventions, accords, treaties, and so on—that facilitated the emergence of Laos as a new nation.

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These and other representations of Laos’ nascent nationhood were produced not by Lao subjects or citizens seeking independence through anticolonial struggle, but by agents of the still-partial colonizer, stubbornly seeking to retain a role in Indochina. Like Jean Deuve, propaganda officer, Naklop Lao founder, scouts commissioner, and Lao Police director, Coutard did not subordinate the Lao, even as he made photographic subjects of them. At this liminal moment, when Laos was neither fully a colony nor fully independent, these Frenchmen were representing militarized Lao men as masters of a national future. Just as the French had founded the Lao Nhay movement of the 1940s, so they continued to play a role in forging a national future for Laos within the French Union after 1950. But France’s putative reason for remaining in Laos—to prop up a weak new nation under threat from communist forces—did not auger well for the future. Despite the optimism of the times, as expressed in the physical and masculine expressions of nationhood examined in this chapter, the Cold War context that produced them pointed towards deep ideological, geographical, and cultural cleavages that would define the following two decades.

4

Sport and the Theatrics of Power

The two-decade period after the 1954 Geneva Agreements was defined by intractable division and protracted civil war. Against this inauspicious background, the National Games of 1961 and 1964 combined modern sporting spectacle with existing genres of state performance in a grand demonstration of national unity and progress. On the one hand, Olympic-based sporting motifs and the modernity of the athletic body boosted the symbolic power of the games founder, General Phoumi Nosavan, demonstrating the well-known capacity of state performance to reinforce political legitimacy. On the other, they were able to display Phoumi’s status as a national leader, recalling a premodern Southeast Asian polity in which performance was not principally an instrument of power—the willto-rule—but an end in itself.1 While the games promoted the modern idea of a prosperous and unified nation-state, employing the modern spectacle of embodied performance to represent these themes, they also constituted a theatrics of power with a rich regional genealogy of its own. The brief life of the National Games highlights tensions and parallels between these historically distinct, but fortuitously matched, genres. The 1960s period in Laos remains poorly understood despite representing one of the most important periods in the country’s history. It is well known, of course, that by virtue of its location and global geopolitics Laos was drawn into the Cold War, leading to ideological clashes, years of civil conflict, and eventual revolution. Yet the decade was also characterized by unparalleled social, cultural, and economic change, as foreign capital, products, and ideas poured into the country. Early scholarship on the period pays insufficient attention to this dynamism, focusing rather on the power plays of Lao political elites, US influence and interference, and the corruption that sustained these intrigues. These concerns present a simplistic characterization of state power, especially during the early 1960s governments domi-

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nated by General Phoumi Nosavan. Phoumi is represented as an army strongman whose power stemmed solely from American patronage and the threat of violence. Hugh Toye, a British attaché at the time and later a perceptive writer on Laos, provides the defining image of Phoumi: His voice was deceptively soft, his speech disarming, but in fact he was as ruthless as his appearance suggested. When among his own people, there was an air of muted violence about the man, a scarcely hidden enjoyment of power over people, a hint of conscious physical restraint. He was hated and feared, and his orders were obeyed.2

Martin Stuart-Fox likewise stresses that Phoumi enforced his will through the National Directorate for Coordination, a police and security organization, while securing a network of clients through corrupt means as minister of defense (1960–1962) and finance (1962–1965). Although these factors were undoubtedly important, there are always multiple dimensions to power. With more nuance concerning the cultural sources of power, Grant Evans argues that Phoumi “epitomised a particular cultural ideal of the tough phu nyai,” literally big man, meaning that his power derived as much from local networks of prestige and patronage as American largesse.3 As a mechanism of statecraft, the National Games shed further light on Phoumi’s complex agency as a political actor. In the Balinese polity made famous by Clifford Geertz, grand ceremonies “were not the means to political ends: they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for. Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics. . . . Power served pomp, not pomp power.”4 Geertz’s rejection of purely instrumentalist understandings of state symbolism, in which performance is motivated by the will-to-rule, remains as profound as it is poetic. The political objective of symbolism in Bali was not tyranny, trickery, or even government, but the “public dramatization of . . . social inequality and status pride. . . . Status was its ruling obsession and splendor was the stuff of status.”5 For his critics, Geertz’s polemic ignores colonial history and downplays material relations between a ruler and his people.6 According to Stanley Tambiah, his emphasis on the “expressive action” of the “still center” overlooks the “pulsating” nature of Southeast Asian court politics, the divergent strategies undertaken to gain and retain power, and the dynamism, radiance, and charisma of the most effective monarchs. The theatre state could not, in this sense, “transcend the classical disjunctions between expressive

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and instrumental action . . . between power as pomp and power as control of resources and people.”7 The dichotomy between pomp as power and power as pomp is similarly problematic: even if the purpose of ceremony is to dramatize social relations, this display must, logically, also serve power. Geertz himself implies as much, arguing that the king was “a political actor, power among powers as well as sign among signs.”8 Still, if these reservations demand reevaluation of Geertz’s more polemical (and poetic) positions, his enduring insight that state performance does not reduce to the will-to-rule provides a productive framework for understanding the National Games of 1960s Laos.9 A product of their time, the theatrics of power constituted by the games differed markedly from those outlined by Geertz. Most importantly, they were transformed by the cultural flows, practices, and technologies accompanying colonialism and American aid, especially the technologies of Olympic spectacle. As John MacAloon argues in his unsurpassed theory of spectacle in modern societies, the modern Olympic Games embody “spectacle par excellence, a type case against which all others may be compared.”10 Existing theatrics of power were duly modernized and popularized by a series of “imaging technologies” associated with the Olympic genre, including stadiums, Olympic rituals, public address systems, radio, press coverage, and photography.11 The polity imaged by such technologies had also changed. Whereas Geertz’s theatre state modeled centripetal power in a center-oriented polity, the National Games represented the bounded territorial state of postcolonial Laos. In the former, the ability to mobilize manpower was the register on which a king was judged; in the latter, it was controlling territory that mattered. Mobilizing people remained crucial for displaying status, but the games modeled control over a bounded national state rather than a world centered on a king. The role of royalty had also changed. The king was more visible than before, touring the nation he now represented, but was just one player in an expanded political cast. Whereas he had previously occupied the lead role, making him the subject of politics at the center of the universe, he (or his image or proxy) could now be mobilized as an object of politics, creating new tussles in the exercise of performative power. Finally, the modern state brought multiple vectors of power to bear, including Cold War alliances, foreign patronage, and standing military forces. While the modernized theatrics of power remained a critical feature of this matrix, state performance was hardly “what the state was for.”

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Disunity in postcolonial Laos Despite the promise of independence and unity presented by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Indochina, which ended the First Indochina War and formally brought French colonialism to an end, Laos was again deeply divided by 1958, this time by the regional politics of the Cold War. The Geneva conference that led to the agreements had recognized the Pathet Lao as a guerilla movement, and, as a prelude to the integration of leftist and RLG forces and the formation of a coalition government, granted it the northern provinces of Xam Neua and Phongsaly as regrouping areas. In 1955, however, as negotiations proceeded on forming a coalition government, Pathet Lao leaders and the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), as the ICP had been renamed, formed the clandestine Lao People’s Party (LPP), or Lao communist party. The following year, the LPP established the Neo Lao Hak Sat (Lao Patriotic Front, NLHS), a public political party and front orga nization, from the existing Neo Lao Issara.12 Meanwhile, the United States significantly expanded its influence in Vientiane, underwriting the national budget from 1955 in the name of containing communism.13 Under these conditions, it was perhaps remarkable that Prince Souvanna Phoumma, a half brother of princes Souphanouvong and Phetsarath, managed in 1957 to form a Provisional Government of National Union—the first of three coalition governments that would ultimately fail. Souvanna’s cabinet included two NLHS ministers, including Souphanouvong, and supplementary elections were conducted the following May. But the First Coalition was destined not last. The United States was unable to countenance NLHS involvement in the coalition government, engineering a financial crisis before suspending aid in mid-1958. Souvanna Phoumma made way for a new government headed by Phoui Sananikone, scion of a powerful Vientiane family and leader of the Lao Huam Lao party (literally, Lao with Lao, but known as the Rally for the Lao People). A committed anticommunist, Phoui moved closer to Thailand, arrested NLHS members in Vientiane, and targeted Pathet Lao forces in the north. The left retained control over the north and east of the country while the right dominated in the Mekong Valley, and the influence of moderates declined.14 The principal beneficiary of these events was Colonel (later General) Phoumi Nosavan, the officer we met in the previous chapter as director of the National Youth and Physical Education Cadre School (ENCJEP). Born

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in Savannakhet in 1920 and a member of the Lao Issara in the 1940s, Phoumi’s career was defined by two close family connections. First, he was the cousin, brother-in-law, and protégé of Kou Voravong, a defense minister assassinated in 1954. This connection placed him in an existing rivalry between the southern Voravong family and the Sananikones of Vientiane, whom the Voravongs held responsible for Kou’s assassination.15 Second, Phoumi was related by marriage to Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, the military dictator of Thailand, who came from Mukdahan, immediately across the Mekong River from Savannakhet.16 Phoumi regularly sought Sarit’s counsel and closely emulated his rise to power on the back of strident anticommunism and American patronage. After returning from the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris in August 1958, Phoumi joined the recently formed Committee for the Defense of the National Interest (CDNI, Lao: Khanakamakan Pongkan KhwamSonchai Haeng Sat), an anticommunist group of new-generation civil servants and military officers backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Not satisfied at being one of four CDNI members in Phoui’s 1958 government, Phoumi applied increasing pressure and was rewarded with promotion to the position of defense minister the following January. By the end of the year he had forced Phoui from power and was “indisputably the most significant force in the country.” He then rigged the 1960 national elections so that not a single left-wing candidate won.17 Phoumi’s rise did not end the political crisis in Laos. In August 1960, when the Lao political elite was in Luang Prabang making arrangements for King Sisavangvong’s funeral, Captain Kong Le, a young and charismatic paratrooper commander, took Vientiane in a peaceful coup—reputedly with just 200 men. Kong Le promised to stem US influence, halt the rise of the right, and—in an evocative plea for unity—stop Lao killing Lao (lao kha lao). To this effect, he requested Souvanna to form a new government, to which the latter agreed. Phoumi would not go easily, however. After consulting with Sarit in Bangkok and returning to Savannakhet, he mounted what became known as the Battle of Vientiane.18 Easily overrun by Phoumi’s UStrained troops, Kong Le’s forces retreated to the north and formed a shortlived alliance with the Pathet Lao.19 Reconfirmed as deputy prime minister and minister of defense, Phoumi formed a new government under the proAmerican prime minister, Prince Boun Oum, which was duly recognized by the West and Thailand. With support from the Pathet Lao, Souvanna’s government was relocated to Xieng Khouang province and recognized by communist powers, while Souvanna opted for exile in Phnom Penh. Laos existed as a single territorial entity in name only, with “two ‘legal’ governments”

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and at least three-fi fths of the country in the hands of “solid insurgent forces.”20 Combined with precolonial fractures between the north, center, and south, the longitudinal division of the country into east and west resulted in the “veritable disintegration of national space.”21 Although Phoumi was clearly the dominant political figure at this time, Evans argues that he failed to “impose his will on the Lao political scene” in the manner of Sarit in Thailand. Besides the fact that Phoumi never became prime minister like Sarit, the political culture was different in Laos: whereas the Thai king was subject to pressures from the bureaucracy and military, the Lao civil ser vice was weak, the army young and ineffectual, and the newly installed king, Sisavang Vatthana, “a fervent defender of constitutional rule.”22 In particular, Evans adds elsewhere, Sisavang resisted “the imposition of military rule by refusing the royal imprimatur.”23 However, as Phoumi demonstrated so dramatically by his blatant rigging of the 1960 elections and his return to power through the Battle of Vientiane, Lao politics could not be reduced to moral certainties like constitutionality. If the king asserted himself politically later in the decade, particularly in 1964 when he firmly opposed military efforts to seize power, he was more circumspect in the early 1960s, when he failed to summon leaders after the Kong Le coup and effectively approved Phoumi’s countercoup.24 Indeed, Nhouy Abhay, a government minister throughout these years, criticized the king for “taking refuge” in the constitution, confirming the US ambassador’s opinion that “his early period on the throne was hardly characterized by audacity.”25 In short, although Phoumi was certainly less powerful than Sarit and did not enjoy his uncle’s level of royal patronage, he very much imposed his will on Lao politics during the early 1960s. The National Games offered him a chance to display this power, and to effectively harness the royal imprimatur he lacked.

Discourses of unity and progress Known to have been an amateur boxer in his youth and a noted sports enthusiast, Phoumi assumed responsibility for sport and youth in his position as minister of defense.26 It was in this capacity that in February 1961, just two months after the Battle of Vientiane, he passed a decree establishing the National Games of Laos (L. Kan Kila Haeng Sat Lao, Fr. Jeux Nationaux du Royaume du Laos).27 The games were to include men’s and women’s athletics, swimming, and “team sports.”28 Local sports such as muai lao (Lao boxing) and kato (sepak takraw) were added later, providing a contrast with the

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colonial period, when it was rare to include indigenous games in organized sporting competitions. With the inaugural games planned for that November in Vientiane, the event was scheduled to take place every two years. This frequency and timing was almost certainly inspired by the biennial South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games, founded two years earlier by Thailand, along with Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and South Vietnam.29 As examined in chapter five, the SEAP Games seem to have provided a direct model for the National Games, suggesting the Lao event emerged not only from colonial antecedents and global cosmopolitanism, but also from regional engagement. Despite Phoumi’s abject divisiveness in Lao politics, the principal theme of the National Games was national unity. According to the decree establishing the games, the event aimed to “assemble, in conditions as perfect as possible, in a fair and impartial competition, enthusiasts from all provinces of the Kingdom of Laos.” Regulations stipulated that no distinction “for reasons of non participation” was to be made on the grounds of province, race, religion, or politics.30 While nondiscrimination was a familiar discursive theme of the Olympics, the explicit mention of provinces seemed to represent a response to the divided geographical state of Laos. The theme of geographical unity was also reflected in the policy of rotating hosting rights, in order to “propagate the importance of the games throughout” the country.31 Postcolonial Laos had inherited historical distinctions between the northern, central, and southern regions, which had been ruled over by separate kingdoms and were mirrored in the RLG politics: Phoumi and Boun Oum were associated with Savannakhet and Champasak, in the south; the royal family (including Souvanna Phoumma) with Luang Prabang, in the north; and Phoui Sananikone with the capital, Vientiane, in central Laos.32 While the problems in Laos could not be reduced to inherited geographical ruptures, awarding the first three games to Vientiane, Savannakhet, and Luang Prabang recognized the need to share the games between each of the country’s major regions. Recalling the Lao Nhay campaign of the 1940s, Phoumi’s decree invoked historical grandeur in asserting that the National Games should be “worthy of the glorious history of the Kingdom.”33 Undeterred by the fact that the history of the Lao since 1707—when Lane Xang had broken into several separate kingdoms—had been characterized by division, rivalry, and diminishing fortunes, Phoumi linked this image of timeless grandeur to the present by appointing King Sisavang Vatthana to preside over the opening ceremony.34 Although the sovereign was an obvious choice for this task, his

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Thai counterpart had done the same for Sarit in the first SEAP Games in Bangkok in 1959, providing a model of how the sports festival that was becoming de rigueur in the region might provide a dramatic stage on which to alloy the symbolic forces of the military and monarchy in the contemporary theatrics of power.35 The theme of unity between the provinces of Laos was reinforced in a number of semiotic devices. The National Games flag displayed the royal symbol encircled by a rosette of “twelve interlaced white circles,” which stood as a “symbol of the twelve unified provinces,” against a blue background (figure 4.1).36 This also must have been adapted from the SEAP Games Federation flag, which was also blue and featured six gold rings, “intertwined to denote friendship, brotherly love, and unity of purpose” between the members of the SEAP Games Federation (see figure 5.1).37 Of course, the SEAP motif was itself adapted from the Olympic rings, an “emblème international” for the Olympic movement created in 1914.38 Like these precursors, the interlocking rings of the Lao flag represented unity, here between the provinces of Laos. The royal crest located at the center of the rings localized the flag and elevated the nation above the provinces in the symbolic hierarchy of the ensign and the games. In another borrowing

Figure 4.1. Official flag of the National Games of Laos, designed in 1961: positioned within a rosette of twelve circles, representing Laos’ provinces, the royal crest placed the nation at the peak of the flag’s symbolic hierarchy. (Image by author)

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from the SEAP Games, the National Games flame was also adapted to the theme of national unity. An athlete from each of the twelve provinces was to bring a torch to Vientiane, ignited at a special “religious ceremony or official event” in his home province. These twelve athletes would assemble at the airport, march to the stadium, complete a circuit of the track, and join together in lighting the National Games flame to the refrain of the national youth anthem. Produced solemnly and in unity, the flame would also burn eternally, for the torch for subsequent events was to depart from the province of the previous games.39 The theme of national unity was articulated in greater detail prior to the first National Games in Vientiane in 1961. In a lengthy radio address, Colonel Bounkhong Padichit, the director of the Department of Sport and Youth and chairman of the National Games Organizing Committee, hailed the inaugural event as “a historic day for our Lao national sports organization . . . the first time our Kingdom of Laos has organized the National Games . . . the first and most important time by having . . . all provinces in the Kingdom of Laos come together and compete.”40 Given the events of the preceding year, it was notable that Bounkhong boasted of the games bringing together all of the provinces, presumably including those effectively under the Pathet Lao. This expression of goodwill, which ran against the grain of politics, may have resulted from negotiations from mid-1961 between the “three princes”—Souvanna, Boun Oum, and Souphanouvong—aimed at forming a new coalition government. In this sense, the games may have offered a simple and symbolic means of rapprochement, like ping-pong diplomacy between China and the United States a decade later. In any case, Bounkhong’s boast reinforced the raison d’être of the National Games: to assemble the nation in the National Stadium, a metaphor of national desire, the nationin-miniature, and to project an image of Phoumi as national statesman par excellence. The main term used to celebrate unity was samakkhi, meaning solidarity or unity of purpose.41 One of the games’ two main objectives, according to Bounkhong, was precisely to “establish lasting bonds of samakkhi between athletes.”42 In part, this showed how colonial ideas had been adapted to nation building. The themes of teamwork and sportsmanship—i.e., solidarity among team members and opposition players—were ubiquitous in colonial Laos, particularly during the Vichy years when sport and youth activities were harnessed for character-building purposes. These values had roots in the games ethic of nineteenth-century England and the modern Olympics, which Pierre de Coubertin had established precisely as a “festival of human

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unity.”43 But the local roots of samakkhi—derived from the Pali samagga, meaning “[to follow] the same path,” in the Buddhist sense—sank deeper still. Discussing the usage of samakkhi in Siamese, Matthew Copeland suggests the term initially retained religious connotations before becoming established as a positive social attribute relating to national cohesion in late nineteenth-century debates over reform.44 In the 1960s in Laos, samakkhi was similarly the principle term used to describe a united approach in national affairs. Bounkhong’s speech drew on this notion of national togetherness and goodwill.45 As in nineteenth-century Siam, the political context meant that to foster samakkhi was to enhance one’s suitability to govern. Bounkhong’s speech also demonstrated how the games drew on the royal prestige of the monarchy in the spirit of samakkhi. “His Majesty the King and Her Majesty the Queen have graciously agreed to open and close [the games] and to conduct [medal] ceremonies in important competitions,” he reported. In one sense, the royal role confirmed changes in the monarchy in Laos and elsewhere, as travelling the realm and performing state duties now constituted a major means of being seen and becoming known.46 In another sense, the royal presence enhanced the gravitas of the games. Bounkhong dedicated much of his speech to the “matter of watching sport,” particularly the qualities of conduct (maranyat) and culture (vatthanatham) among spectators. While recognizing the games were a competition between provinces, each with its own supporters, he urged spectators to acknowledge the efforts of other teams, applaud winners regardless of province, and under no circumstances “insult or deride losers or referees.” In particular, “spectators should do nothing to compromise samakkhi between competitors.” While fostering solidarity between spectators and athletes had long been promoted as an aspect of sportsmanship, Bounkhong specifically emphasized the presence of royalty, stressing that it would be “utterly inappropriate” for “anything unbecoming” to occur. Proper conduct for the king included public displays of civility, including national unity.47 The second objective of the National Games concerned national improvement in sports, a goal that was connected to a second key motif of the times, national progress. In the words of Bounkhong, the goal was “to improve the standard of Lao athletes to be on a par with foreign athletes and to make Lao sport progress [charoen kaona].”48 Modern sports are unashamedly positivist in their outlook. Like the Olympic motto, citius, altius, fortius (faster, higher, stronger), comparison lies at the heart of quantification and records, two of modern sports’ characteristic features.49 In this case, Bounkhong measured progress in comparison with other countries, reinforcing the dialectical

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nature of nationalism and success in sports. By facilitating such comparison, the games would foster increased “national strength and joy.”50 In addition, Bounkhong argued that the games would strengthen the nation instrumentally by improving athletes’ health and energy.51 The relationship between physical culture, health, and national development was discussed ever more frequently throughout the 1960s, as demonstrated by a chapter on caring for the lungs in a primary school hygiene textbook. The lesson was framed as a discussion between a father and his two children: “How can we make our bodies strong?” asked Mister Khampha. “You have to exercise and work diligently. When we are strong and in good health, our lungs will be strong and germs won’t be able to harm us,” Father answered. “Oh! So that’s why our teachers at school always get us to do physical training,” exclaimed Miss Khamphian.52

The education ministry’s magazine Seuksathikan (Education), which promoted physical education (phalaseuksa) as one of four aspects of a balanced education, conveyed a similar message to teachers.53 For instance, a 1960 article explained that physical exercise and sports made the body strong and prevented illness, allowing people to make a living for themselves and their families by working every day.54 Such logic built on existing cultures of physicality in mainland Southeast Asia, such as those involving amulets, spells, and other methods of protection. The innovative aspect of contemporary physical culture was linking one’s body to the nation by improving productivity. Once again, visual images often made this point most viscerally. A small cartoon in a 1960s textbook chapter on “the country’s progress” is a case in point (figure 4.2). Just as the busy port, boats, and trucks showed that “convenient communication and transport will help make the country progress [charoen],” the worker’s muscles illustrated that healthy bodies would facilitate this objective.55 If the worker was the agent of national progress, his muscular torso was its aesthetic, demonstrating how somatization, typically the representation of social ailments and amelioration in physical idiom, could also occur through bodily aesthetics.56 The key civilizational term used in both the civics textbook and Bounkhong’s speech, khwam charoen kaona, incorporates two verbs meaning “to progress,” charoen and kao na.57 The latter of these terms is a straightforward compound of kao (to step) and na (front/forward), meaning to advance or progress in a basic metaphor of movement. As discussed in chapter two,

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Figure 4.2. The aesthetics of progress: the caption of this cartoon, appearing in a primary school civics text, reads “Convenient communication and transport will help the country to progress.” Note the porter’s muscular physique. (Royal Lao Government, Baephian nathi phonlameuang, 1967)

Thongchai Winichakul notes that charoen has the more specific connotation of material progress and technological advance.58 Reinforcing this materiality, charoen means “prosperous” as much as it does “progress,” demonstrating in turn that prosperity is a key marker of progress. The textbook chapter on “the country’s progress” made the similar point that charoen stood for both material (vatthu) progress, including roads, hospitals, machinery, cars, and labor-saving devices, and mental (chitchai) aspects, including education and culture, which would reinforce national customs and tradition.59 As this definition suggests, the state of being charoen approximated what typically is thought of as national development.60 Like material or mental progress, the National Games were a testament to the country’s charoen. The athletic body represented the materiality of charoen, a key feature of material progress lost in discussions that equate progress with science and technology. The textbook also defined charoen as ngok ngam, where ngok means “to grow or develop” and ngam means “beautiful,” with connotations of material aspiration and distinction.61 In other words, there was a moral element to charoen that judged beautiful things as progressive. Athletic bodies were an example of this kind of progress, a metaphor for the beautiful growth of the nation, and the National Games would put them on show. Charoen’s inherent materiality and physicality has something in

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common with the desirability of abundance (udom sombun), a resonant term examined in earlier chapters that continued to be used to discuss the benefits of physical exercise in the 1960s. Again, this parallel demonstrates how the modernizing rationale of physical culture was enmeshed in existing concepts of physicality. This discussion of sport and civilization recalls Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning’s (1986) seminal work on sport in the civilizing process, and related work in Southeast Asian history. Parallel to “parliamentarization” in eighteenthcentury England—the process through which cycles of violence “calmed down” and social disputes moved to the Parliament—the violence of games was reduced through codification and the exercise of self-constraint. In both cases, the social habitus of the landed aristocracy and gentry became established as desirable social behavior in wider society.62 Elias’ broader work on the civilizing process inspired Thongchai’s examination of the term siwilai as a “geographical discourse of civilizational thinking” in nineteenth-century Siam, as discussed in chapter two. While the meaning of siwilai and charoen were contested, being able to demonstrate these qualities replaced existing sources of legitimacy as “Europe emerged as the new axis mundi” in the Siamese worldview.63 In celebrating sport as a “wonderful symbol for the nation, demonstrating an understanding of culture and an elevated spirit,” Bounkhong’s discussion of spectator conduct brought to mind similar ideas of civility.64 The political figure associated with these qualities was Bounkhong’s boss, Phoumi Nosavan, the minister and figurehead of sport in Laos. As a onetime sportsman himself, Phoumi was feted in Khao Kila Nyuvason (SportYouth News) as a “former sport and youth warrior” (nakrop kao kila nyuvason), an image he nurtured by associating himself with national athletes. In December 1961, he officiated at the send-off of the Lao athletes before the second SEAP Games in Burma and appeared again upon their return, when he presented them with garlands.65 In such ways, and particularly by founding the National Games, Phoumi portrayed himself as custodian of the samakkhi and charoen represented by sport, and rightful beneficiary of the power these virtues inferred.

Performing unity and progress in 1964 Hosted by the southern city of Savannakhet in 1964, the second National Games illustrated the special capacity of the sports festival to substantialize themes of national unity and progress expressed by Phoumi, Bounkhong,

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and others.66 As in the Chinese National Games studied by Susan Brownell, the sporting events in the games took second place to the spectacle of national myth making in the opening ceremonies. Attracting a larger audience and greater media coverage than the sporting events themselves, these ceremonies “dramatize and reinforce a world-order that organizes human bodies in space and time, with the state portrayed as the keeper of that order.”67 As the Lao political crises of the 1960s emphasized so emphatically, however, the state is rarely monolithic. While the opening ceremonies of the 1964 games certainly dramatized the Lao world order of national unity and progress, they did so with Phoumi rather than an impersonal state as the selfappointed keeper of that order, even as his personal power had started to slip. The context of the second National Games reflected the contradictions and uncertainty of the time. On the one hand, Phoumi was much isolated compared to three years earlier, when he had founded the games. Having lost the faith of his American backers, who had finally agreed to the principle of Lao neutrality, he had little choice but to accept the outcome of the Geneva Conference on Laos in 1962, and to join Souvanna Phoumma’s second coalition government that emerged from it. Although Phoumi remained deputy prime minister in the new coalition, and retained this post when it collapsed in 1963, Souvanna was no figurehead as Boun Oum had been. Phoumi had also lost the powerful defense ministry to Souvanna, and his Thai support had diminished with Sarit’s death in late 1963. On the other hand, Phoumi retained access to US patronage as finance minister, continued to exert influence through the Directorate of National Coordination, and continued adding to his considerable business interests. By late 1963, the right had again eclipsed Souvanna and the neutralists, and civil war had resumed.68 The National Games presented Phoumi with another—and ultimately his final—opportunity to star on the stage of state. It was surely no coincidence that the event was scheduled for his stronghold of Savannakhet, a location that would aid him no end in projecting a spectacular likeness of the Lao political order in his own image. In one respect, the increased tension between the power Phoumi possessed and the image of it that he wished to display meant it was now more difficult for him to claim overlordship of this order. On the other hand, the fact that Phoumi retained an official position of power permitted him to conflate self-image with external reality, suggesting, at least momentarily, that power really did serve pomp rather than the other way around. The main site for the Savannakhet games was the Kou Voravong Stadium, originally built during the Vichy years but since renamed after Phoumi’s

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assassinated mentor. Modern stadiums are an “archetype of modernity,” delimiting playing and viewing areas, organizing human bodies in space, and erecting “permeable boundaries” between actors.69 A testament to modern engineering, these edifices “rise out of the earth and help to create the visual landscape of the city,” making them “in most cities the largest single container of crowds.”70 Although the Kou Voravong Stadium was modest by international standards, concrete bleachers, a covered tribune of honor, and an impressive new gate on the eastern side of the stadium made it impressive in Lao terms. Over 100 meters long and 100 meters wide, and with a capacity of 3,000 spectators, it was almost certainly the largest man-made structure and container of crowds in Savannakhet. Symbolizing the stadium’s modernity, the new gate displayed the Olympic rings, a symbol that evoked international cosmopolitanism, despite the fact that Laos was not even a member of the International Olympic Committee and had never competed in the Olympics.71 In terms of size and structure, the stadium befitted a spectacle showcasing charoen. Still, as Geertz might say, “all this was but mise-en-scène,” for it was spectacle, rituals, and people that gave the ceremony its expressive force.72 MacAloon describes the Olympic Games as a “ramified performance type,” composed of four performance genres, namely, spectacle, ritual, festival, and game, the first two of which were most important in the Lao games. Spectacles, according to MacAloon, are overwhelmingly visual, display “a certain size and grandeur,” divide participants into performers and spectators, and display a dynamism that arouses excitement.73 Ritual, meanwhile, is ceremonial behavior that “invokes and involves religious or sacred forces . . . and effects social transitions or spiritual transformations.” The “sacred force” of the Olympics, he argues, is “humankind-ness.” This is evoked in the rituals of the opening and closing ceremonies by positioning “the symbols of the transnational, Olympic, ‘human’ community . . . over and above the symbols of the nation-states.”74 While the Lao National Games were tiny compared to the Olympics, the same basic features of spectacle and ritual were present in Savannakhet when the second National Games opened on March 2, 1964. As discussed previously, these technologies had come to Laos indirectly, via the Pétainist festivals of the early 1940s and the inaugural SEAP Games in 1959. Rituals included such Olympic icons as the torch relay, athlete’s march, opening declaration, athletes’ oath, lighting of the flame, and release of pigeons. In structural terms, the only significant differences were the obvious ones: the international and national symbols were respectively replaced by national and

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provincial symbols, while the transcendental ground of the rituals was national unity and progress rather than humankindness. The key ingredient of the opening ceremony was people. There were perhaps 5,000 in all, consisting of over 1,000 athletes, scores of team officials, unknown numbers of elite soldiers, more than 500 schoolchildren and college students, and an estimated crowd of 3,000.75 This figure must be considered in context, surely representing one of the largest gatherings in Savannakhet. Certainly, the only events of comparable size would have been the largest religious festivals—the Vat Inheng festival in the case of Savannakhet—providing a positive parallel in terms of human numbers and spiritual potency. Though sheer numbers were important in terms of scale, the most important cast members were the officials. Although the National Games decree stipulated that the king was to open the games, Crown Prince Vongsavang represented the monarch in presiding over the Savannakhet opening ceremony.76 It is possible the king declined to open the games for political reasons. By this time, according to the then US ambassador, he was refusing “proposals made to him for speeches and declarations on the grounds that it was preferable for him to say nothing about Vientiane politics”—and the games were certainly political.77 On the other hand, it was common for the crown prince to represent the king during the 1960s due to security issues caused by the conflict. In any case, the crown prince’s attendance and patronage of the games was celebrated with due reverence in headlines and photographs splashed across the front page of Sat Lao, a leading daily newspaper.78 Other officials involved in the ceremony included a royal retinue of senior ministers and military officials, most notably Phoumi, and members of the diplomatic corps, King’s Council, National Assembly, and National Games Organizing Committee. Formalities commenced with a relay of the national sports torch from the airport to the stadium.79 Just as the Vichy-era torch relay symbolized unity among the people of Indochina, the Lao torch linked provincial representatives in a choreographed homage to national unity.80 The relay involved sixteen athletes, one from each of the sixteen provinces (four had been added since 1961), including the Pathet Lao strongholds of Xam Neua and Phongsaly. The athletes dressed neutrally in white T-shirts and shorts, their provincial affi liations subordinate to the national symbols of the relay and the torch. As the relay made its way to the stadium, the torch was passed from athlete to athlete, linking symbolically (in the following order) the southern provinces, central provinces, northern provinces, the capital of Vientiane, and the host province, Savannakhet, in the studied coalescence of the

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nation. The relay proceeded to the stadium along Phetsarath Road. Commemorating Laos’ most famous nationalist and in many ways its most cherished public figure, who had died in 1959, the road’s very name added to the national feel of the occasion. At the stadium, 3,000 spectators waited while athletes assembled outside in preparation for the parade of athletes. Elite soldiers formed a guard of honor, the first of many militaristic elements in the ceremony. Members of the Vientiane diplomatic corps arrived and duly “recognized” the games, lending international legitimacy to the performance. Invited guests of honor and representatives of the King’s Council and National Assembly arrived and did the same. Last of all came Crown Prince Vongsavang accompanied his retinue: General Phoumi, the deputy prime minister; Keo Viphakone, deputy minister of social welfare; Phouangphet Phannaret, deputy minister of finance; Bounthong Voravong, deputy minister of fine arts, sport, and youth; and “high level military officers.” A notable member of this group was Bounthong, Phoumi’s brother-in-law and brother of Kou, after whom the stadium was named. In fact, together with Phoumi’s deputy minister Phouangphet and the rightist Keo, this select grouping of Phoumi loyalists seemed more like his retinue than the crown prince’s, confirming that this was really Phoumi’s event.81 After making an offering and inspecting the guard of honor, Vongsavang entered the stadium, inspected the tribune of honor, and took up his place. Regulations dictated that the national anthem be played as the crown prince stepped from his vehicle and the national flag raised as he ascended the tribune. The flag-raising ceremony had been a feature of sports festivals since the 1940s, when it reinforced and ritualized the association between sport and empire. With a national flag and national officials, the ceremony now served national ends. Likewise, as colonial officials had earlier occupied the tribune of honor, Vongsavang’s presence demonstrated how royalty had been reinstalled at the symbolic apex of local hierarchies. The tribune, Geertz might say, was a version of the “King’s public seat . . . where he sat to observe and be observed during the festivities.”82 The difference now was that the crown prince shared the tribune with Phoumi and his loyalists, elevating them, and particularly Phoumi, to a station that was symbolically proximate to him. All was now in readiness for the parade of athletes. As in the Olympics, teams marched in alphabetical order around the stadium with flags and signboards identifying them. Like the National Games flag, the provincial pennants featured a rosette of rings representing the unity of the provinces,

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but the royal crest was replaced by the province name interlaced through the rings.83 Athletes were dressed in the “parade sports uniforms” of their province. Typical of formal sports uniforms of the time, these uniforms included white shirts with white or dark trousers and, in some cases, a dark blazer.84 As the teams passed the tribune, they turned their heads and saluted the dignitaries seated there. Th is may again have been the Olympic salute, for it was still part of the sport-youth emblem and was featured on a cover of Seuksathikan in 1960.85 According to Sat Lao, the crowd applauded “rapturously” for the provinces, especially Luang Prabang, as the athletes marched by. Constituting the centerpiece of the opening ceremony, this physical and symbolic parade of nation constituted what Geertz might call “an outbreak of symbolic energy.”86 The teams came to rest across the field, lined up behind the signboards and flags of their provinces, facing the official tribune. The collective spectacle of the athletes, under the gaze of national officials, created what MacAloon calls an image of “cooperative unity, though a unity of ordered segmentation,” in which the provinces also retained a distinct presence.87 The display represented the ritual and aesthetic equivalent to Colonel Bounkhong’s “solidarity between athletes” speech, the public performance of national samakkhi. The participants were more than athletes; standing in orderly rows and bounded by the confines of the stadium, they had become a metaphor for a unified and disciplined national citizenry. The national space of Laos, disintegrated in the political dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s, was now symbolically reintegrated on the field. Momentarily, the stadium became the nation, unified once more. Sat Lao published a montage of four photographs showing the “various provinces competing in the Second National Games,” projecting this image of unity to a wider national audience.88 The nation in place, the National Games Organizing Committee entered the field. With the committee and athletes assembled behind him, the Olympic ring–adorned gate in the background, Bounthong Voravong faced the tribune of honor and gave a speech on the organization of the second National Games. In the crisp white uniforms of full military dress, adorned with medals and epaulettes, Bounthong and the committee members reinforced the military aesthetics of the ceremony and embodied the continued militarization of physical culture in Laos. Despite the participation of both male and female athletes in the games, the military aesthetic reflected the inherent masculinity of the performance, as the militarized male body represented the idealized embodiment of the nation. Again this image was printed in Sat Lao and taken to a much wider national audience.

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With the remaining cast members in place, Crown Prince Vongsavang was now able to declare the games open, inviting “every athlete from every province to come together and compete in the second National Games.”89 He presented the National Games flag to a referee, who raised it to the refrain of the Lao youth anthem (pheng nyuvason lao). The crown prince then released a single pigeon, the “lead bird” of 2,506 that were freed to signify the year (of the Buddhist Era), a ritual drawing not only on the release of doves at the Olympics (a symbol of peace), but the freeing of small birds to gain Buddhist merit. The same number of balloons was then released. In the climax of the opening ceremony, the games torch relay arrived, eliciting “applause from spectators all around the stadium” and another symbolic outbreak of energy. Though reports omitted the detail, the athletes’ oath was then supposed to be delivered by a representative of the host team, reiterating familiar themes of sportsmanship and national glory: “We swear that we will . . . participate in a chivalrous spirit for the honor of Lao youth, the glory of sport, and the grandeur of the Kingdom of Laos.”90 The ceremony concluded with a gymnastics display by schoolchildren and college students and a display of traditional artistic dance, performed by 500 schoolgirls. The female form had a place in the embodied nation assembled in the Kou Voravong Stadium, after all, but as a metaphor of national tradition that contrasted with the modernity of military masculinity. This ritualized performance of national desire had taken place under the presidency of the crown prince. Seated in the tribune of honor, positioned above the nation assembled below, Vongsavang observed proceedings and was seen observing them, not only by those at the stadium but by many more who were not present. The front page of Sat Lao pictured him in this role while headlines trumpeted: “Crown prince travels to open Savannakhet National Games: to stay until end of games”; and in a smaller typeface: “Crown prince presides over opening of National Games in Savannakhet.”91 In Geertzian terms, Vongsavang, in lieu of the king, was formally “represented as the prime ‘guardian,’ ‘custodian,’ or ‘protector’ . . . of the land and its life,” which the games assembled, the one who was able to “mobilize the men, the resources, and, not least, the expertise” required of the games. As in the theatre state, his perfunctory role was crucial to the performance: “His job was to project an enormous calm at the center of an enormous activity by becoming palpably immobile.”92 The crown prince did not have the games to himself, however. Unlike in Geertz’s Bali, he was not really the overlord of this spectacular but, like other participants and spectators, an actor on General Phoumi’s stage. Phoumi

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had established the games and garnered royal patronage for them. In 1961 he appointed the king to open the games and Bounkhong invoked the royal presence in urging spectators to behave themselves. In 1964, Phoumi greeted the crown prince, escorted him to the tribune of honor, and sat near him, implying proximity to the royal figure. Phoumi did not compete with royal influence; he used it for his own display of status. Like Sarit in Thailand, though perhaps less obviously and less effectively, he used the games to “latch on” to royal virtue.93 While Phoumi certainly could not be a royal, his role in the opening ceremony mirrored that of his patron. In contrast to other officials, he sat unanimated throughout the opening ceremony, projecting an impression of calm and control. Not only founder of the games, he was represented as their overlord and overlord of the nation-in-miniature modeled before him. In the theatre state, Geertz tells us, the status of a king ultimately depended on the mobilization of “men, skills, goods, and knowledge”; this was nothing less than the “prime task and primary art of statecraft.”94 The Lao National Games contained a fundamental difference. The sovereign (or his representative) was not only a mobilizer of men, he was also a man to be mobilized, the object rather than subject of politics. On this contested stage a changing monarchy had its own game in play, and who was using whom in the dance of prestige could shift continually.95 But in Phoumi’s National Games, the man with the greatest status, the subject of politics was Phoumi himself, even as his mundane power was ebbing, making him increasingly politically isolated.

Sport and modernity in postcolonial Laos In April 1964, a month after the Savannakhet games, two formerly loyal generals mounted a coup and Phoumi was deposed. Although the coup failed, Phoumi’s time in power was drawing to a close, and the following March he fled Laos for exile in Thailand. The third National Games, scheduled for Luang Prabang in 1966 or 1967, never took place and the event lapsed, confirming again that they had been Phoumi’s games. Phoumi’s downfall resulted most directly from diminished US support, his reduced ability to dispense patronage in the military, and the loss of Thai support after Sarit’s death.96 More generally, it demonstrated the division that continued to characterize Lao politics and society. Despite being conceived of in national terms, Laos was not governed by a single and centralized executive

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government with uniform control over its territory. Quite the opposite, irreconcilable forces competed for control of national power and resources. Phoumi typified the state of entrenched division, his national appeal undermined by uncompromising anticommunism, a reputation for brutality, and family and regional rivalries. Given his divisiveness, it is hardly surprising that he never truly exercised national power. Yet it was Phoumi who founded the National Games, producing what was possibly the decade’s most spectacular assertion of national unity and progress. Much of the existing historical scholarship has stressed the modernity of Asian sporting festivals, including national games and regional competitions like the Asian Games.97 As discussed in chapter one, however, sports anthropologists have cautioned against approaches derived from modernization theory. Non-Western countries are especially relevant for this critique, for they show how categorical distinctions between sport and ritual have been created historically, revealing not only the modernity of tradition, but also how ritual elements typically associated with premodern times persist in modern sport.98 Brownell is especially persuasive on the latter point, demonstrating continuity as well as change in her comparison of Qing Dynasty grand sacrifice and the Chinese National Games.99 The National Games of postcolonial Laos provide further evidence of the complex relationship between sport and modernity. In the divided politics of postcolonial Laos, the claim to modernity— like the claim to foster unity—represented a source of legitimation and the currency of status. On the one hand, the games sought to project modern notions of national unity and progress under the aegis of their founder, the “former sport and youth warrior,” General Phoumi Nosavan; on the other, they dramatized Phoumi’s status, rather in the manner of precolonial Southeast Asian polities. While the games sought to foster national values through modern technologies of physicality, adapted from the modern tradition of the Olympic Games, this objective was embedded in an older theatrics of power. The spectacle of the games modeled the territorially bound nationstate, a relatively new form of polity in Laos, but continued to demonstrate concern with status-display by dramatizing Phoumi’s overlordship of it. More than a simple pursuit of power, Phoumi’s claim to modernity allowed him to show off his self-ascribed status as not only the most powerful but also the most modern man in Lao politics—certainly much more than a military strongman. Representing a new generation of Lao leaders defined by connections to the United States, this image was probably quite convincing, particularly in

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1961, but modernity consisted of more than image alone. While Laos may have lacked the centralized executive government of the modern nation-state, ideas and practices linking the athletic body to national destiny were evidence of major changes in political culture. The National Games highlighted how existing forms of culture and polity were retained and reshaped as new ones were adopted. This bricolage of old and new was particularly productive for Phoumi Nosavan, for it was he who deployed and was seen to deploy it. Phoumi’s power was on the wane, however, even before the second National Games in Savannakhet. When his power finally crumbled, so did the games and the opportunity they offered to display his status.

5

Representing Meuang Lao in Southeast Asia

Participating on the regional sporting stage provided another means of galvanizing the association between sport, the human body, and national politics in postcolonial Laos. Despite generally poor performances, such competition engendered comparison with surrounding countries, which reinterpreted precolonial and colonial dialectics of friendship and antagonism, emulation and rivalry, through the prism of international sport. The relationship between sport, nationalism, and regional relations in Laos was profoundly shaped by the region’s rival Cold War alliances, from which local communist, neutralist, and rightist factions emerged. These rivalries stemmed from and intensified competing notions of what represented the authentic Lao nation and rightful heir to the Lao Issara independence movement. At the crux of the matter was communism: whereas the neutralist and rightist factions of the RLG were convinced that communism and North Vietnam represented grave moral threats to Laos and Lao culture, the NLHS believed communism—or at least an alliance with communist countries—remained the key to repelling colonial and neocolonial threats. Based on their differing positions on what constituted the true Meuang Lao, Lao country or Laos, the distinct sporting relationships in the region developed by the communist and anticommunist factions highlighted the potent ways in which regional dynamics refracted globalized sporting culture in Laos.

Sport, globalization, and regional dynamics Though sport is undoubtedly a major manifestation of the globalization of culture and ideas, theorists have differed over how to conceptualize its global spread, particularly over issues of domination and resistance. Debates have shifted from analyzing sport as a homogenizing form of cultural imperial-

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ism, in which Western sporting cultures and cosmologies overwhelmed nonWestern physical cultures, to the multidirectional ways in which global and local forces interact in processes of “glocalization,” a term used to highlight local agency in processes of cultural appropriation. While some scholars have pronounced the effective death of the “sporting local,” others question the “extensiveness, intensiveness, velocity, and impact” of globalization at the local and national levels, citing in particular the prominence of the nation and nationalism in sport.1 This final point is especially relevant to postcolonial societies, such as Laos, where sport transformed from a means of colonial subjectivation to one of national celebration, in some cases before the end of colonialism.2 Missing from these accounts of sport and globalization is sustained analysis of how local, national, and global factors are affected by regional processes.3 One book that promises to address such questions is Sport, Nationalism, and Orientalism, a volume on the Asian Games (1951–present) and the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO, 1963–1966), edited by Fan Hong.4 According to Hong, these events “emerged as a challenge to doctrines of European and American superiority, various forms of racism and imperialism. Sporting Orientalism is a discourse of conflict and confrontation between the Orient and the Occident in political and sports fields. It is a desire for change.”5 However, while Hong’s analysis represents a welcome foray into the regional dynamics of sporting culture, the Asian Games and GANEFO differed in terms of their conception and underlying politics. Whereas the former event was a regional offshoot of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Asia, designed to promote pan-Asianism (“Orientalism,” in Hong’s terms) according to the global ideology of Olympism, the latter was established explicitly in competition with the Olympic movement. Rather than seeing regional sporting events in terms of Asian-Western competition, it is more productive, as prominent sports sociologist Joe Maguire proposes, to investigate “the influences that non-occidental people have had on each other” through such events, and how these dynamics reshape global flows of culture and ideas.6 In adopting this approach, this chapter draws on early scholars of cultural globalization, who were often alert to ways in which regional dynamics unsettled local-global binaries. In his famous critique of homogenization and Americanization, Arjun Appadurai suggests that globalization was subject to a “scalar dynamic,” meaning that for many countries it was neighboring “polities of larger scale” rather than Americanization that nourished the “fear of cultural absorption.”7 Although Appadurai limits his analysis to the

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threat represented by regional cultural flows, Ulf Hannerz, in observing similarly that “the structure of center/periphery relations . . . has many tiers,” emphasizes the constitutive significance of regional flows. In this view, global forms flow through regional “cultural brokers,” larger and more influential countries or cultures in a given region that translated global influences “into something more adapted to regional conditions.”8 While notions of center/periphery are jarring, perhaps even oxymoronic in a globalized world full of “regional centers,” the idea that global forms are refracted through regional processes provides an important theoretical point of departure for this chapter. Indeed, I argue that it is not possible to understand Laos’ postcolonial sporting culture without referring to regional developments. Regional dynamics filtered and reshaped global influences, acting as conduits through which global trends were refracted. While underdeveloped in the sports studies literature, this approach will be familiar to students of Lao and Southeast Asian history, which boasts a distinguished historiographical tradition of grappling with the localization of foreign cultural influences across the region.9 Although, as Maguire argues, “the diffusion of sport, out of its European heartland, moved along the formal and informal lines of Empire,” in the case of Laos imperial processes of propagation exhibited regional characteristics that foreshadowed subsequent transnational flows.10 This was especially evident in the Lao’s first sporting rivalries, which were not directed against the colonizer, as frequently observed elsewhere, but between “Laotian” and “Annamite” teams. Already entrenched at the time of the 1936 Bédier Cup football controversy, recounted in the introduction, these rivalries gained strength during the Vichy years, especially in the Pétain Cup. On the flipside of such rivalries, the Vietnamese simultaneously represented a model to be emulated, as illustrated by the influence that developments in the Vietnamese territories of Indochina had on the emergence of sporting institutions and culture in Laos. A similar dynamic of emulation and rivalry had emerged between Laos and Siam/Thailand. Before French colonialism, the Lao kingdoms were vassals of Bangkok and drew culture and ideas from there. Despite the best efforts of the French, these patterns of interpolation did not end with the borders imposed by colonialism.11 In terms of sport, competitions took place between towns on either side of the border. In the late 1920s, French officials sanctioned football friendlies between Pakse-Sports, a sports society in southern Laos, and Ubon Rachathani, a city across the Mekong in northeast Thailand. Officials stressed that the matches would be conducted in a “true sporting spirit,” promote relations between the populations of the two cities,

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and foster enjoyment—suggesting similar benefits could be gained through sporting relations with Siam as with French colonial territories.12 Further football matches took place between the Lao and Siamese teams during the 1930s, including in the Bédier Cup. In a context characterized by FrancoLao efforts to separate the Lao from the Siamese, such games functioned as a prelude to international matches in the postwar period.13 The Second World War and postwar decolonization transformed these nascent modes of regional engagement according to emergent principles of nationalism. The war itself played a part in creating new ideas of “Southeast Asia,” as Japanese occupation broke down colonial divisions and created shared experiences of hardship. Around the same time, the allied South-East Asia Command popularized a geographical term for the region, though it remained unfi xed geographically and looked rather different to later conceptions of the region.14 After the war, the region’s nationalist movements came together briefly in the left-wing South East Asia League, founded in Bangkok in 1947 to promote anticolonial solidarity. As the seat of Pridi Banomyong’s sympathetic Thai government and a base for regional independence movements, including the exiled Lao Issara, the Thai capital became the locus of anticolonial regionalism, until a military coup later that year returned Field Marshal Phibunsongkhram (Phibun) to power. Around the same time, Vietnamese communists fostered a “parallel revolutionary vision of the region” as they strengthened relations with the Chinese Communist Party. Given the central role of the Vietnamese in organizing communist movements throughout Indochina, this part of the international communist movement retained a clear geographical dimension, even after the ICP was dissolved in favor of national communist parties.15 On the anticommunist side, the United States established the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 with the United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand.16 After Phibun’s return to power in 1947, Bangkok emerged as the major center of anticommunist regionalism, just as earlier it had briefly played host to anticolonial ideas of the region. Officially neutral, the Kingdom of Laos did not join SEATO, but rightists such as Phoui Sananikone and Phoumi Nosavan were defined by stridently anticommunist positions and maintained close relations with Thailand, America’s anticommunist bulwark in the region. Phoumi, as we have seen, was especially close to the regime of Sarit Thanarat, his relative by marriage. The Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations in 1955 offered a third framework for regional relations based on principles of nonalignment,

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or what in Laos was referred to as neutralism or neutrality (khwampenkang).17 Neutralism emerged as a political option for Laos at the 1954 Geneva Conference and became most closely associated with Souvanna Phouma, particularly in the aftermath of the Kong Le coup in 1960.18 Although the form of solidarity promoted at Bandung was based less on regional ties than anti-imperialism, regional factors were not altogether absent, as attendance by Asian and African nations reinforced the continental tendencies of colonial subjugation and anti-imperialism. The ideology of nonalignment was also associated with regional leaders Sukarno and Sihanouk (respectively of Indonesia and Cambodia), while Burma was also nonaligned. The competing regional concepts created by communist, anticommunist, and nonaligned solidarities determined not only Laos’ regional engagement through sport, but how opposing Lao factions used sport to materialize their self-image as the country’s authentic representative.

The SEAP Games First conducted in 1959, the South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games appear to have been the first major sporting festival in Southeast Asia. The person usually credited with founding the SEAP Games is Luang Sukhum Naiyapradit, a Thai career civil servant and vice president of the Olympic Council of Thailand (OCT). Luang Sukhum was a modern-minded noble with impressive royal connections, who had excelled at sport and music as a student in the United States.19 In early 1958, he asked Thailand’s honorary national athletics coach, American David Dichter, to gauge the interest of Cambodian and South Vietnamese officials in bilateral sporting exchanges with Thailand during a trip to those countries. During Dichter’s trip, this idea “broadened” into the suggestion of a regional event involving several countries of peninsular Southeast Asia. With Cambodia and South Vietnam offering their in-principle support, Sukhum presented the idea to the OCT, which agreed to host a regional sports games in Bangkok with athletes from Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya, and South Vietnam, as well as Thailand. A meeting between the six countries in May, during the third Asian Games in Tokyo, ratified Sukhum’s proposal for a “Little Asian Games,” named the event the South East Asia Peninsular Games, and created the SEAP Games Federation to oversee the event.20 Beginning in December 1959 in Bangkok, to honor Thailand’s role in initiating the event, the games were to be held biennially in odd-numbered years, “between the

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Olympic and the Asian Games.” Hosting of subsequent events would be rotated according to alphabetical order.21 Despite the best efforts of organizers, several changes were made to these plans. Due to deteriorating relations with Thailand over the Preah Vihear/Phra Viharn temple dispute (which has flared again more recently), Cambodia withdrew from the 1959 games, although the belated decision to include Singapore, then under self-rule on its way to independence, ensured six teams took part as originally planned.22 After Burma hosted the second games in Rangoon in 1961, as scheduled according to alphabetical order, Cambodia cancelled the 1963 event, this time acting in solidarity with Indonesia in its dispute with the IOC over GANEFO, inaugurated the same year (as discussed below).23 Laos, which was next according to alphabetical order, turned down the 1965 games for financial reasons, leaving Malaysia (as Malaya had become) to take its place. The games returned to Bangkok in 1967, Rangoon in 1969, and Kuala Lumpur in 1971, while Singapore hosted for the first time in 1973.24 Having failed to host the games in the SEAP format, Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam withdrew completely in 1975 due to communist revolution, leaving just Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. With the future of the games in doubt, the 1977 event was expanded to the Philippines and Indonesia, which had long been lobbying for inclusion, and renamed the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games.25 Although a detailed study of the SEAP Games has yet to be written, it is clear that organizers had two main reasons for establishing the SEAP Games.26 The first was to improve sporting standards. Referring to participating countries as a whole, Sukhum told reporters bluntly: “Our teams are not strong. . . . Our standards are low.”27 In a letter to his regional counterparts, OCT president Lieutenant-General Praphat Charusathien was more diplomatic, emphasizing that “the SEAP Games would help countries improve their standards at future Olympic and Asian Games” by “rais[ing] the level of the competition among nations of Southeast Asia.”28 According to the official report of the first games, probably written by Sukhum himself, regional populations sported “a great affinity in practically all respects, such as the way of life and climate as well as physical appearance.”29 The final point appeared to refer to the small body size of athletes from throughout the region, meaning they would be able to compete on more equal terms than in larger international events such as the Olympics. The second objective of the SEAP Games was regional solidarity. As the official report of the first games put it, “the most important fact remains that the contest among these nations of the region will no doubt foster

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Figure 5.1. Official flag of the South East Asia Peninsular Games (1959): “The light-blue colored background means the water that surrounds or the sky that covers the South East Asia Peninsular countries. The bright yellow gold rings symbolize the six original South East Asia Peninsular countries. They are intertwined to denote friendship, brotherly love, and unity of purpose.” (Official Report of the Organizing Committee for the First South East Asia Peninsular Games, Bangkok 1959 [1961])

good understanding, goodwill, and cooperation.”30 Or, as Praphat predicted, the event would “better the already existing bonds of friendship among the various member nations of the Games.”31 As the previous chapter touched on, the regional links the games sought to forge were encapsulated in the SEAP Games logo of six interlocking rings on a blue background (figure 5.1): “The light-blue colored background means the water that surrounds or the sky that covers the South East Asia Peninsular countries. The bright yellow gold rings symbolize the six original South East Asia Peninsular countries. They are intertwined to denote friendship, brotherly love, and unity of purpose.”32 Such language of kinship featured regularly in games rhetoric. When the Thais refused to expand the event to include Indonesia and the Philippines, for instance, they stressed that the event was a “small family affair”—though, more realistically, they probably feared the threat Indonesia would pose to their ascendency in the medals tally.33 Although these accounts of friendship and fraternity did not mention the conditions of membership, criteria were both geographical and ideological. Most obvious, as the name of the games suggested, was the limitation

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(with the technical exception of Singapore) to the countries of peninsular Southeast Asia. This notion of the region is revealed in the Thai (and Lao) name for the event, Kila Laem Thong, literally the “Golden Peninsula Games.” Laem thong or “golden peninsula” was the vernacular translation of Suvarnabhumi (Golden Land), a Sanskrit geographical term in Indian texts referring “not so much to a clearly defined ‘region’ as to the prosperous somewhere in the area.”34 In various nationalist versions of the myth, Siamese/ Thai, Burmese, and other regional scholars claimed Suvarnabhumi had been centered on the land of their respective modern-day nations. In Siam/ Thailand, the myth took on racialist associations in the ultranationalist period after 1932. The prominent nationalist scholar and author, Luang Wichit Watthakan, proposed that the golden land had originally been populated by people of the same Thai “race,” before being separated into separate lineages of Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, and so on.35 “Siam has become the heart of the Golden Peninsula,” he wrote, “like Athens was the heart of Greece.” “All of us on the Golden Peninsula are the same . . . [but] the Siamese Thais are the elder brothers,” said one of his characters, employing a common kinship metaphor that evinced hierarchy as much as proximity.36 This logic was used to justify Thailand’s expansionism in the early 1940s, according to a rubric of regaining “lost territories” in Burma, Malaya, Laos, and Cambodia. In the dawning age of postcolonial nationalism and the United Nations, the wartime associations of laem thong had officially been superseded by postcolonial visions of multilateral regionalism based on principles of sovereign equality. Still, the historical connotations of the Thai name, the “Golden Peninsula Games,” invoked the country’s “regional imperial knowledge in which neighbors were either enemies or inferior dependencies” and Thailand was the region’s gracious leader.37 Although this implication may not have registered with Thailand’s fellow competitors, enduring perceptions of Thai arrogance and aggression undermined emerging notions of regional friendship between sovereign equals, such as that promoted in the SEAP Games. No event epitomized this tension better than the Preah Vihear/ Phra Viharn temple dispute, which sparked Cambodia’s withdrawal from the inaugural SEA Games of 1959. In contrast to Cambodia, Laos remained close to Thailand throughout these years, and Lao sporting officials were unbothered by Thailand’s leadership role in the SEAP Games. The Lao-language press used Kila Laem Thong and Kila Siap Kaems (“SEAP Games”) interchangeably, and embraced the term laem thong (which also exists in the Lao language) as a motif of regional fraternity. Indeed, Lao officials looked up to Thailand as a sporting “big brother” or mentor, a sportive reflection of existing

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cultural and historical ties, amplified by the RLG’s close if subordinate relationship with the Thai government. The second criterion for membership of the SEAP Games Federation was anticommunism, a defining trope in the reconfiguration of Thailand’s regional perceptions during the Cold War. The political leaders of Thailand, Malaya/Malaysia, Singapore, Laos, and South Vietnam were trenchantly anticommunist, while Burma and Cambodia were nonaligned. On the other hand, communist North Vietnam was never included in the games— nor even mentioned—despite its location on the so-called golden peninsula. With the United States having already made Thailand its regional bulwark against communism, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, the charismatic and ruthless army officer who took power just before the games were established, came to personify what a heady mix of anticommunism and American patronage could do for one’s personal power and fortune.38 Though it will come as little surprise that the US Embassy in Bangkok strongly supported the SEAP Games, some sources suggest it may even have dreamt up the event. As well as being an athletics coach in his spare time, Dave Dichter (Sukhum’s emissary to Cambodia and South Vietnam) was a junior official in the US Embassy. In a detailed report to the State Department in Washington DC, Dichter claimed the games were his idea alone. Though emphasizing the nonofficial and serendipitous nature of his involvement in Thai sports, he stressed his opinion that the SEAP Games would have a positive impact on America’s image in Thailand, and on relations among the region’s noncommunist countries. On this basis, Dichter successfully sought funding for training and other equipment from the State Department and the Asia Foundation—a request that went all the way to Secretary of State John Dulles, who supported the request as well as the games themselves. Although the precise division of responsibilities between Sukhum and Dichter is not certain, the latter figure is barely mentioned in official accounts, leaving Sukhum and Thailand to take credit for establishing the event.39 The noncommunist bloc assembled by the SEAP Games had obvious benefits for the region’s strident anticommunists, particularly Thailand. Unbound by the 1954 Geneva Agreements and US foreign policy, the SEAP Games were able to include many more of the region’s countries than SEATO, which despite its name included only Thailand and the Philippines from Southeast Asia. As Dichter noted in his report, the event also allowed the United States to keep its role discrete, limiting any negative association with American interference and allowing Thailand to strengthen its public image, domestically and internationally, as the region’s anticommunist

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leader. This it did with spectacular effect, especially given Praphat’s public role in the games. As well as being president of the OCT, Praphat was minister of the interior and a key member of Sarit’s military troika, personifying militarist values of strength, stability, and security in the context of the Cold War. In addition, patronage of the games by a young King Bhumibol, then enjoying the early years of the monarchy’s Sarit-sponsored renaissance and the rebirth of the Thai theatre state, enhanced the event’s pomp and prestige, capturing the mutually beneficial embrace of monarchy and military in this period of Thai history.40

Lao nationalism and the regional geography of desirability Uninterested in the politics of the SEAP Games, Lao press coverage focused on the nationalist dimensions of participating on the regional stage. In hindsight, this emphasis may seem rather ironic, given the poor level of Laos’ performances. Whereas Thailand, Singapore, Burma, and Malaya/Malaysia each won over 500 medals between 1959 and 1973, Laos won only 23, none of which were gold (table 5.1).41 To put the country’s performance in context, even Cambodia and South Vietnam, the next-worst teams, won around 150 medals each. The Olympic Council of Malaysia has blamed the poor performance of Indochinese teams on the fact their teams were made up of soldiers rather than dedicated athletes.42 But while sporting leaders and shooting teams had strong military links, press sources do not indicate more generalized military involvement. It seems just as likely that sport, like everything else, was a victim of conditions of war. In any case, given that Laos did not yet compete at the Asian Games or Olympics, the SEAP Games were embraced as the pinnacle of sporting competition in the country. Laos sent a team to all of the games between 1959 and 1975, celebrating rare successes with gusto and finding reasons for optimism in failure. Counterintuitively, the games provided a barometer for national self-assessment, as participation alone and rare medals (when they came) were celebrated as evidence of national progress. As sport was viewed as a characteristic feature of modern societies, competing in the SEAP Games allowed Laos to belong as a modern and independent member of the community of noncommunist nations that emerged in postcolonial Southeast Asia. One area in which success was noted was the display of sportsmanship (namchai nakkila), a key theme in sport since Coubertin’s pronouncements

Table 5.1. Number of medals won by countries participating in the South East Asia Peninsular Games, 1959–1973 Year and host city (country) 1959 Bangkok (Thailand)

1961 Rangoon (Burma)

1965 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

1967 Bangkok (Thailand)

1969 Rangoon (Burma)

1971 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

1973 Singapore (Singapore)

74 33 34 40 DNC 13 1

60 26 40 81 10 10 0

109 76 99 48 52 23 2

165 83 96 68 DNC 32 3

101 93 80 146 DNC 22 3

109 96 139 61 52 18 5

99 140 115 67 43 25 9

Participating countries Thailand Singapore Malaya/Malaysia Burma Cambodia South Vietnam Laos

Total medals 717 547 603 511 157 143 23

Source: Bangkok Post, various dates. Note 1: Medal tallies vary slightly between this and other sources. Note 2: The 1975 SEAP Games, the fi nal time the event was held under this name, have been omitted since Laos (together with Cambodia and South Vietnam) did not compete.

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on Olympic values. After the 1961 games in Rangoon, where Laos won not a single medal, Khao Nyuvason Kila (Youth-Sport News) reported: “Laos came last but the Lao athletes performed their duty in the best possible way. Although they missed the opportunity to win a medal, they received the honor and praise of being referred to as ‘people possessing a high degree of sportsmanship.’ ”43 With connotations of modern conduct and manners, sportsmanship was presented as an indication of Lao progress. “All of the Lao athletes,” the article added, “discharged their duties in their capacity as sports representatives of the nation in the best possible way, and conducted themselves with strict discipline.”44 Deriving from the Pali vinaya, the name given to the monastic code of discipline, the Lao word for discipline (vinai) gives this universal attribute in the sports world a local Buddhist resonance. Athletes were also congratulated for trying to the “utmost of their ability,” their failure to win medals blamed on the lack of training and expert coaches. If these deficiencies could be overcome, it was certain that at the next games “we will taste victory because, in terms of physical and mental strength [kamlang kai and kamlang chai], we are not the weakest country in the games.”45 Phoumi Nosavan, the “former sport and youth warrior” who had just founded the National Games, also drew plenty of positives from the Rangoon games.46 Before the games he had urged: “I ask not that you win every event; only that you return with what you should.” Despite the team winning nothing, he shrugged off the poor performance as pretty girls placed garlands around the necks of the athletes and officials on their return to Laos: “Losing at these games doesn’t matter—there will be more and we are sure to win one day!”47 Phoumi’s optimism, reinforced by the girls and the garlands, confirmed that for Laos, simply participating in the SEAP Games was an achievement since it put the country on the regional stage. Laos’ low performance base also meant that even the most modest levels of success at the SEAP Games could be met with enthusiastic declarations of national progress. Despite Laos remaining by far the weakest team in the games, progress could be located in the SEAP Games medal count, which, like the stopwatch, statistics, and other technologies of measurement that define modern sport, facilitated comparison, both temporally and relative to other participants.48 In 1965, after the country had won two medals for the first time (bronze in tennis and sepak takraw), the director of the youth and sport department, Taykeo Luangkhot, declared proudly that Lao sport was “progressing on a par [kaona thiam] with other countries.” His deputy, Pheng Sithat, who also sat on the council of the SEAP Games Federation, added that athletes had “improved their record [sathiti] compared to before.”49

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The Lao word for records or statistic, sathiti, derives from the French statistiques (or perhaps, through Thai, the English statistics), an etymology reflecting the introduction of rational measures of sportive progress from Europe. Yet despite the impression of objectivity conveyed by statistics or records, sportive comparisons and the language used to express them permitted a degree of interpretation. While by winning the country’s first medals the Lao team had objectively improved compared to past performances, the suggestion of “progressing on a par with other countries” was not only questionable, since all except Burma had progressed demonstrably since 1961 (table 5.1), but ambiguous. Did Taykeo mean Laos was catching up with (i.e., progressing to the level of) other countries, or did he mean the country was progressing in the same way as other countries? (The Lao term thiam, meaning “equal” or “like,” could imply both.) In the first sense, the other countries were rivals to be caught up with; in the latter, they were mentors providing an example to be followed. Either way (and given the ambiguity of the Lao, it is possible that Taykeo had in mind both) it was comparison with these “other countries” that framed notions of Lao success. By celebrating Laos’ “progress” in the 1965 games, despite it remaining a distant last on the medal table, he highlighted the manner in which international sporting competition facilitated the assertion of national progress and worth, intrinsically comparative, even when a small country like Laos had no realistic chance (or ambition) of winning. Despite these assertions of success, the press was less kind in the aftermath of the 1965 games. Sat Lao argued in an editorial that Lao sport was being restricted by “lack of funding, equipment, and . . . supportive leaders.” It was not sufficient to provide “verbal or moral support . . . leaders must lead and search for wonderful things with practical utility.” In this respect, Thailand and particularly Praphat, the president of the OCT, could serve as a model. Despite his team topping the medal count, the Thai leader had reportedly demanded more sophisticated training techniques, especially concerning the health and fitness of athletes. Taking this as an example, the newspaper opined: “Lao leaders should think of a way to assist Lao athletes, please!”50 The positivist approach to identifying and remedying weaknesses exhibited increasing sophistication over time, including the use of rudimentary sports science. In a front-page interview with Sat Lao prior to the 1967 SEAP Games in Bangkok, the team manager, Colonel Sakun Sananikone, maintained that Laos had “hopes of victory in most sports [that were] sending a team.” Sakun offered four reasons for his optimism: First, there was

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“justice” in the selection of athletes, resulting in the selection of people with “ability,” “discipline,” and “true sportsmanship”; second, all athletes had been well trained, in many cases by foreign coaches; third, athletes received training in “conserving energy . . . according to principles of health,” and had their diet and sleeping monitored at training camps in the month before departure; and finally, government and business had “enthusiastically and proudly supported and sponsored the athletes.”51 These changes closely resembled the shortcomings identified after the previous games, especially the lack of training and support and the need to improve in the area of athlete health. Based on principles of science, ethics, and foreign assistance, they also incorporated the key criteria for progress according to state discourses of developmentalism. The changes had little impact on results, however, with Laos winning just three bronze medals in 1967 (two in men’s tennis and one in women’s basketball). Although the narrative of progress nourished the will to improve and defi ned such improvement, it could not guarantee improved results. The emphasis on foreign assistance was especially notable. On one level, just as members of the United Nations were theoretical equals, participating nations in the SEAP Games were formally equal as members of the SEAP Games Federation. In practice, however, there was a wide gap between these “equals,” as the medal tables showed, meaning there was a hierarchy in which weak countries like Laos could learn from stronger countries. Among these, Thailand remained the primary model for Lao development in sports. In 1961, Phoumi Nosavan appropriated Thailand’s SEAP Games concept in the Lao National Games, appropriating and adapting key features such as symbols, scheduling, and political objectives. Given the relationship between the two leaders, Sarit might even have given Phoumi the idea personally, though this is not possible to confirm. As demonstrated in the Sat Lao critique of Lao sports leaders after the 1965 SEA Games, Thailand could also show the way in sports leadership. As implied in older “golden peninsula” discourses, upon which the SEAP Games built, the Thais functioned as sporting “big brothers” to the Lao. Respect and emulation of Thailand in the sporting world suggested that, in the geographical discourse of civilization in Laos, Thailand remained a paradigm of modernity and progress every bit as important as the West. As in precolonial times, emulating the region’s center of power and prestige could boost rather than undermine the legitimacy of Lao rulers. Of course, the upheavals of colonization and decolonization, the emergence of bordered nation-states, and the two countries’ relationships with the United

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States meant their relationship differed in important ways from precolonial relations between Siamese and Lao kingdoms. But despite sixty years of French colonialism and a decade of independence, Laos continued to look to Bangkok as the preeminent center of power and culture. This geography of desirability can be contrasted with the geographical discourse of civilization in Siam/Thailand itself, where leaders now looked to Europe rather than other Asian centers.52 This observation suggests not only that a regional and global hierarchy governed the geographical discourse of civilization, but that Lao elites subscribed to it as much as the Thai, despite their lower station on the hierarchy that resulted from it.53

Victory against the big brother The flipside of Lao respect and emulation was a fierce rivalry with Thailand, albeit one that was much more important for Laos than its neighbor. The basis of this sporting rivalry could be located in history. Early in the nineteenth century, the armies of Chao or King Anou, the rebellious vassal ruler of Vientiane, were defeated by the Siamese, the leader captured, and the town sacked. While this episode stemmed from a “state system that was passing into history,” rather than from the Westphalian system of nationstates or even the imperial geopolitics that produced modern Laos, it provided fodder for one of Laos’ most important legitimation myths.54 Given the history and historiography of Lao-Thai antagonism, the rare occasions on which Laos managed to upset its larger neighbor on the sporting field represented unparalleled national success. Perhaps the best example of the royalist era came in the 1969 King’s Cup, an invitational football tournament founded the previous year, which brought together South Korea, Malaysia, Laos, Australia, Indonesia, South Vietnam, Singapore, and of course Thailand. In Group A, Laos was pitted against regional powerhouse South Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia, the latter two of which were regular winners at the SEAP Games. Yet Laos exceeded all expectations. After losing honorably to Korea (2–0), it defeated Thailand (4–3) and drew with Malaysia (1–1), taking it through to the semifinal round against Indonesia.55 Although Laos proceeded to lose its semifinal and the third-place playoff, it had beaten its closest and greatest rival, its sporting “big brother.”56 This unprecedented sporting success was appropriately welcomed by sports administrators, fans, and the press. A Sat Lao headline trumpeted: “Excited preparations to welcome Lao players!” A “special flight” flew the

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team back to Laos, where more than 1,000 people assembled to welcome home and “honor” the team that “was able to defeat Thailand, draw with Malaysia, and progress to the semifinal.”57 The players and team manager, Colonel Sakun, had garlands placed around their necks, “commensurate with the rank and standing of the Lao national team making the second round for the first time in history.”58 Newspapers were fi lled with front-page banner headlines, articles, and photographs. A few days later, a photograph showed the team members, dressed smartly in blazers and ties, standing behind a banner reading: “With great joy we congratulate and welcome home the Lao national football team.”59 Editorials, special commentaries, and sports columns celebrated the victory at length. Reports linked the progress of Lao football to that of the nation, claiming the performance had built the reputation (sang seu siang) of Lao sport and Laos in general. A column on “Lao sports organization” contrasted sharply with earlier criticisms, charting the ascension of Lao sport, the national pride it accrued, and the impact it would have on the reputation of Laos outside the country: If we cast our minds back over the years, we can see that Lao sports circles have not advanced as far as they should have. This is not to say that all sports have fallen into disrepair, however. These days, there is still nonstop development through the attention of sports leaders, particularly in football. In the past, Lao football was still in its very early stages, to the point that many countries liked to consider that Laos had not yet reached a uniform standard, but our football leaders have unceasingly endeavored to develop every player in every way. During this month, the Lao football team has proudly built its reputation. It has evoked the respect of Laos, and the Lao people are wholeheartedly delighted in the advancement of Lao sport. Before, we received foreign sports organizations and they thought we were still weak. This [result] is bound to cause astonishment in foreign sports circles and to make them understand that Laos is now a country that can play a more important role in sports organization.60

After years of disappointment, things were now different—all because of a single win over Thailand. Likewise, an editorial painted a picture of Laos triumphing against the odds by overcoming well-documented fi nancial, material, and training

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limitations. “Lao sportsmen play with spirit and with what is called ‘learning from mistakes’ rather than with the financial and technical support of developed foreign athletes,” it explained. “In international competition, therefore . . . there is a joke that ‘Lao sportsmen are the pigs of the stadium,’ ” a crude allusion to Laos’ poor reputation in sport. “It is most pleasing that Lao football has built the reputation of the Lao nation and people in the King’s Cup. . . . While disappointingly losing the semifinal, they reached the third-place play-off, and this is considered to demonstrate progress and ability of which all Lao people and sportsmen should be proud.”61 Laos was a “small country” with a “small population” and “parts of the country in a state of war,” making selection and training difficult when compared to other countries. Together with the lack of financial and technical support, this had given the impression that “Laos lacked the ability to win in international competition.” However, beating Thailand and drawing against Malaysia proved that “Lao athletes possess not only sportsmanship but also ability of a physical kind, and that the standard of play is not the worst in the world.”62 With the King’s Cup result, more conventional measures of success— physical ability and results—trumped earlier contentment with sportsmanship and modest improvements. The tone of relief was palpable. Finally, Laos could hold its head high, being equal and even momentarily superior to its main regional rival. The rags-to-riches narrative of the Lao footballer’s triumph is familiar to any follower of sport; national versions of such stories provide metaphors for national resurgence and revival. Reports did not pretend that Laos had become a world or even regional power—as the characteristically modest boast of being “not the worst” summed up—but the King’s Cup result was taken as evidence of Laos belonging as a legitimate and equal member of the region’s postcolonial community of nations.

The politics of GANEFO Participation in the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) posed troublesome questions about the nature of this “region,” as well as of Laos as a participant in it. Indonesia’s president, Sukarno, established GANEFO in 1963 as a challenge to Western hegemony in the Olympic movement. As host of the previous year’s Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia had refused to grant visas to athletes from Nationalist China (Taiwan) and Israel out of solidarity with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United Arab Republic (UAR), effectively barring two charter members of the Asian Games

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Federation from competition.63 Then headed by the American Avery Brundage, the IOC condemned this “political action” as contrary to Olympic philosophy and suspended Indonesia from the Olympic movement.64 Unrepentant, Sukarno declared that the movement was an “imperialist tool” of the “old world”; for the “new world” he would establish the Games of the New Emerging Forces.65 A preparatory conference in April 1963 decided to hold the first GANEFO later that year in Jakarta. Sukarno’s keynote speech at the preparatory conference summarized his geopolitical worldview: [M]ankind is divided into two communities: the community of the Old Established Forces, and the community of New Emerging Forces! The new Emerging Forces, that is the community of people, who want to be free, who want to be independent, who want to be not exploited, who want to be not dominated by other peoples, who want . . . to have a new world of . . . prosperity, who want to be standing on one identity, who want to live up to the idea of . . . THE FREEDOM TO BE FREE.66

Assailing the old established forces represented by Brundage, the United States, and the Olympic movement, Sukarno railed against the suggestion that the Olympics were above politics. The problem, he asserted, was IOC hypocrisy in sanctioning some politics but condemning others.67 Cleverly, Sukarno thus claimed to represent true Olympic values of nondiscrimination, since GANEFO would welcome all countries, including those barred or effectively barred from the Olympics—certain communist nations, the UAR, and now Indonesia. Although GANEFO was by no means a communist event, many communist-bloc countries enthusiastically welcomed it, especially those that were not IOC members. Most notable was the PRC, which had lobbied Indonesia to bar Nationalist Chinese athletes in 1962. Given its absence from the Olympic Games, China became involved in GANEFO as it presented a rare opportunity to perform on the world stage. Just as significantly, it also did so in order to “champion developing countries and revolution on an international stage.”68 Repeatedly praising the anti-imperialist stance of the games, the Chinese provided much of the event’s funding and sent the largest team to Jakarta, where local fans responded by embracing them as their second team. North Vietnam likewise got behind the games, hailing the “common task . . . to wipe out imperialism and colonialism.”69 On the other hand, the threat of IOC sanctions compelled other countries, including

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the Soviet Union, to gloss over the politics and send second-string teams.70 Still, as Ewa Pauker argued afterwards: “The very nature of the Games politically implicated all those who participated. What mattered was presence, not performance.”71 In some respects, GANEFO’s position of nonalignment allowed it to straddle the region’s ideological divides. While US-backed South Vietnam and South Korea were absent, many Asian countries were among the fi ft yone that took part, including US allies such as the Philippines, Japan, and Thailand, as well as Laos (which officially remained neutral).72 While the event explicitly celebrated global anti-imperialism, it also demonstrated that the experiences on which these values were based were common to most of Asia, as well as to Africa and Latin America. In other words, the ideological rationale of the games was reflected regionally. In other respects, however, the political fervor of GANEFO undermined nascent regionalist sentiments in Southeast Asia. Not only was South Vietnam absent (in a reversal of the North’s nonparticipation in the SEAP Games), but so, not surprisingly, was Malaysia, as Sukarno used GANEFO to bolster his policy of Konfrontasi (Confrontation) against its neighbor.73 Meanwhile, Cambodia, which had already cut US economic and military assistance in 1963, chose solidarity with Sukarno and GANEFO over hosting that year’s SEAP Games, which it cancelled when pressured by the IOC and the International Amateur Athletics Federations (IAAF) over its support of GANEFO. According to Anatara, the Indonesian news agency, Cambodia had acted “in solidarity with Indonesia in its dispute with the International Olympic Committee. . . . [It] has ignored IOC [and IAAF] threats and fully supported the Games of the New Emerging Forces.”74 As this showed, GANEFO now represented a rival not only to the Olympics, but also to the SEAP Games and the anticommunist regional concept that event sought to promote. Recognizing the part Indonesia had played in these developments, a member of the Indonesian government expressed his hope that Cambodia could host the second GANEFO, so “all the work of the Cambodian people for the sports venue [half completed for the SEAP Games] was not in vain.”75 It would do so in 1966. A limited range of sources makes it difficult to gauge Laos’ participation in GANEFO. On one level, taking part might have reflected the country’s official return to neutrality under Souvanna Phouma’s second coalition government in June 1962. By late April 1963, however, when the GANEFO Preparatory Conference was held, the coalition was already falling apart as Laos

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was dragged inexorably into the escalating struggle between North Vietnam and the United States. The assassination of key neutralists in late February and early April splintered the neutralist faction and, by the time of GANEFO, the Neo Lao Hak Sat had returned to the mountains, and the right had reasserted itself as the dominant force in the royal government, even though it retained the facade of a coalition with Souvanna Phouma remaining prime minister.76 Against this context of renewed division, Laos’ delegate to the preparatory conference, Pheng Sithat, reflected optimistically on GANEFO: We see these games as a real demonstration of the New Forces’ aspirations of goodwill, foreshadowing an era of understanding and fraternal peace between all peoples. Our hope for GANEFO is that sports meetings overcome rivalries of all kinds and bring greater international understanding for building world peace and brotherhood among men.77

While all delegates repeated rhetoric of this kind, the goal of peace had a special poignancy in Laos at this time. Nevertheless, it is likely that, by participating in GANEFO, the RLG was pragmatically hedging its bets at a time of great uncertainty in Laos and Southeast Asia, just as Lao leaders had been doing for centuries. Until the mid-1960s, many in the officially neutralist Vientiane regime kept their options open. Like nonaligned Cambodia, the government was theoretically able to receive aid from all sides, and retained embassies from socialist-bloc countries.78 Participation in GANEFO probably reflected similar pragmatism. Whatever its underlying political motivations, the RLG embraced GANEFO as another opportunity to perform on the international stage. This consideration was especially important given the cancellation of that year’s SEAP Games in Cambodia. A couple of months before GANEFO, the sport and youth commissioner, Prince Sopsaisana, called in on athletes as they trained at the National Stadium. They were, he declared, “the healthy and powerful elite of the Nation”: I see that progress and effort has been made by the Directorate of Sports and Youth. Our young people will certainly be able to represent our country in the sporting competitions. Even if they cannot win gold medals in the International Games [GANEFO], I am sure they will put on a fine show. Their progress, perseverance, and courageous application at training are to be congratulated.79

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There was no discernable difference here from the sentiments expressed before and after the SEAP Games: GANEFO would provide opportunity for athletes—the nation’s elite—to represent Laos on the international stage. In practice, this dimension was probably more important than the ideological politics of GANEFO.

An alternative Meuang Lao The politics of participating in GANEFO crystalized the second time the event was held, in Cambodia in 1966. The Asian GANEFO, as the second event was also known, reflected dramatic changes in the region since 1963. When Indonesia’s leadership of GANEFO ceased after Suharto’s 1965 coup against Sukarno, China stepped into the breach. The second session of the GANEFO Council in Beijing formed an Asian Committee and determined to conduct an Asian GANEFO the following year in Phnom Penh. These developments underlined Sihanouk’s close relationship with China, which again underwrote the event, most notably by completing the architecturally renowned National Sports Complex, which included a vast Olympic stadium.80 Together with the attendance of many communist countries, and their greater proportional presence than in 1963, Chinese leadership strengthened the impression that GANEFO was now as much a communist event as a nonaligned one.81 Reinforcing the polemics of the event, the Asian GANEFO was scheduled immediately before the Asian Games in Bangkok, with which it was effectively in competition.82 In Laos, the Asian GANEFO sparked a brief but intense controversy when the communist Neo Lao Hak Sat (NLHS) supplanted the RLG as national representative. Revealing the sensitivity of this change, Sat Lao attacked the host, the event, and the NLHS in a strident front-page commentary. The newspaper slammed its neighbor for hosting the event when “most members of the GANEFO Federation” were part of the “socialist political bloc.” A proper neighbor (pheuan ban)—literally “village friend” in the Lao language—would not have contemplated such a thing, the report implied. Despite the National Sports Department declining Cambodia’s “official invitation,” Cambodia had apparently issued a subsequent invitation by “unofficial channels” to the NLHS. The “Neo Lao rebels” were “imposters” since Cambodia was “recognizing the Neo Lao athletes as participating in the name of the Kingdom of Laos.” The National Sports Department should not sit by idly with its lips sealed but act decisively, the commentary concluded.83

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In fact, many unofficial teams took part in the Asian GANEFO. In some cases this was to circumvent IOC sanctions, in others (like Laos’) because official teams refused to attend. Still, Sat Lao’s sensitivity confirmed that NLHS participation raised questions about which athletes and, by extension, what political values and ideology represented Laos. NLHS participation “in the name of the Kingdom of Laos” gave the Lao communists international recognition as the Kingdom of Laos. If this was technically true, given that the coalition government of which the NLHS was part was still nominally in place, Sat Lao was outraged at the international legitimacy NLHS participation in Phnom Penh would bestow on the revolutionary movement. The language used in reports on GANEFO confirmed that participating “in the name of Laos” conflated the NLHS with the country as a whole. Unlike the differentiation between “Nationalist” and “Red” China or North and South Vietnam, no distinction was made between different representatives of Laos. In English-language coverage the NLHS team was simply “Laos.”84 Even the Lao-language Sat Lao referred to the NLHS team as “Lao,” the common shorthand for Pathet or Meuang Lao (the Lao country), or the country’s formal title, Ratsa’anachak Lao (the Kingdom of Laos).85 Previously, these terms had referred to the country ruled by the RLG. By contrast, the Lao and English press usually referred to the revolutionary side in the civil war as the Neo Lao Hak Sat or simply Neo Lao (Lao Front), or sometimes the Pathet Lao (only in English). These modified forms marked the movement not as “Laos” itself, but as a particular group within the country. By doing away with the modifiers, press reporting on GANEFO represented the NLHS as the unadorned, unmodified, and therefore authentic “Laos.” Just as the NLHS sports team had effectively become the “team of Laos” (khana Pathet Lao), as Sat Lao referred to the RLG sports department’s official national team, the NLHS had similarly—albeit momentarily and symbolically—become the true Meuang Lao, literally the Lao country or Laos.86 Most worryingly for royalists, such ambiguity potentially repositioned Laos into the regional bloc of communist countries and sympathizers. The majority of GANEFO Federation members and therefore participants in the games, according to the newspaper, were “countries and groups of the socialist political bloc.”87 Although this was an exaggeration, the context of increased polarization in the region since the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 provided fertile ground for anticommunist scaremongering.88 In Laos, even the neutralists had split into pro- and anti-NLHS factions, with Souvanna Phouma representing the latter. Although the RLG remained

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highly fractious, its remaining members agreed unanimously that communism in general, and the DRV in particular, posed a grave threat to the country. As the newspaper’s self-righteous coverage showed, it was unfathomable for Sat Lao—considered by one observer to have “rightist views”—that a team competing in the name of the Kingdom of Laos could be positioned with the communist bloc.89 Perhaps out of protest, the newspaper did not report on the GANEFO beyond its initial scathing commentary. The anticommunist RLG and its supporters confirmed their regional sporting allegiances during the 1966 Asian Games in Bangkok, immediately following the Asian GANEFO. By contrast with its blackout of GANEFO, Sat Lao provided comprehensive coverage of the Asian Games, even though Laos was not yet a member of the Asian Games Federation and did not send a team. As the region’s major anticommunist power, host Thailand remained the RLG’s closest regional ally and locus of emulation and desire. In a direct contrast with GANEFO, the Asian Games represented the region’s principal sporting expression of anticommunism; while Nationalist China, South Korea, and South Vietnam all took part, the PRC, North Korea, and North Vietnam did not. Soon after Bangkok, a Sat Lao editorial hailed the event for consolidating “feelings of harmonious and united friendship and solidarity.” While Laos did not take part, “many of the Lao public with an interest in sport” had reportedly travelled to Bangkok to watch the games. Given this interest and Laos’ limited membership of international sporting organizations, the editorial argued that Laos should join the Asian Games Federation. While the country could never be an Asian Games champion, “sport is the birthplace of domestic and international solidarity,” it argued.90 But not all sport, as the GANEFO controversy illustrated. The editorial did not say so, but NLHS participation in GANEFO “in the name of Laos” had made the priority of joining the Asian Games all the more urgent.

GANEFO in revolutionary sport and historiography The participation of the NLHS in the Asian GANEFO was duly enshrined as the foundational episode in revolutionary sports historiography. Th is lineage was established in “Pavatkhwampenma Khong Kila Lao” (History of Lao Sport), a pamphlet published by the National Sports Committee (NSC) in 2001, on the “35th anniversary of the birth of Lao sport.”91 The basic function of this narrative, in familiar fashion, was to glorify the revolution and

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revolutionary history. The author, a certain S. Thipthiangchan, began by describing sport in “ancient times,” when it developed as a form of military training. Then, ignoring half a century of colonial rule, he leapt forward to the 1940s, when sport and physical culture had started to develop “under party guidance in time with the struggle for peace and independence and in the proletarian international spirit.” “Party and state leaders, he added, took part in countless solidarity and friendship games with teams from military units and departments, both domestically and abroad.” The most prominent of these would have been with Vietnamese forces; the National Sports Museum displays a 1961 photograph of a bare-chested Prince Souphanouvong playing football with “family and foreign experts,” almost certainly Vietnamese.92 On July 13, 1966, Thipthiangchan then explained, the head of the Lao People’s Liberation Army (LPLA), General Sisavath Keobounphanh, established an official army sports troupe. This the writer labeled a “milestone marking the beginning of Lao sport’s advancement to a new era.” Five months later, the sports troupe was invited by Cambodia to compete in GANEFO, suggesting the troupe was formed expressly for that purpose.93 Thipthiangchan asserted that GANEFO was specifically for the region’s “independence- and peace-loving countries . . . fighting for national liberation.”94 As implied in Sat Lao’s coverage, the NLHS was not just competing in the name of Laos on the world stage in this context; it was Laos, meaning Laos was asserted to be one such country, fighting for national liberation. The NLHS sent a team of just twenty-two athletes in two sports— volleyball and shooting—and failed to win a single medal.95 But, as Thipthiangchan concluded, it was participation that mattered: “This is considered the first time Lao sport fought on the international stage. At that time, the matter of losing or winning was secondary. More important was solidarity and friendship for national liberation, for independence, for peace, and for social justice.”96 By bestowing an alternative form of nationhood and regional engagement on the NLHS, GANEFO was written into history as the foundation stone of revolutionary sport. Given the country’s earlier participation in the SEAP Games and other international events, it was simply untrue that this was the first time “Lao sport fought on the international stage.” What the history pamphlet meant by “Lao sport” was “revolutionary Lao sport,” implying further that only sports that took place under NLHS authority were genuinely national. The formation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) in 1975 allowed the NSC to drop the implied qualifier that rendered “revolutionary Lao sport” partial and problematic, finally conflating

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revolutionary sport with Lao sport. This process of historical revision can be tracked to a particular time and place more than three decades after the Asian GANEFO, when at its third congress in 1999 the NSC officially designated July 13, 1966, as Establishment of Lao Sport Day.97 Like other official holidays and commemorations, this date thenceforth became part of the LPDR’s ritual calendar, which since 1975 has reordered the past with the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) at the center of history.98 This commemoration also enshrined Sisavath Keobounphanh’s role in Lao sporting history; it was surely no coincidence that in 1999, he was prime minister and a member of the LPRP Politburo.99 In the resulting historiography, the Asian GANEFO of 1966 marks the birth of authentic Lao sport. This singular moment of arrival was consecrated two years after the promulgation of Establishment of Lao Sport Day, with the publication of “Pavatkhwampenma Khong Kila Lao” on the occasion of “the 35th anniversary of Lao sport.” A further five years later, this moment was celebrated again at a function to commemorate “the 40th anniversary of Lao sport.” Subsequently displayed in the National Sports Museum, a photograph taken at this event shows Sisavath and five more aging veterans of the revolution holding their clasped hands in the air. The caption reads: “Leaders and athletes of the first Neo Lao Hak Sat team which participated in GANEFO in 1966, exemplifying the birth of Lao sport on July 13, 1966.” GANEFO II, originally scheduled for Cairo in 1967, was relocated to Beijing due to internal disputes in the sports movement, and collapsed altogether after being cancelled due to the Cultural Revolution.100 Nevertheless, with seventeen countries and 1,270 athletes, the Asian GANEFO in Phnom Penh was said to have been a great success.101 For the Lao left, in particular, the NLHS’s participation had given prominence to the existence of an alternative conception of Meuang Lao and its involvement in an alternative regional framework. Geographically, this region was broader than that expressed in the SEAP Games, stretching from Japan in the east to Palestine and Yemen in the west. The ideological characteristics of GANEFO were also broader. Despite increased Chinese influence in Phnom Penh, and the hysteria this elicited in Sat Lao, GANEFO primarily remained an antiimperialist movement rather than an explicitly (or even secretly) communist one, as evidenced by participation by several noncommunist and even anticommunist countries. In fact, the principles of the Asian GANEFO broadly reflected official NLHS foreign policy, which in the 1960s was based, firstly, on anti-imperialist solidarity with Vietnamese and Cambodian revolutionaries and, secondly, on international anti-imperialist solidarity with “the na-

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tional liberation movements of all the Asian, African, and Latin American countries.”102 Lao participation in the Asian GANEFO reflected this policy, which did not require drawing a line between anti-imperialist and socialist solidarity.103 At the same time, the communist presence at the Asian GANEFO illustrated strengthening international sporting ties between the Lao communist movement and socialist countries. As it became clear in the early 1970s that the Pathet Lao would emerge victorious in the Lao civil war, NLHS teams took part in international friendship competitions with communist countries. A “first generation” NLHS table tennis squad travelled to Beijing in 1973, while a Lao table tennis team of nine players—five male and four female—travelled to Pyongyang in April 1975.104 Participation in events like these indicated the NLHS’s involvement in international socialist sporting circles before the 1975 revolution. Of course, the most frequent and important sporting exchanges would have continued to be with the DRV, communist Laos’ nearest neighbor and closest ally. Renamed the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party at its second congress in 1972, the LPRP was a creation of the regional Indochinese Communist Party and its successor, the Vietnamese Workers’ Party, a heritage that shaped all elements of communist policy and politics. In this respect, although the Asian GANEFO certainly did not constitute the birth of Lao sport, it was the launch pad from which communist Laos’ sporting relations in the region took off.

Sport and region in Laos There can be no doubt that Laos was formed by global processes of organization, particularly colonialism and decolonization.105 Soviet, Chinese, and especially Vietnamese efforts to promote communism, and American efforts to contain it, exercised profound influence on the country’s postcolonial politics. As demonstrated in this chapter, however, focusing solely on global forces and their local consequences risks overlooking the regional forces that mediate processes of globalization.106 Recent studies in Lao historiography have displayed particular sensitivity to regional factors, showing how notions of Laos and Lao nationalism have been produced not only in the country itself, but also in its engagement in the region, particularly with Thailand and Vietnam.107 Taking this as a lesson for history-writing more generally, we must pay close attention to the regional forces that refract and intersect with global factors in shaping the national past.

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Regional factors were nothing less that fundamental in shaping Laos’ destiny in the 1960s and early 1970s. Studying this extraordinary yet singularly tragic period of the country’s history, one cannot but be struck by the persistent promise of postcolonial independence, even as competing nationalist forces descended, time and again, into conflict. This conflict stemmed not only from geography, given Laos’ proximity to Vietnam, but also from differing visions of postcolonial politics, society, and culture, which promised concomitantly different visions of regional solidarity. In this context, regional sporting events were not only a vehicle through which the Cold War was waged; they demonstrated how international polarities associated with the Cold War were realized or reflected regionally. The SEAP Games and GANEFO offered membership of very different conceptions of the region. Whereas the SEAP Games’ principles of noncommunist solidarity remained remarkably consistent between 1959 and 1973, the politics underlying GANEFO changed markedly between 1963 and 1966. The shift was especially apparent in Laos, where the RLG represented Laos in 1963 and the NLHS did so in 1966, pointing towards a different regime of the future with different regional alliances. In such ways, membership of distinct and sometimes competing regional sporting blocs allowed both the RLG and NLHS to buttress their respective claims to be the true Meuang Lao in postcolonial Southeast Asia.

6

Socialist Cultures of Rhetoric and Physicality

The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) took power in December 1975, ending what would become known as the thirty-year revolutionary struggle and ushering in the authoritarian Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR). While the rise of the socialists ended one battle framed by the Cold War, it heralded another as the new regime turned its attention to the spheres of politics, economics, and culture. Concerning the last of these, the “revolution in culture and thought” aimed to build a “new socialist person” as a requisite factor for the construction of socialism. Strong and healthy, the new socialist person was defined by physical as well as moral and behavioral characteristics, which would be produced by a mass sport and physical culture movement created for this purpose. The party projected the physical dimensions of the socialist person as wholly and virtuously novel, as indicated by the millenarian use of the modifier mai (new). Although socialist physical culture had much in common with colonial and postcolonial antecedents, this claim contained a degree of truth given the Marxist-Leninist roots of socialist physical culture and their adaptation to Lao socialism. In common with other socialist reforms, efforts to build a mass sport and physical culture movement aimed at producing the socialist person confronted insurmountable barriers. The official reports that document this failure nevertheless illustrate more fundamental consequences of the socialist obsession with physicality, as the regime privileged the corporeal over the intellectual and produced an entire cosmology of socialist change couched in physical metaphor and idiom.

Socialist physical culture and rhetoric While communist sport is often remembered for Cold War Olympic rivalries between East and West, a more significant dimension was the evolution of what historian James Riordan calls a “model of sport or ‘physical culture’

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for a modernizing community.” In this sense, socialist physical culture sought to promote labor productivity, national defense, health and hygiene, female emancipation, integration of minorities, and foreign relations. Characterized by an instrumental logic of nation building, it was “an agent of social change with the state as pilot.”1 Despite critiques of so-called bourgeois sport earlier in the twentieth century, this was not so different from the nation-building rationale of state-sponsored sport in the West, though the level of utilitarianism was perhaps taken to new extremes. Also far more extreme was the extent to which physicality shaped state rhetoric, so that almost every notion of progress involved building, expanding, strengthening, or reinforcing the national body politic. According to Riordan, Soviet enthusiasm for sport and physical culture emerged from theoretical foundations in Marxist and Leninist thought, and what we might term philosophies of subject formation. Soviet socialism viewed physical culture as an inherent part of the cultural sphere, itself a component of superstructure. Specifically, “physical culture”—of which sport was one part—combined with “mental culture” to form “creative culture,” which was one element of “ideology.”2 This view of culture emanated from Marxian materialism, which rejected the sharp dualism of mind and matter and, in particular, stressed the importance of the latter vis-à-vis the former. Though Marx had little to say about sport or physical culture, he advocated physical education and most of all work, where he claimed people, as physical beings, “start, regulate and control the material reactions between themselves and nature.”3 Lenin wrote more than Marx about sport and physical education, especially its role in the “all-round development of all members of society.”4 In this context he emphasized building character and the human spirit in a manner that resonated with the subject-forming intent of nineteenth-century muscular Christianity, accounting for similarities between socialist and so-called bourgeois sport.5 Although theories of Marxian materialism were repeated throughout the socialist world, physical culture was never promoted in such a structured fashion in Laos. Rather, the key to understanding physical culture in the country emerged in postrevolutionary notions of building the new socialist person (khon mai sangkhomninyom) and upgrading culture (bamlung vatthanatham), which were framed in terms of building the nation and rescuing national culture from the sins of capitalist society. In this sense, socialist physical culture in Laos borrowed most directly from Chinese and Vietnamese antecedents. In communist China, Mao Zedong—who famously expounded his enthusiasm for physical training in his “Study of Physical

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Culture” (1917)—“placed a great deal of importance on the health of the people’s bodies as the basis for the health of the nation.” He also demonstrated his personal “fitness to rule” by publicly demonstrating his own physical prowess, most famously when he sparked a swimming craze by swimming across the Yangtze River.6 Although less has been written about socialist ideology and sport in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh apparently concurred with Mao’s view, equating weak people with a weak nation, and strong people with a strong nation. For this reason, he believed that “each person must actively do exercise and sports” and “considered physical training as [the] duty of [a] patriotic person.”7 The simplicity of such associations between the individual and collective bodies captured the intensified somatization of socialist societies as socialist transformation was represented using physical metaphor and idiom.8 Grant Evans critiques the notion of the new socialist man in Laos, which I will call the new socialist person in keeping with the Lao term. “Adaptions and change,” he writes, “have a logic that is too complex to be prefigured in teleological ideas like new socialist man.”9 In particular, Evans finds no evidence of spontaneous peasant cooperation in socialist Laos, a key assumption behind the ideology’s supposed relevance to the collectivization of agriculture. Instead, he finds the idea of the new socialist person legitimated social transformation under the guiding hand of “a vanguard party that claims to be the source of truth and wisdom,” providing above all “a rationalization for the leading role of the party.”10 This was undoubtedly true, but Evans’ interests lie in explaining the failure of collectivization rather than pursuing the cultural impact of efforts to shape the new socialist person. Vatthana Pholsena emphasizes the generative dimensions of efforts to “renew” the population, particularly in areas such as manners and physical codification. Although her best-known work concentrates on the postsocialist era, when the project of building new socialist people had faded into “the reformulated concept of [fostering] ‘culture in the new era,’ ” Pholsena has more recently examined revolutionary mobilization in the Pathet Laocontrolled areas of southern Laos before 1975. While considering how socialist language linked, and thus reinforced, new categories of “the people” ( pasason) and “the nation” ( pathet sat), her interests lie elsewhere and she only scrapes the surface of this aspect of mobilization.11 In seeking to probe the generative aspects of state subject-forming projects more deeply, I examine the historical and cultural impact of new socialist person rhetoric in the decade after 1975. As French revolutionary historian Lynn Hunt has argued, the rhetoric of revolution provides “a way of reconstituting the social and political world”;

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language does not merely reflect change, it is an instrument of it.12 The language and representation contained in rhetoric is cultural ephemera with a generative potential of its own. The productive function of language in revolutionary regimes was particularly profound in socialist regimes, which recognized the potential power of language and often lacked other means to implement their “intention of rapidly revolutionizing consciousness.” “For a party bent on transforming consciousness, control over language is vital,” writes anthropologist Katherine Verdery. Responding to the critique that communist rulers simply “spoiled” language by ritualizing speech and saturating it with rhetoric and metaphor, Verdery stresses the generative dimension such usage can have “in the retooling of language as a means of ideological production.” Indeed, “one might say that in these societies, language and discourse are among the ultimate means of production. . . . Language, and the cultural production that takes place through it, thus became crucial vehicles through which socialist leaders hoped to form consciousness and subjectivity and to produce ideological effects.”13 Despite the obvious differences between twentieth-century Laos and eighteenth-century France, and for that matter the eastern European context studied by Verdery, Lao revolutionary rhetoric possessed a similar capacity to effect cultural change, a fact overlooked by scholars critiquing socialist education and culture policies in terms of their failure.14 Critically, the language of ideological production gains much of its force from physical idiom and metaphor, a dimension lacking in the analyses by Hunt and Verdery. It is natural to question the extent to which the reproduction of revolutionary rhetoric was simply performed as opposed to absorbed or, for that matter, resisted in Laos. But even where quiescence was carried out due to fear, ambition, or apathy, the reiteration of the revolutionary line—what James Scott might call the “public script”—had great social consequences.15 It not only produced a Foucauldian regime of truth, dictating the proper way to speak and behave, but structured policies that provided the basis for political, social, and economic change. As well as the microcapillaries of power associated with Foucault’s formulation of power/knowledge, the Lao regime was bolstered by the macrocapillaries of an authoritarian, coercive state, including prison camps.16 “New thought” (naeokhit mai) could be implemented and policed with crushing effectiveness, a grim reality reflected in the flight of 10 percent of the population by 1980, and in personal memoirs such as Bounsang Khamkeo’s I Little Slave.17 Even though the new regime took time to establish uniform control across the country, recent research has demonstrated the effective modes of state making employed by

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the Pathet Lao resistance government, even before 1975.18 Studying the revolutionary rhetoric that helped create this world allows us to examine how socialist ideas, vernaculars, and practices came to Laos, their reproduction in the local milieu and language, and their impact in terms of policy, practice, and social change. The question is just how to study socialist state rhetoric, a formulaic mode of language that might easily be disregarded as “propaganda.” This is an important question but historians, I suggest, have been grappling with the issue since the cultural turn rendered all historical sources—long held to be repositories of empirical truth—mere “representations.” The question, therefore, is less whether we use propaganda as a source than how we use any source. This requires informed consideration of how a source’s history affects its content and the history we write. All “history is historiography,” as theorist Alan Munslow puts it.19 With this in mind, it is important to reflect briefly on what is meant by propaganda in the content of socialist Laos, and why I prefer the term “rhetoric.” Peter Kenez defines propaganda as “the attempt to transmit social and political values in the hope of affecting people’s thinking, emotions, and thereby behaviour.”20 Although all modern states apply some form of propaganda according to this definition, Jan Gross stresses that socialist regimes take the “censorship of public utterances” to a completely different level, “radically modif[ying] the entire structure of the language,” so that “a fundamental distinction has been erased between what is and what ought to be,” between “naming and judging.”21 Like other socialist regimes, the Lao party-state did not shy away from its use of propaganda (khosana or, sometimes, more specifically khosana kan meuang, political propaganda). Together with information (thalaeng khao) and culture (vatthanatham), khosana was keenly embraced as a means for promoting doctrine and policy, and for mobilizing society.22 As in terms for “propaganda” in Vietnamese and other communist countries, it did not have negative associations akin to “brainwashing” in English.23 In fact, although khosana can be modified to have negative connotations, the word by itself is morally neutral, as reflected in its broad range of connotations, including publicity, information, and advertising. Using “propaganda” as an objective category based on the Lao term is thus unhelpful. If, on the other hand, state language is dismissed as “propaganda” based on the pejorative English term, we overlook official language production without considering its capacity to effect social change. Given the baggage that accompanies “propaganda,” I prefer the term “rhetoric” to capture the complexities of state language.24

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The “third revolution” and the new socialist person In 1971 the Central Committee of the Neo Lao Hak Sat (NLHS) defined its “educational direction” as follows: “to build a new generation of person, one that will become a new type of person: one with great physical strength, with strong health, with knowledge and ability in various subjects, with revolutionary ideology and qualities, with a resolute spirit—brave . . . prepared to together serve the nation in the future.”25 Even four years before it came to power, the party’s objectives of building a “new generation” or “new type of person” were clear. She or he would possess great physical strength and strong health. Together with the correct knowledge, ability, thought, qualities, and spirit, physical characteristics were seen as essential for this person to serve the nation. Although these objectives may have seemed fanciful when they were first articulated in 1971, with the NLHS based in caves in the country’s northeast, building the new socialist person had become national policy five years later, with the above definition appearing on the first page of Kila Kainyakam (Sport and Physical Culture), a teacher handbook published by the new Ministry of Education in 1976. This short excerpt captured the defining force of “new person” ideology and, as part of this, the emphasis placed on propagating physical culture throughout society. While the “new person” motif emerged well before 1975, it changed upon the party’s rise to power. Most importantly, the “new person” became the “new socialist person” as the new regime publicly embraced socialism, having earlier downplayed it in order not to alarm people. In addition, state rhetoric embraced physicality more holistically as a defining feature of the new regime. The party’s vague rhetoric concerning the new type of person transformed as part of a more structured theoretical framework at the third and especially fourth plenum sessions of the second Party Central Committee, held in October 1975 and February 1977, respectively. The final blueprint, passed at the fourth plenum, was the theory of the “three revolutions”: the revolution in relations of production, the revolution in science and technology, and what is usually called the revolution in ideology and culture, which I will call the “revolution in culture and thought” in keeping with the Lao term (kanpativat vatthanatham lae naeokhit).26 From the inner sanctum of the party, the theory spread through the party-state apparatus and beyond. Later in February, the prime minister and party secretary-general, Kaysone Phomvihane, explained the revolutions to a combined meeting of the Su-

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preme People’s Assembly (SPA) and the Council of Ministers.27 Two months later, the party newspaper Siang Pasason carried a story on the third revolution, which was also broadcast on radio.28 The model of the three revolutions was borrowed directly from the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which announced the same blueprint at its fourth congress in December 1976.29 Without close comparative analysis it is not possible to know if or how the CPV version was modified in Laos, but the broader pattern of appropriation across the board suggests changes were minor.30 Vietnamese communism was critical in shaping Lao socialist thought at all levels. Between 5,000 and 6,000 Vietnamese political advisers were reportedly stationed in Laos after 1975 and officials engaged in formal and informal meetings and exchanges.31 Most senior Lao party officials studied Marxist-Leninist theory at the Nguyen Ai Quoc School in Hanoi, Vietnamese instructors developed courses for the Lao party-state’s political theory school in Vientiane, and entire Vietnamese political tracts were translated into Lao “with minimal modification.”32 Notwithstanding the scope for fine-tuning to local context offered by translation itself, we can surmise that Lao officials adopted the Vietnamese blueprint for the three revolutions with few significant revisions.33 As its name alone indicated, the third revolution and its project of building the new socialist person were utterly ideological. Fostering revolutionary thought (naeokhit pativat) throughout the party, the military, civil servants, and the people was a principle objective of the party. This intent is captured in the Lao word I am glossing as “thought,” naeokhit, which means literally “way of thinking.” In his 1977 speech to the SPA and Council of Ministers, Kaysone explained the goal as “lifting the level of socialist revolutionary awareness, of knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, in order to grasp and support the policy of the party-state.”34 The objective of building the new socialist person had to come “before the first step,” and was thus a requisite or necessary factor (patchai) for the construction of socialism. This was because, in the dialectical relationship between base and superstructure, new relations of production could only be built by people with a new consciousness (sati mai). In particu lar, “a high level of alertness in respect to politics” and “a high cultural and technical-scientific level” would enable the new socialist person to “oversee the state, the economy, and society.”35 In short, culture and thought training would create the socialist person as agent to produce the new society. Though short on detail, such sentiments demonstrated that the socialist theory of transformation was based on the potential—indeed the

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necessity—of human agency. Th is endeavor also captured the party’s totalitarian ambition, its commitment to wholesale social transformation. As is well known, these objectives were never achieved in the field of economics—i.e., the revolution in relations of production—to say nothing of science and technology.36 It was precisely the lack of progress in these fields that made language, thought, and culture so critical.37 Unlike the first and second revolutions, the third revolution did not promise specific reforms or technical inputs but construction of an abstract ideal, an objective so impossible to verify that it could hardly (be proven to) fail. This is why, ten years later, Kaysone had no trouble declaring that “the new socialist man has emerged.”38 The task here is not to test the veracity of this claim but to examine what policies and practices were carried out in pursuit of the third revolution, particularly with respect to physical culture, and to assess the impact of associated bodily rhetoric.

Building the new socialist person through education, culture, and physical culture As determined before 1975, the fields that would foster the new consciousness were education and culture. The main focus of education policy was eradicating illiteracy and replacing French as the medium of instruction, which under the RLG had still been used in many urban schools. In terms of content, the emphasis would be on “all-round education,” an explicit aspect of which was “political education.” Rather in the manner of ideology training for party-state cadres, political education included learning to love the nation and socialism, and recognizing that these were one and the same thing. The overall objective of the education system was to build “new generation people to become socialist laborers possessing culture, revolutionary attributes, a technical level, and hardworking discipline.”39 Beneath the overzealous rhetoric, the objective of training a capable workforce was not so different from the nation-building aims of education systems elsewhere. However, socialist terminology—particularly motifs of the worker and hardworking discipline— demonstrated a forceful concern with physicality, even though the working class in Laos was virtually nonex istent.40 State rhetoric on culture encompassed both negative and positive dimensions. As is well known, the party attacked the cultural legacies of the previous regime, particularly American influences. In his 1977 speech al-

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ready cited, Kaysone declared: “First and foremost, we must fight steadfastly, permanently and resolutely to wipe out the remaining vestiges of feudal and especially colonial thought and culture; in particular, [we] must extract the wicked poison of the thought and culture of neocolonialism that the American imperialists and reactionaries introduced and propagated throughout our country.”41 Officially, remnants of American culture would inhibit progress under socialism. Other major targets, as in other communist revolutionary movements, were “backward customs,” which were said to “obstruct the production and livelihoods of the people.” Behind the strident language lay the party’s social conservatism.42 Most notoriously, Kaysone and other party officials delivered edicts “to destroy all fiction books, magazines and photographs which are erotic and sexy, the photos of imperialist cow-boys,” and launched drives against “social hazards such as gambling, hippies, prostitutes, [and] bars.”43 Though Kaysone’s cultural crusade has attracted plenty of attention, scholars have tended to overlook his language, much of which was newly translated into Lao or gave old words new connotations. The key verbal metaphor used to convey the negative aspect of culture and ideology was loplang, to abolish, a compound of lop, to erase or rub out, and lang, to wash or cleanse, and the term could also carry connotations of moral cleansing. The ubiquity of adverbials such as “steadfastly” (manniao) and “resolutely” (detdiao) reinforced the fervor of the mission to clean up society. Meanwhile, the object of the cleansing—the “remaining vestiges” (honghoi setleua) of colonial culture—was conflated with “poison” (phit), conveying toxicity and even death.44 All of these were physical metaphors of one kind or another, a matter I return to later in this chapter. The critique of the old society pervaded every aspect of administration, and sport was no exception. Ministerial reports leveled criticism at “preliberation” sport on the grounds of ideology, politics, and administration. Concerning ideology, “the capitalist system” had not recognized the “mass characteristics” of sports. Nor had it understood that “sport was the right of all people and a means of building the new person physically and mentally, of building the body—laborers must have complete health.” Politically, sport had been “separated from the matter of politics and foreign affairs.” Finally, “absolute power” (atnyasit) had been centralized in the Ministry of Education, Sport, and Youth (MESY), which depended on patronage from “capital” and “rich people.” This was evidence that the old regime had not fostered expansion in the khabuan mahason, or “mass movement,” another term with distinctly political undertones.45

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Rather repetitively (a feature of this rhetoric), current sporting activities were critiqued for reflecting the ideological, political, and administrative conditions of the “old regime” (labop kao), a term that became ubiquitous in political criticism. These included: (1) lack of regard for the mass movement, which restricted sports activities to the wealthy, literally “people with vehicles” (phu mi phahana); (2) lack of faith in politics; (3) authoritarian organization, resulting in MESY holding “absolute power” and “anarchy” (anathipatai) reigning in the countryside; and (4) professionalism, meaning “the selling of brilliant athletes’ bodies.”46 Th is final criticism may have been a reference to professional boxing, which in the 1960s had been popular among gamblers.47 The critique of old-regime sport demonstrated how the template of the old-bad culture was affi xed to all aspects of society, including sport and physical culture. Such polemics laid narrative foundations for the establishment of an enlightened new (mai) sporting culture to replace the darkness of the old (kao). Notions of time and progress structured revolutionary rhetoric, explaining why these temporal markers were so ubiquitous. Given the millenarian intent of such language, it is not surprising the party’s critique of old culture has attracted the most attention. But positive metaphors of construction and growth occupied party leadership as much as metaphors of eradication. In his 1977 speech, Kaysone emphasized that “we must build a new culture that has the substance of socialism, which truly demonstrates revolutionary characteristics, national characteristics, and popular characteristics.”48 Behind the didactic phrasing, “socialist culture” essentially contained two objectives.49 The first objective was a program of nationalist cultural revival. This involved “reinforcing the priceless cultural heritage of the nation,” “expanding the cultural capital” amassed during the revolution, and “selectively embracing the fruits of civilization of all mankind.” By “reinforcing patriotic foundations,” these strategies would make Lao culture “rich and abundant” (udom hangmi). In the spirit of socialist internationalism, Kaysone also called on the population to build a “socialist patriotic spirit” together with an “international proletarian spirit,” which in Laos meant nurturing its closest relationship with the Vietnamese Communist Party.50 Kaysone declared the new culture was to be “socialist in content and national in form,” though it is hard to see what this would have meant in practice.51 These objectives were reflected in the party’s development of sport and physical culture. Traditional sports such as Lao boxing and sepak takraw were emphasized more than before, showing a heightened concern for national heritage. In 1976 the Department of Sport, Physical Education, and

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Artistic Education announced it was conducting research into “traditional Lao boxing,” and later historiography presented the party as savior of indigenous sports.52 In addition, the promotion of ideas and practices associated with socialist-bloc countries—particularly physical culture and calisthenics— were probably thought to constitute “fruits of human civilization.” Finally, sporting relationships with the “extended socialist family” sought to foster an international proletarian spirit, particularly with Vietnam and Cambodia (after the Khmer Rouge was pushed out), but also more widely.53 These themes are explored in greater detail in the following chapter, in the context of elite and spectator sport. The second objective of socialist culture pertained to the character of the new socialist person. Kaysone urged the Lao people to “build a new life, a life of working hard and fighting for the nation and for socialism” on foundations of “industrious, diligent, and audacious hard work.”54 Kaysone and others returned to the theme of hard work time and again. In the same speech, Kaysone beseeched: “[We] must foster an effervescent and hard-working spirit, a spirit of determination to serve production and people’s livelihoods. . . . [We must] resist the illnesses of laziness, parasitism, extortion, greed and covetousness, and extravagance.”55 Such virtues and vices are somewhat universal, especially in modernizing regimes, but here they were striking for their similarities to the themes of the Vichy-era Lao Nhay movement. Amplified with socialist rhetoric, motifs of work and austerity were now attached to the ideal of the new socialist person. He or she would be hardworking and self-sufficient, a person who was not a burden on others but would improve him/herself, and therefore Lao society, too. Kaysone’s critique played against erstwhile images of the Lao as easygoing, playful, or downright lazy, particularly compared to the image of the industrious Vietnamese, as well as perceptions of RLG dependence on the United States. As demonstrated in the teachers’ handbook Kila Kainyakam, mass sport and physical culture were thought to possess great potential in fostering the positive characteristics of the new socialist person. Reports of the Ministry of Education, Sport, and Religious Affairs (MESRA) declared that the party-state promoted sport and physical culture as “a means of building the strength and purity of laborers.”56 The field was also embraced for its potential to build attributes of character (khunsombat) that related to labor and productivity, especially those concerning diligence and discipline.

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Mobilizing sport and physical culture for the masses While the party-state’s consciousness of physicality was clear to see, it was characterized by the deep paradox that it was a rhetorical construction. Transforming the rhetoric into practice would require policies, programs, and resources. Upon coming to power, the party asserted its goal of promoting a movement in these fields throughout society, with its December 1975 Program of Action stating the need “to stimulate, maintain, and develop sports activities and physical education amongst the people, particularly amongst the youth, in the army, and in the administrative departments and primary schools.”57 In order to realize its objectives, the party-state employed a series of measures aimed at building a mass political movement in sport and physical culture. The masses (mahason) or the people (pasason) were key motifs in partystate rhetoric. Unlike under the previous regime, which the party-state attacked for favoring phu nyai (big people), the masses would now be “masters” or literally “lords” (pen chao) of the country’s destiny.58 The party-state sought to put this priority into practice in sport and physical culture by imbuing the movement with “mass characteristics.” In the official argot, this meant “mobilizing the sport and physical culture movement among the masses”; in other words, establishing a program of mass mobilization. Mass mobilization techniques had been introduced to Laos during the war by the DRV, whose own efforts to “mobilize and organize the entire population to participate in the uprising and war” were based on Lenin’s “theory on people’s war.”59 During the war in Laos, notes Pholsena, such programs sought to educate the peasantry, including the ethnic minorities she focuses on, in the knowledge that “the resistance struggle was the prelude to a wider social revolution.”60 After the war, the ethos of mass mobilization was enshrined in mass organizations, including those for youth, women, trade unions, and the Buddhist sangha. Implementation was overseen by the Neo Lao Sang Sat (Lao Front for National Construction), as the NLHS was renamed in 1979. Although it was not a formally constituted mass organization, the political purpose of the newly dubbed “sport and physical culture movement” (khabuan kila kainyakam) was implicit in its very name. The word khabuan entails an idea of teleology, of becoming, and contains connotations of a “political movement.”61 Although more neutral terms like “sports circles” (vongkan kila) and “sports movement” or “sports activities” (kankheuanvai kila) also continued to be used after 1975, the widespread use of khabuan

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underscored the increased politicization of sport. MESRA reports referred repeatedly to the role of this movement in “serving the political tasks of the party-state,” and continually criticized underperforming officials for paying inadequate attention to this core concern. The political nature of the sports movement was also reinforced by its location in MESRA under Phoumi Vongvichit, a deputy prime minister and “cultural tsar” of the new regime.62 As part of the restructure, the royalist Department of Youth and Sport was replaced by the Department of Sport, Physical Education, and Artistic Education (DSPEAE), an idiosyncratic ensemble explained by the department’s task of building the “new socialist person.” Three years after the party came to power, Phoumi launched a two-year plan reinforcing the objective of “mobilizing sport and physical culture work to be a mass movement among the people, in schools, factories and offices, units of basic production, and the organizational offices of the state.” Elsewhere in the report, he declared that the first priorities would be “youth, students in schools and the army, civil servants, workers, and laborers.” According to Phoumi, this focus would “connect sport and physical culture work with and serve the political tasks of the party, build socialism, and protect the nation.”63 The political nature of socialist sport was also captured in the increased prevalence of the term kainyakam (physical culture) after 1975. The word mirrored the high priority attached to physical culture in other socialist countries, where it was a key element of creative culture. Indeed, although I have found no clear explanation of where or why this increased emphasis on kainyakam came from, it seems more than likely—given the role of Vietnam in shaping almost every aspect of the revolution in Laos—that this nomenclature and related techniques for mobilizing the population through sport came from that country. In any case, the compound kila kainyakam (sport and physical culture) encompassed sportive physical activities organized by the state, the totality of which had political objectives. These activities would have included official sport, physical education, and mass calisthenics, for instance, but not artistic dance or the national circus, which were categorized as “culture” and thus situated in the Ministry of Culture and Information. Despite the rapid lexical and institutional changes, there was little evidence of activity at first. But from late 1976, MESRA confidently declared that the DSPEAE was “paying attention to building, mobilizing, and pushing the sports movement far and wide among our friends the masses.”64 The “achievements,” “weak points,” and “remaining issues” mentioned in reports painted a picture of the department’s priorities: expanding domestic competitions; holding special sports events on days of national and socialist significance; hosting

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“friendship” competitions with foreign countries and sending teams abroad; improving infrastructure and equipment; and expanding mass sport and physical culture. Accomplishing these tasks, the new regime claimed, would build a “joyous” or “lively atmosphere” among the masses, boost solidarity and friendship, and improve health and hygiene. Although boundaries were inevitably blurred between various tasks and their anticipated outcomes, it helps for analytical purposes to divide them into two groups: those fostered through elite and spectator sports, which are examined in chapter seven, and those nurtured through mass sport, discussed in this chapter. Official reports often invoked the “right” (sit) of the masses to participate in sport and physical culture, reflecting the egalitarianism upon which the party-state asserted its legitimacy to rule. In reality, however, there was a greater emphasis on the responsibility of socialist subjects to be strong and healthy, and the benefits this would deliver for the nation, party, and socialism. Improved health and hygiene, it was claimed, would increase labor productivity and improve national security by providing a large pool of healthy workers and recruits. Given the ever-present perception of military threats, especially from Thailand, defense was an urgent priority until the late 1980s. As a result, corporeal health was advocated not only for its instrumental benefits, but as a barometer for measuring national strength; the human body, once again, stood as a metaphor for the nation. Other putative benefits of sport and physical culture, such as solidarity and friendship, were also promoted for their perceived national benefits, since both had implications of national unity. While these motifs were inevitably presented as revolutionary concerns, they had roots in patterns of somatization that had been evident for several decades.

Achievements and shortcomings One of the most important means of promoting popular physical culture was mass calisthenics or gymnastics (kainyaborihan), physical exercises performed with large numbers of participants in formation. Although this type of physical exercise had been part of the Lao sporting scene since at least the 1940s, its importance increased tremendously under socialism as a result of its popularity in other socialist countries. Besides the socialist connection, calisthenics had obvious symbolic and practical appeal. In the first sense, it ordered large numbers of bodies in collective synergy, reflecting the party-

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state desire to discipline the population at both local/micro and national/ macro levels; in the second, it required a small ratio of trainers to participants and no special equipment. The DSPEAE had ambitious plans for promoting calisthenics “throughout the country,” at schools, government offices, and factories. Sessions were to take place in the morning or at lunchtime or during other breaks. It was also hoped that “radio calisthenics” would be broadcast from public address speakers erected in urban areas. The envisaged ubiquity of calisthenics was the key to its appeal. By spreading the benefits of sport for health to the widest possible number of people, it was anticipated that calisthenics would imbue the sport and physical culture movement with “mass characteristics.” This goal proved elusive, however, and most detailed discussions of calisthenics appeared in official reports under “weaknesses.” If it was perhaps understandable when Phoumi reported in 1976 that the “morning gymnastics movement” was “not yet in order,” the assessment got worse in the years that followed.65 The inadequate “propagation and mobilization of calisthenics among the people,” Phoumi reported, was evidence of sport and physical culture’s lack of “widespread mass characteristics,” as well as of the failure to recognize that work in this field was to “serve the political tasks of the party-state.”66 By the end of the decade, the reported state of morning and lunchtime calisthenics was better, but only in the towns and cities. In more remote areas, where villagers’ participation was vital if the state hoped to implement “mass sport,” results remained poor.67 Another means of expanding the mass sports movement was physical education (kainyaseuksa) in the schools. We have already seen that, soon after the party came to power, MESRA published a primary school teachers’ handbook, Kila Kainyakam. The initial print run of this book was supposedly 50,000, which, according to the ministry’s statistics for 1976– 1977, would have been sufficient for more than ten books for each primary school, just under four for each class, or one for every eight students.68 Even if many thousands were never distributed, the print run indicated the party-state’s ambitious plans to push sport and physical culture in the expanding school system, and thousands presumably did make it into the schools. In terms of content, the handbook presented lessons in five areas: (1) drill; (2) physical exercises; (3) walking and running; (4) skipping; and (5) games. These were divided into five grade levels with around thirty lessons at each level. Exercises reinforced the virtues of physicality, especially its

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ameliorative value after intellectual work. Characteristically, one exercise was done to the chant: Stoop a lot, tired back Write a lot, tired arms Train like this, feel better.69

In addition, the book urged teachers to teach their pupils to “demonstrate loyalty towards classmates and teachers” as well as “increas[e] the spirit of mutual mastery in disciplined conduct, in exercising, and playing with alertness and rigor.”70 If it seems unlikely that teachers could have transmitted the more overtly revolutionary characteristics, former pupils recall generic incantations to persevere in their physical education classes, in such incantations as ot thon, ot thon! (hang in there, hang in there!). To this extent, physical education put the policies of the party-state into practice. Other themes in the handbook, such as solidarity, principles, and grace or good manners, had been attached to physical training since French colonial times. The recycling of existing themes showed not only how universal they were in sport and in Lao culture—as was especially true with solidarity (samakkhi)—but also how such benefits were appropriated by each of the state ideologies that prospered in twentieth-century Laos. If these themes sounded very earnest, the handbook dictated above all that games must be played “with fun and enjoyment.” 71 As explored in chapter seven, enjoyment was a key objective of the socialist sport and physical culture movement, always for the reason of bolstering support for socialism.72 Teacher training was another measure implemented to expand physical education, though many details remain unclear. In 1976 the DSPEAE conducted research into a curriculum for a physical education school, and appears to have established a specialized physical education teacher training school in 1978.73 For unknown reasons, Phoumi’s two-year education plan of the following year demanded a location for another teacher training school, this time incorporating physical education and artistic education (since both were in the same department).74 Twenty-two trainees passed at the “first level” of PE training in 1978–1979 and a further thirty were admitted at the “middle level.”75 By 1980, the school had reportedly produced fi ft y-one graduates, and expected to receive another twenty-nine trainees by the year’s end.76 In 1983, the school was reported to have twenty-six teachers and 135 students, and to have matriculated fi ft y-three graduates at the middle level, though it was unclear to which period this referred.77 Although

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these were not especially large figures, they demonstrated the recognition that expanding physical education in the schools would require development of human resources. Despite the impressive handbook and advances in teacher training, like calisthenics physical education was more often than not a disappointment. While it was not surprising that the number of PE teachers was said to be “very lacking” in 1976, the same problem was reported a year later and again in 1978.78 Even after the PE teacher training school was opened, the shortage of teachers remained a perennial problem, mentioned in virtually every report. If this shortage was perhaps understandable, given that physical education might have been considered a luxury when the regime was trying to build a national education system virtually from the ground up, the lack of teachers was symptomatic of wider failures in the national physical education program. Despite the claim that “schools of every level” had “considered the important matter” of “educating and building the new person to possess strong health and perfect hygiene,” the department regretted that “teachers of sport and physical education in some localities have not answered the call.” These areas “lacked leaders” and “played their own way.” Schools in some areas had no sport or physical education whatsoever.79 A further problem faced by schools and the mass sports movement in general was equipment and infrastructure. Receipts from the national stadium and swimming pool allow us to track some of the funds that supported the DSPEAE, but these were small amounts and there is no other information on how the department was funded. Most likely it received its budget through general revenue, in which case these resources would almost certainly have been meager. Certainly, “lack of equipment” and “material scarcities” were remarked upon constantly.80 In the face of state shortfalls, a spirit of self-sufficiency was encouraged, in keeping with Kaysone’s calls for self-reliance. The department reported one month in 1977 that it had produced fourteen sepak takraw balls, small balls woven from rattan!81 In the same spirit, it was expected that schools, offices, and districts would construct their own sports infrastructure, including courts, fields, and other facilities. But in reality, calls for self-sufficiency simply transferred responsibility for the lack of resources from the department to schools and local institutions. Characteristically, the department reported in 1978 that “districts, offices, [and] organizations are yet to develop and innovate in order to build a sufficient material basis for sport and physical education: e.g., parallel bars and high bars, fields for long jump, high jump, [and] sepak takraw.”82 Passing the buck to other bodies reflected the party-state’s failure to develop

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sport and physical culture with mass characteristics, a failure that was usually buried in language of growth being “commensurate with actual conditions.”83 Overall, we can surmise, the new regime’s mass sport and physical culture movement was a failure. A damning catalogue of “weak points” in a departmental report from about 1980 captured many of the relevant issues. The sport and physical culture movement was not “lively,” nor was it “even” (i.e., consistent). While development was satisfactory in certain urban areas, especially the districts of Vientiane prefecture, it remained poor in the countryside. The morning and midday calisthenics movement was “still small,” causing a vicious circle in which physical training methods did not “conform to principles,” further limiting possibilities of expansion. Relations between the ministry and provincial sports departments were poor, and there was as yet no understanding of how “sport and physical culture work could serve the political tasks of the party.” Indeed, the movement was characterized as ad hoc or disorganized (tam pen tam koet). Fault lay with the failure to seek out ways to push the movement along and to give it “revolutionary liveliness.” Like others, this report reiterated the absence of sport and PE teachers in the schools as well as the inadequacy of equipment and places for sport. School councils failed to recognize clearly the importance of work in sport and physical culture and had the characteristic of watching on halfheartedly. In summary, there was a culture of reliance upon “upper levels.”84 Such reports underscored the failure to establish a mass sport and physical movement outside of the main cities. While by 1980 the department boasted of sport and physical culture movements in many provincial centers, “rural and mountainous areas” were “not yet developed.” For this reason, the sport and physical culture movement was “not yet a true movement of the masses.”85 This failure was a serious problem, since spreading sport “from the center to the grassroots” was a defining motif of party discourse more generally. Several years later, the Lao Olympic Committee wrote that the department had failed in these years “to expand the right of the masses to be masters of socialist sport.”86 The other major criticism of mass sport, linked to the first, was its failure in political and ideological terms. As mentioned, reports regularly criticized sport and physical culture’s failure to serve the “political tasks of the party,” which meant it was not bolstering the goals of the revolution adequately. Another criticism, presented in a report summarizing the first ten years of socialist sport, noted the failure to link mass sport to productivity and national defense.87 In sum, the same criticisms of

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pre-1975 sport continued to be leveled at the new sporting structure of the party-state. Given the name and mission of the “people’s party,” the people themselves were conspicuously absent from attempts to explain the program’s failure. Reports never suggested that the general population might have rejected the programs, along with other socialist projects, as an unwelcome imposition on already difficult lives. This is not particularly surprising, of course, for admitting lack of popular interest would have undermined the legitimacy of the party. Faceless and nameless cadres were a much easier target of criticism. But, in all likelihood, the farmers and workers treasured in socialist rhetoric had enough physical exertion in their lives already. The decade after the 1975 revolution was characterized by drought, trade restrictions, and above all by austerity. While Kaysone publicly championed austerity as a means for forging a stronger will, these were hardly ideal conditions to foster the physical transformation of society. A related problem, potentially even more serious, was the poor nutritional and general health conditions in Laos.88 Under such conditions, the questionable appropriateness of mass physical culture and its ultimate failure suggests a significant disconnect between the LPRP and the masses it invoked in its rhetoric.

The motif of labor and the body Despite this failure in terms of policy and implementation, the corporeal motifs of revolutionary rhetoric reordered the socialist world in terms of meaning and cosmology. In particular, the ubiquitous motif of labor reinforced the revolution’s underlying ideology of physicality, juxtaposing the rhetoric of revolution and the human body with fundamental and farreaching consequences. Following the dictum of Marx and perhaps most famously Mao, officials emphasized the need to nurture mental as well as physical attributes in the new socialist person. For the vast bulk of the population, however, the Lao party like other socialist regimes privileged physical qualities over the intellectual. Though never as extreme as the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, party resolutions in 1976 and 1978 captured the mantra of physicality and practicality in the slogan “learning goes with doing” (hian pai kap het).89 Kaysone also highlighted the need to build a “socialist intelligentsia class.”90 But this class was limited to the leaders of the revolution, who were responsible for devising the “theoretical direction,” and the

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civil servants who studied the direction in order to implement it. For the vast majority of the population, physical toil was given top priority, as illustrated by the integral role of labor in prison camps—and the ensuing flight from Laos of the well educated.91 Referred to euphemistically as sammana (seminar), reeducation camps served distinct functions of punishment and reform, both of which were served by physical labor. Phoumi explained in January 1977, “Why are these people attending seminars? They are doing so to study new things. . . . Those power bosses who never worked with their hands must learn to do so because under the socialist system everyone must engage in both mental and physical labor.”92 As well as the resentment and resistance such conditions engendered, the memoirs of former inmates spell out the harsh reality of manual labor that defined life in the camps.93 But labor was not just a punishment. Workers and laborers together with peasants and soldiers were glorified in official representations as the symbols and beneficiaries of the revolution. Given the physical nature of these vocations, glorifying them underscored the place of the body as a key site for articulating the values of socialist society. As in similar regimes elsewhere, socialist realist art reinforced this message in Laos, the juxtaposition of worker, soldier, and peasant providing visual shorthand for the party’s idealization of physical labor. In such images, the worker and soldier were typically men while the peasant was a woman. If this scheme represented women as nurturers for the nation, they also suggested women were included in the representational ideal of the new socialist person. Though less common, representations of female soldiers further suggested women could be represented in roles defined by dynamic modes of physicality. While the party-state’s social conservatism often had a greater affect on women (e.g., by banning jeans and makeup), representational changes indicated a broader understanding of “women’s work” compared to the pre-1975 period, including honored vocations that were physically demanding.94 In 1982, at the height of the revolution, Amphay Doré addressed the symbolic importance of physical labor in a pyramidal representation of the “socio-political structure” of socialist Laos. In this model, Lao socialist society consists of five levels, which he lists from the base of the pyramid to the peak: (1) those undergoing social and political reeducation; (2) the mass of the population; (3) bureaucrats, police, and soldiers; (4) party members, who “approximate to the socialist ideal”; and (5) the “New Lao Man.” As Doré

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summarized, “The model and goal towards which the social edifice converges is the ‘new man,’ who stands at its theoretical apex.” For those at the bottom—those requiring reform and the bulk of the population—physical labor is the source of social mobility; at its upper reaches, it is political education that matters: “Superior cadres of the state and Party do no physical labor at all.”95 Although Doré was certainly right in arguing that physical labor was glorified for the mass of the population, his model contains one major flaw: as an ideal, the new socialist person encompassed all positive traits as defined by the party, including physical aptitude. This all-roundedness emerges in representations of socialist Laos’ most prominent leaders, Kaysone and Souphanouvong. A photograph of Kaysone doing physical training features ubiquitously in biographical publications and at sports exhibitions in the country (figure 6.1). An interesting feature of this picture is that Kaysone is doing tai chi, a Sino-Vietnamese tradition that reflected the Vietnamese portion of his cultural background.96 But captions accompanying the picture inevitably omit this detail, presumably because tai chi is foreign to Laos. Thus, the caption at the 2005 National Games in Savannakhet said Kaysone did sport to benefit his mental and physical health, while the caption accompanying the same picture at the Kaysone Phomvihane Museum (in 2012) explained that he was doing Lao boxing (muai lao) training, thus nationalizing his regimen. Further images of Kaysone at the National Sports Museum and Kaysone Phomvihane Museum pictured him playing table tennis, the caption elaborating that he “did exercise every day at the Kilometer 6 dormitory” in Vientiane, where he lived with other party leaders after 1975. In such ways, Kaysone is represented not only as patriotic, spartan, intellectual, and a “man of the people,” as Grant Evans has written, but also as a sports enthusiast and physically fit man.97 The same is true of Souphanouvong. Despite being sidelined from the inner-circle of LPRP power after 1975, Souphanouvong’s public image was constructed around his royal charisma or barami—which was especially important after the king’s abdication—and legendary thirst for discipline, restraint, and physical conditioning. Evans suggests the latter traits reflected “a Lao voice for the ‘protestant ethic,’ ” born of Western and Vietnamese ideas of rationalism and modernization.98 Though true in a general sense, such values also appear to have reflected Souphanouvong’s personal experience of the Vichy National Revolution, which he praised in a 1943 newspaper article while living in Vietnam.99 Six years later, his letter of resignation

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Figure 6.1. Kaysone Phomvihane, the nearest embodiment of the new socialist person, is represented as not only a patriot, a man of the people, and an intellectual, but as a physical man (1990). (Courtesy Lao National Sports Museum)

from the Lao Issara contained unmistakable resonances of the Lao Nhay movement: I decided, at the age of thirteen, to rid myself of the “xu xu” [seu seu] character of letting things drift, of indolence, of “resting on big words,” all so characteristic of our country and of declining races, destined to serve as sheep to hungry wolves. I avoid the vulgar materialism that wants to reduce everything to three things: women, liquor, and useless and debilitating

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merrymaking; the only “materialism” that counts in my eyes and merits being sought by all the people on the earth is the materialism of health, hygiene, and cleanliness coupled with solid intellectual, spiritual, and moral principles, all based on progress and hard work.100

These beliefs are invoked in representations of Souphanouvong’s enthusiasm for sport and physical training. Side by side with images of Kaysone, the National Sports Museum displays photos of him playing football and volleyball during the civil war, and exercising with a rudimentary chest expander (figure 6.2).101 In each of these images, Souphanouvong appears in military fatigues or is bare-chested, exuding an image of masculinity that suggests he really was the new socialist man (and not an ungendered new socialist person). Such images also suggest parallels between puritanical socialist rhetoric and Buddhist asceticism, which LPDR leaders highlighted in contrast with the foreign aid–fueled decadence of RLG society—another echo of the Vichy years.102 Though less impressive than Mao Zedong’s famous swim across the Yangtze River in 1966, representations of Kaysone and Souphanouvong as sportsmen conveyed an impression that the communist leaders “practiced what they preached” and were fit to rule—in both senses of the term. By “link[ing] the bodies of the people to the strength of the nation in general and the bodies of the rulers with the legitimacy of their power in particular,” such images underscored the value of physicality in socialist society.103 If the all-roundedness of Kaysone and Souphanouvong was but an ideal, physical labor was a means through which the masses of society could work for the revolution. LPDR notions of “culture” were defined by a productive and even ameliorative quality, which could build a new type of person and, through him or her, a new society. Reflecting the constitutive features of socialist culture, political speeches and administrative reports were peppered with the term bamlung vatthanatham, a phrase that literally connotes “upgrading culture.” Loaded with moral and political qualities, this term was also used in practice to refer to adult education programs.104 In this respect, culture was not merely abstract or decorative, nor was it naturalized as an essential or innate quality akin to tradition; it was a mutable category akin to “educational level,” to be upgraded for the purpose of facilitating socialist transformation. The field of sport and physical culture was the perfect vehicle for such upgrading, for it would not only boost physical strength and health but regiment bodies according to notions of social discipline and control. In an instrumental sense, this would build strong, healthy and hardworking laborers to aid national construction; more generally and symbolically, the emphasis on physical characteristics of the socialist person betrayed the party’s

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Figure 6.2. With his reputed thirst for discipline, restraint, and physical conditioning, Prince Souphanouvong embodied the ideal qualities of the new socialist person (1971). (Courtesy Lao National Sports Museum)

glorification of the physical, its contempt for the intellectual (except in the case of leaders), and the totalitarian objective of disciplining people and society.

Physical meta phor in the cosmology of socialist Laos Above all, upgrading culture was characteristic of what we might call the cosmology of socialist Laos, a profoundly positivist vision of total social transformation under the leadership and auspices of the party. In this worldview, the party would “lead” the transformation of Lao society by identifying “problems” or “difficulties,” producing “strategies,” and implementing “plans.” The linguistic motifs of administration were laden with this view of social progress. “Progress” towards “objectives” was “evaluated” in terms of “work carried out,” “good points,” and “achievements.” Conversely, “obstacles” and “weak points” were identified and further plans created in order for them to be “overcome.” Criticism was an explicit dimension of Kaysone’s theory of social progress: “It is essential for us to frankly point out our difficulties, weaknesses, and shortcomings in order to overcome and rectify them, then to proceed.”105 There was nothing that could not be achieved, or at least conceived, in this worldview.

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This cosmology pervaded the party-state at all levels. Party cadres carried out self-assessment and self-criticism by recording curriculum vitae with their achievements and weak points.106 Three decades later, senior civil servants who cut their teeth in the early years of the revolution continued to follow this format in personal résumés.107 Administrative reports followed a similar structure: work accomplished, good points, weak points, and remaining issues.108 The conceit of reeducation was based on doing the same to human beings. Prisoners undertook self-criticism and labored their way to redemption. No matter how unrealistic this idea of society and social change, this model and its accompanying rhetoric pervaded society and shaped the administration of all cultural fields, including sport and physical culture. Just as labor would redeem the individual, so the upgrading of culture, according to this worldview, would bring about social progress. Although socialist society built upon existing parallels between the individual and collective (national) bodies, it perfected somatization as a means of representing social change. In this respect, the entire socialist cosmology was comprehensible as a physical metaphor in which society—like the pathetic but redeemable subject of reeducation—was a weak, ill, or otherwise substandard body that could be healed with proper intervention. The physical idiom began with so-called vestiges of the old regime: poison, for instance, brings on physical sickness or even death, while cleansing (lang), applied to social ills through the metaphor of abolishing (loplang), protects one from germs and bacteria. The positive terms the new regime applied to the new culture were equally physical in their nature. The most common verbal metaphor, kosang (to build or construct), was applied equally and ubiquitously to bodies, people, and society. Given the material connotations of kosang, relating to the construction of roads, buildings, and other structures, the metaphor of construction implied substance and size—the latter of which is the most basic metaphor of development or progress in modernist visions such as socialism. Similar themes of physicality and size were emphasized in key verbs such as “increasing,” “expanding,” “reinforcing,” or “raising the level.” Many of the original Lao compounds for these terms—nyaikheun, khanyai, soem khanyai—incorporate the adjective nyai, meaning “big,” “large,” or “great.” Other key linguistic components implied an upward trajectory—for example, nyok (lift) or kheun (rise, up)—while overcoming obstacles (phanpha upasak) also invoked the physical, meaning to traverse or pass by a barrier. As these prescribed remedies were implemented, the body of society—the

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nation—would be upgraded. This positivist cosmology of socialist transformation was based almost entirely on physical metaphor and the obsession with physicality that lay beneath it. These verbs permeated administrative reports, including those concerning the sport and physical culture movement. A typical example boasted that the movement had “reinforced successes in the construction of socialism, expanding the health and hygiene of the masses.”109 In one short sentence, sport reinforced, expanded, and constructed, and thus improved the health of the masses and the nation. The idiom of improvement was closely related to the underlying raison d’être of sport: the aim of reaching higher, going farther, being stronger, and breaking records. The parallel positivism that referred to socialist transformation, the body, and sport captured how physical culture—here the culture of all things physical—resonated in socialist rhetoric for cosmological as well as instrumental and ideological reasons.

The physical cultures of socialist Laos Sport and physical culture resided at the junction of several currents in party rhetoric on culture. Most obviously, these fields were embraced for their potential to improve physical strength and health and, therefore, to contribute to the building of a new socialist person to “serve the nation.” But beneath this straightforward instrumentalism were two more profound connections. First, socialist culture privileged physical attributes, especially through the motif of labor, in condemning laziness, extravagance, and related sins. This theme connected the abstractness of socialist rhetoric to the body, emphasizing its central importance in the ideology of socialist Laos. Second, the socialist worldview of positivist transformation—the cosmology of socialist Laos—was bound up in physical idiom. Like an inept human body, society awaited physical amelioration through building, improving, and strengthening. These ideological and cosmological juxtapositions of language and the body highlighted the pivotal function of the physical in socialist society. The formulation of socialist physical cultures at the intersection of rhetoric and practice—the mental and the physical—produced a number of paradoxes. The first and most obvious of these arose from the party-state’s inability to realize its vision of creating a mass sport and physical culture

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movement. For all the rhetoric on the physicality of the new socialist person, the most tangible efforts to create the new physical society failed due to material shortages and, almost certainly, poor motivation among subjects who had more pressing physical concerns. This leads us to the second paradox: despite policy and implementation failures, it was the technically nonphysical elements of physical culture—the rhetoric, ideas, and ideology of physicality under socialism—that had the most enduring impact on socialist society. This proposition argues for a wider definition of physical culture, one that is not limited to physical practices but refers equally to the concern and consciousness of physicality, emerging at the junction between ideas, language, and the body. One of the defining and most disturbing features of the new society was the violent condemnation of independent thought, as the party became thinker for the nation. In the place of thought, the physical realm was glorified through motifs of labor and construction. As physicality pervaded socialist culture through the very words that represented socialist reality and desire, corporeal idiom placed the physical and metaphorical body at the heart of revolutionary rhetoric and history. While the obsession with physicality was produced in speeches, reports, and the press, it was never restricted to words; concretely, it resulted in the mass physical traumas of imprisonment, reeducation, and relocation. In particular, the party’s anti-intellectualism explains why teachers and other educated people left the country in such disproportionately large numbers, consigning mundane efforts at national progress through better policies and education to failure. In this respect, the physical culture of socialism—the culture of physicality under socialism—had a profound impact on Lao culture and society, fundamentally changing the relationship between the state and its subjects, between the national body and the bodies of individuals. Cold War ideological sensibilities, expressed in Laos in the idioms “new socialist culture” and “new socialist person,” intensified the awareness of, and concern with, physicality. Notions of the physical emerged from the rhetorical or mental realm, which in the cosmology of the Lao party-state represented the polar opposite of the physical. Th is fi nal paradox resides at the heart of all renderings and analysis of the physical: How, considering what post-structuralism has taught us, can meaning be formed and mediated, if not through language and representation? This paradox is not sufficiently recognized in studies of the body and physicality. When it is commented upon, it is usually raised as a methodological

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rather than epistemological issue.110 With this general neglect in mind, the cultural and ideological battles of the Cold War, fought at the intersection of rhetoric and physicality, provide particularly fertile ground for exploring the production of physical realities through linguistic and cultural representations.

7 Mobilizing the Revolution

Elite-level sport—especially spectator sport—offers a second perspective on how the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party utilized sport for political objectives in socialist Laos. After coming to power in 1975, the partystate energetically embraced such sports in order to build a “revolutionary atmosphere,” nurture revolutionary “friendship,” boost Laos’ international reputation on the world stage, and promote gender equality—objectives that were to advance the revolution by strengthening the party-state, boosting socialism, and bolstering nationalism. As simplistic and even naive as this vision may appear, the performative qualities of large-scale sporting events possess a special capacity to animate ideology, particularly the myth of perpetual movement that resides at the core of socialism. In this respect, spectator sport had the potential to represent a dynamic contrast to the mundane realities of socialist stagnation. As in the case of mass sport and physical culture movement, the popularity and political functions of spectator sport rarely achieved the levels that officials aspired to. But even when mobilization through spectator sport failed in immediate terms, the social and cultural processes of mobilizing the population were at least partially effective in buttressing the idea of the party-state as a united and unitary locus of power in socialist Laos.

Conceptualizing socialist spectator sport Though slow to warm to competitive sport, most communist countries had firmly embraced international sports competition by the time of the Lao revolution—the main exception being the People’s Republic of China (PRC).1 When communist-bloc countries did embrace competitive sport, they refused to accept, even officially, the Olympic mantra that sport was

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“above politics,” instead championing sport’s potential to promote ideological and nationalist objectives. The Soviet Union and its East European satellites looked to sport as a field in which they could prove themselves superior to the West, and the Soviets topped the medal table in most Olympiads between 1952 and 1992. The most outstanding performances—since explained by systemic use of performance-enhancing drugs—were those of East Germany, locked in ideological battle with West Germany and largely isolated from the noncommunist world. These and other communist states “believed that the Olympics brought more exposure and prestige and were . . . the measure of a nation’s viability,” rendering sport a means of bolstering the image and legitimacy of communism.2 An even more strident nationalism was behind China’s belated embrace of the Olympic movement.3 As a small and poor country emerging from thirty years of war and revolution, Laos hardly aspired to match the likes of the USSR, China, or East Germany on the world stage—and there is certainly no evidence of systematic performance-enhancing drug programs. But like other communist-bloc countries, Laos drew inspiration from its larger socialist counterparts. First, spectator sports—particularly events marking days of national significance— were embraced as a source of revolutionary “fun and liveliness.” This notion was in many respects the key to party-state enthusiasm for public sporting events, as such enjoyment was said, time and again, to “build a revolutionary atmosphere.” Second, sports competition was embraced as a source of friendship and exchange, not only between Lao people, but especially with “fraternal socialist countries.” Third, the party-state asserted that competing “on the world stage” built the international reputation of Laos, even though, as before the revolution, sporting successes remained few and far between. Finally, the success of women athletes on the world stage and efforts to promote women’s sport more generally highlighted the party ideology of using sport to promote equality between the sexes. This chapter examines each of these priorities before examining how they came together, firstly in Laos’ inaugural participation in the Olympic Games at Moscow in 1980, and, secondly, in domestic sports festivals culminating in the reconstituted National Games. As explained in the previous chapter, the new regime sought to “mobilize the sports movement among our friends the masses,” with the ultimate objective of “serving the political tasks of party-state.” This objective applied equally to spectator sports, where, instead of the masses playing sports, they would watch and, in theory, be revolutionized. Although one can imagine parallels with religious revelation, this was not envisaged as a form of divine

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or magical conversion. Instead, the party-state saw the process—like it saw everything in the world—as manifestly rational: the masses would be presented with a powerful testimony to the better world that awaited them, and mobilized by its promise. Studies of mobilization in Laos demonstrate the patent naivety of such visions.4 But as Christian Lentz argues with respect to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), even mass campaigns that fail to achieve stated tactical objectives may initiate social processes that in turn facilitate processes of state formation. Stressing the fragmented reality of political power, Lentz proposes that such campaigns produce a unified “state idea,” a term coined by influential political scientist Philip Abrams, by institutionalizing claims to legitimacy and territorial reach. In the DRV, he writes, “Political actors . . . wielded the state idea—and a claimed isomorphism with national community—to legitimate claims on an evolving, newly discovered, mass society.”5 This argument provides a useful basis for understanding the socialist state in neighboring Laos, where party-state campaigns produced an image of unified state power—symbolized in the ubiquity and force of its very name, the phak-lat—despite internal disputes, bureaucratic inadequacies, and, most of all, practical limitations in what it could achieve.6 Whereas Lentz focuses on agrarian reforms, this chapter extends similar analysis to the performative dimensions of mass mobilization. Combining mass mobilization and state performance, communist spectator sports quite literally put into motion the ideologies of the partystate, as well as its very conceit to be a unified and unitary source of political power. The capacity of spectator sports to make such claims derives from their relation to three kinds of movement or mobilization: literal, linguistic, and symbolic. The first of these is the literal human movement that defines sport and physical culture, particularly regimented modes of movement under the auspices of the party-state. The second is the language of the sports movement itself, not least its very name. The most common Lao terms for the “sports movement,” khabuan kila and kankheuanvai kila, convey literal as well as metaphorical notions of motion.7 Finally, and most abstractly, socialist spectator sports symbolized what Hannah Arendt calls the “perpetual motion mania” of the revolutionary state, the party-state’s existential need to keep moving, a theoretical point to which I shall return. In these three ways, I argue, the party-state sought to mobilize the Lao revolution through the movement inherent in sport and physical culture.

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Building a revolutionary atmosphere If judged by ubiquity alone, the most important element of spectator sport for buttressing socialism was enjoyment. Given the earnestness of building “new people” and a “new society,” there is an oxymoronic quality to official sponsorship of enjoyment—what Robert Edelman aptly calls “serious fun.” “The notion that moments of pleasure and play (‘fun’) might be planned with more utilitarian or didactic goals in mind (‘serious’) seems absurd or at least dubious,” he writes. Nevertheless, “the concept of ‘spontaneity’ or ‘serious fun’ [was] the historic task of mass culture in the USSR,” and elite and spectator sport in Laos followed a similar path.8 The party-state repeatedly reiterated the idea that sport could bolster socialism by improving joie de vie among the people. This was expressed in the regime’s will to create an atmosphere that was enjoyable or fun (muanseun, muanseunboekban) and lively ( fotfeun)—notwithstanding the general belief that life under the new regime was precisely the opposite (bo muan or “no fun,” i.e., unpleasant).9 Pre-1975 sports reports had mentioned the atmosphere of sporting events too, but merely in a descriptive manner.10 The new regime stressed the “atmosphere” generated by sports events with ideological conviction and consistency, marking it as a defining feature of socialist sport. Reports from the Ministry of Education, Sport, and Religious Affairs (MESRA) were full of such language. Its summary of activities in 1977– 1978 declared the sports movement “was lively [and] serving the political functions of the party-state well. It built an enjoyable and lively atmosphere among the masses . . . augmenting successes in the construction of socialism . . . and breathing life into the image of the new regime.”11 Although I have not come across any official mantra equivalent to Mao’s slogan “friendship first, competition second,” the competitive aspect of sport was indeed secondary in such reports, with spectator sport aiming primarily to enliven the image of the new regime. From the time the LPRP came to power, barely a sports news item could be found that did not mention the fun and lively atmosphere. A friendship football tournament in January 1976 was reported to have “attracted lively support.”12 A week later, it was reported that sport in each ministry was “lively.”13 A weekend sporting tournament in February—especially a football match between the senior teams of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Finance—was summarized as having been “lively for all at the stadium.”14 Most commonly, reports mentioned simply that sporting events

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produced an enjoyable, lively, fun, or animated atmosphere, or a combination of these sentiments. The use of the same key terms in administrative reports and the frequency of their usage reinforced their ideological and formulaic nature. The promotion of liveliness through sport was evidence of the party’s efforts to create a positive attitude towards the revolution and the party; what leaders and report writers called “popular revolutionary liveliness” or a “happy revolutionary spirit.”15 The themes of enjoyment and liveliness continued to dominate coverage well after the euphoria of the party’s rise to power had died down. In 1980 the education ministry praised socialist sport and physical culture for “mobilizing and building an enjoyable atmosphere among students and the people in all areas of the country.”16 A 1984 football championship in Vientiane “created enjoyment for the crowd that watched,” while another game “offered fierce excitement.”17 Likewise, a football game between the ministries of defense and health “built a lively, revolutionary atmosphere, and greatly impressed the masses who watched.”18 The same year, Vannasin, a magazine published by the Ministry of Information and Culture, compared sport to art: “The meaning of sport has certain points that are similar to art . . . to produce enjoyment for the masses who come and watch . . . like art, it is a cureall for illnesses of the mind [chitchai] and thought [khwam khit].”19 Especially significant were efforts to use sports events to “build the atmosphere at festivals and on important historical days” that constituted the ritual calendar of the new regime.20 The most important among such occasions were Army Day (January 20), International Women’s Day (March 8), Lao People’s Revolutionary Party Day (March 22), May Day (May 1), and particularly National Day (December 2), the anniversary of the birth of the new regime in 1975.21 Each of these events effectively represented a key social group in revolutionary rhetoric: the military, women, the party, workers, and the nation itself. State officials organized special sports competitions to celebrate the place of these groups in state ideology, as well as to build “fun and liveliness.” In such ways, state rhetoric and ideology was brought to life through physical activity and practice. After seizing national power in December 1975, the party-state wasted no time in organizing sporting spectaculars to mark official occasions in Vientiane. A month later, a crowd of ten thousand—consisting, as all such reports stated, of “the masses, soldiers, police, and civil servants”—were reported to have crammed in to Vientiane’s National Stadium to celebrate Army Day. Incorporating volleyball and football competitions (men’s and women’s), the sports festival was staged in order to “build unprecedented

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interest in Lao history and happiness among the people.”22 After a “beautiful” volleyball match had “generated liveliness,” the football final between the ministries of public works and defense “kicked off with excitement.” Appropriately, perhaps, given that the main objective was happiness and history rather than competition, the match ended in a 1–1 draw.23 Needless to say, reports celebrating the “revolutionary atmosphere” of national occasions do not prove that sport made Lao citizens any more enthusiastic about socialism. Such claims reflected a discursive pattern repeated across all official texts. Nonetheless, it would be hasty to dismiss the official objectives of promoting enjoyment. On one level, such reports reflect how quickly and ubiquitously the idea of state-sponsored fun—however oxymoronic it may seem—came to characterize the organizational objectives of official sports events. If it is true that socialist sport, including spectator sport, was “by no means a matter merely of fun and games,” utilitarianism was not considered incompatible with the goal of personal enjoyment.24 It was just that the party-state promoted the enjoyment and liveliness of sport not for their own sake but to serve the revolution. By seeking to nationalize the joy of sport, the party-state extended the conceit of totalitarian rule to govern people’s participation in and emotional response to consuming sport. The bigger problem in assessing popular responses to socialist sporting events is distinguishing between the frenetic activity on the page—that is, the constant assertions of fun and liveliness in the sports pages and official reports—and the activity that took place at the stadium. Based on conversations with sports fans, many did indeed enjoy attending sporting events, not least because they represented a welcome diversion from the prevailing conditions of poverty and hardship. In response to the dire economic situation, the party-state had banned or scaled back Buddhist festivals (the traditional sources of joy and revelry), restricted travel, and regulated the slaughtering of livestock. While many people had been willing to give the new regime a chance, if only as respite from war and conflict, contemporary observers stressed how unpleasant life quickly became.25 Under these conditions, a day at the football game provided pleasant relief from the monotony of socialist life, just as for the party-state such events represented a relatively cheap and politically acceptable form of popular leisure. In this respect, the most significant benefit of sport would ironically have been to provide refuge from the revolution, rather than revelry in it.26 This apparent failure to realize official objectives might not have prevented the movement having a broader social impact. Revolutionary-era stu-

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dents interviewed by Vatthana Pholsena recall their school lives in terms of “fun” and “solidarity,” mirroring the language used in newspapers and official reports.27 Although they do not mention sport specifically, such memories suggest revolutionary activity inculcated ideology by teaching the language and expectations of socialist rule, pointing towards the subtle ways in which mobilization reinforced socialist ideology and the idea of the partystate as a uniform and effective locus of state power. My own conversations with those who experienced the revolution as young adults have revealed similar patterns.

The extended socialist family As discussed in chapter five, regimes of all political persuasions view international sport as a means of boosting domestic legitimacy and international prestige. After 1975, regional and international sport was especially important for the Lao socialist regime, which had been created through its engagement with the Indochinese Communist Party and international socialism more generally. Reflecting their continued ties, the Lao and Vietnamese regimes signed a twenty-five-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1977, cementing what became known as the “special relationship” between the two countries.28 More notoriously, up to 50,000 Vietnamese troops were stationed on Laos territory to shore up the new regime. Laos also enjoyed regular sporting ties with communist-bloc giants, the Soviet Union and (until 1979) the PRC. As international friendship competitions and training exchanges emerged as a key vehicle for celebrating Lao membership of the international socialist community, sport became entrenched as one of the most regular and concrete manifestations of “socialist friendship.” MESRA reports for the five-year period from 1975 to 1980 document the regularity of such interactions. In 1975–1976, Laos hosted a Chinese (PRC) volleyball team and a Soviet football team, and Lao football and table tennis teams undertook tours to China and Mexico (respectively); in 1976– 1977, Laos hosted the Vietnamese Army team for a match against the Lao Army on Army Day, welcomed a Chinese volleyball team, and sent badminton coaches to China; in 1977, the country hosted a “friendship football tournament” between Vietnam, the USSR, the PRC, and Japan, and sent football and volleyball teams and two badminton coaches to China; in 1977–1978, Laos welcomed football teams from Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the Hungarian Army, as well as a volleyball team from Shanxi province

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in China, and sent a Ministry of Public Works football team to Vietnam, a Ministry of Education football team to China, and a table tennis team to Nigeria and Malaysia; the 1978–1979 program was similar, although a football team also toured the Soviet Union; and in the lead-up to the Moscow Olympics in 1979–1980, Lao teams in athletics, boxing, shooting, football, and volleyball undertook training visits to the USSR.29 As this summary suggests, the vast majority of teams that Laos hosted and visited were from socialist-bloc countries. These events represented the paragon of “socialist friendship,” a principle that was captured in the term “friendship competitions” (khaeng khan mittaphap). Constituting more than “friendlies,” as usually understood in sporting parlance, socialist friendship competitions aimed to reinforce international socialist solidarity between Laos and its “socialist brothers.” Though it is hard to assess the impact of such efforts, the regular hosting of teams from socialist countries provided evidence of the international sphere the country was now immersed in. In this sense, sporting ties achieved a similar effect as hosting technical experts from the socialist bloc and sending young Lao scholars to study in socialist countries. They provided a popu lar alternative to official parades, which linked Laos to the Marxist-Leninist world but largely excluded ordinary people.30 The terms used to discuss socialist sporting relationships gave a socialist gloss to cherished cultural values. Perhaps the most important of these was ai nong, literally “older brother-younger brother,” which was used throughout official and press reports in the term “fraternal socialist countries” (pathet sangkhomninyom ai nong). This common kinship term was already synonymous with revolutionary international relations, having been used to refer to the Lao-Vietnamese forces during the war. Although the intent had been to liken the alliance to brotherhood, connotations of hierarchy were unavoidable since neither Vietnamese nor Lao has an age-neutral term for “brother,” making the term an easy object of anti-Vietnamese derision.31 In the context of sport, the built-in hierarchy of ai nong implied both hierarchy and emulation, the idea that Laos could look up to its older socialist brothers, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China, for assistance and a model for development. Although the countries had changed, there were definite resonances of the RLG’s pre-1975 sporting ties with Thailand. Kinship was further invoked in the idea that sport nurtured “relationships with members of the extended socialist family.”32 Words that had long been associated with sport, such as solidarity and friendship, were now compounded ubiquitously with

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“socialism”—as in “socialist solidarity” and “socialist friendship.” At official occasions including sports events, these terms were broadcast monotonously over public address systems. Over time, they became so closely associated with socialist rhetoric they were difficult to use informally, except when meant ironically.33 Overseen by senior officials from Laos and its socialist allies, international sporting events incorporated new rituals reinforcing themes of socialist friendship and solidarity. In November 1976, a Lao vice minister and the Soviet ambassador were in attendance to witness the opening of a series of Lao-Soviet football matches. With fitting pomp and spectacle, the head of the Department of Sport, Physical Education, and Fine Arts (DSPEAE) and the captain of the Soviet team gave speeches stressing “the foundations of the courageous struggle, the solidarity and the relations of mutual assistance between the Lao and Soviet nations. In conclusion, the two men made a wish that the fraternal solidarity and friendship between the people and athletes of the Lao and Soviet nations would endure and grow forever.”34 The Soviet players then presented sports equipment to the Lao sports department, a material symbol of spoken sentiments, and of the Soviet role in Lao development. Visiting Laos around the same time, a Chinese volleyball team was met with similar rituals of socialist brotherhood and allegiance, the press reporting that the matches ended in an “atmosphere of intimacy and firm solidarity.”35 Significantly, these reports usually appeared on the front page of the newspaper rather than in the sports column inside, an indication of their political function. Rituals of socialist friendship consecrated the support of the Soviet Union and China, which together represented the pinnacle of socialist civilization. Though lacking the sporting prestige of the USSR and PRC, Vietnam shaped Lao sport in other, more comprehensive ways, particularly after its overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. In 1980 MESRA signed a five-year agreement with Vietnam’s Sport and Physical Education Committee, in common with long-term agreements that it signed in other areas of administration.36 Though details of the agreement are not known, an interim report in 1984 focused on exchanges of delegates between the two countries. Thirty-seven Lao athletes had reportedly visited Vietnam, including three teams of the sports department for friendship competitions. Meanwhile, Vietnam had sent thirty-three people in the opposite direction. As well as a sports team, which competed in a friendship match, this cohort included three groups to assist with administrative work. Such unequal exchanges

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were the norm in the so-called special relationship with Vietnam. In reality, they meant Vietnam’s provision of financial and technical assistance. In the early 1980s, Laos and Vietnam also developed a three-way sporting relationship with the People’s Republic of Kampuchea regime, installed by Vietnam in 1979. A feature of this relationship was triangular “friendship” meets between the three nations, such as one that took place in Vientiane in 1984.37 Messages of solidarity between the former Indochinese nations were intended for both domestic and international audiences. Locally, they suggested there was more to the Lao-Vietnamese relationship than one of hegemonic patron and helpless client; internationally, they represented a veneer of regional collectivity. For Vietnam, given its international isolation over Cambodia, these links were especially important as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), led by Thailand, railed against perceived Vietnamese expansionism. Despite finally joining the Asian Games Federation in 1982, the Lao party-state largely rejected nonsocialist sporting ties in the greater Southeast Asian region. Although the new regime retained membership of the SEA Games Federation, it made no effort to rejoin the Southeast Asian Games—as the SEAP Games were renamed in 1977—after withdrawing in 1975, when Laos had officially been under the Provisional Government of National Union. To the contrary, it derided the RLG for limiting its international sporting relations to the Southeast Asian or “SEATO” region—a reference to the SEAP Games—though the real motivation for this criticism was ideological.38 Upon the withdrawal of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam in 1975, the SEA Games expanded to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei. This gave the competition a membership closely reflecting that of the recently formed ASEAN, which Laos dismissed as “an instrument of American imperialism set up to replace the declining SEATO.”39 More surprisingly, Laos’ bilateral sporting relations with Thailand survived, even as they ebbed and flowed with the general tenor of relations between the two countries. After a brief rapprochement, Thailand’s right-wing military coup in October 1976 raised tensions between the two countries to a level not seen since the early 1940s. When government reports from this period mentioned Thailand, they condemned it as a “reactionary” and “American lackey” that was “sowing seeds of suspicion,” engaging in “psychological warfare,” harboring insurgents, and causing “great difficulties” by restricting trade.40 Not surprisingly, few if any sporting exchanges occurred during these years. Towards the end of the 1970s, however, relations thawed. Kaysone and the new Thai prime minister, General Kriangsak Chomanan, signed a

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communiqué in January 1979 that famously promised to transform the Mekong into a “river of genuine peace, friendship, and mutual benefit.”41 This détente was immediately reflected on the sporting field. In 1979, Savannakhet province sent football and basketball teams to compete in Nakhon Phanom, a city on the Thai side of the Mekong River, with MESRA reporting that this was the “special” event of 1979.42 Despite further incidents, Thailand was noted later that year as one of only four countries with which Laos had enjoyed two-way sporting exchanges in the previous five years: the others were Vietnam and the Soviet Union, the staunchest of socialist allies, and Japan, another close friend throughout these years, given the foreign aid it provided.43 On a rather different register, cultural changes in Lao boxing (muai lao) reflected the consolidation of national identities in Laos vis-à-vis its neighbor. Adjacent to Laos and populated by ethnic Lao, Thailand’s northeast (Isan) had long been a stronghold of muai thai, the Thai version of boxing that is virtually indistinguishable from muai lao.44 Given the porosity of the border between Isan and Laos, there had been much border crossing in this sport prior to 1975. Lao boxers often fought in Nong Khai and Thai boxers in Vientiane, with newspaper advertisements making less of the boxers’ nationality than their hometown. Reflecting this closeness, the terms muai lao and muai thai had been largely interchangeable in Laos, or simply reduced to muai. After the revolution, however, the culture and nomenclature of muai was nationalized as official cross-river bouts were suspended and muai lao replaced muai thai in the local lexicon. These changes reflected broader efforts to paint the culture of socialist Laos as righteous as opposed to the decadence of capitalist Thailand. Such differentiation was reinforced by increased regulation of the Lao-Thai border, as Thailand repeatedly closed the border for political reasons and, for desperate escapees from the new regime, crossing the river became a life-threatening ordeal. Thus, while sport continued to promote Lao-Thai relations, these relations were structured by increasingly overt nationalism and ideology associated with the revolution.

On the world stage The third major theme of spectator sport in socialist Laos was participation in international competitions, which not only provided opportunities to celebrate Laos’ membership of the “extended socialist family,” but to boost its “reputation on the world stage.” As victories remained few and far between,

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those that did occur were celebrated with special gusto, especially in the first years of the revolution. Most prominently, Lao teenager Souphavanh Phiathep made headlines in 1976 after winning a gold medal in the “three continents” or AAA (Asia, Africa, [Latin] America) junior table tennis championships held in Mexico City. A glowing report in Vientiane Mai heralded the result as a “great victory,” producing “the greatest happiness and excitement for the Lao people, and especially for our young sporting friends.”45 Upon her return to Laos, Souphavanh received the Freedom Victory Medal (level III) from Phoumi Vongvichit, the education minister. Four years later, MESRA’s five-year report for 1975–1980 praised her victory as the most outstanding thing that had happened in five years of socialist sport: “Seizing the gold medal . . . elevated the role of table tennis and Lao sports circles on the international stage.”46 The widespread usage of this term, “international stage” (vethi sakon), typified how the new regime tied its international image to domestic legitimacy at a time when the latter was under serious challenge. Like participation in the Asian GANEFO a decade earlier, Souphavanh’s success was celebrated as a moment of arrival by socialist Laos and a boost to the country’s international reputation, since it had taken place on the world stage. Souphavanh remained unrivalled as a national sports hero for over a decade until 1990, when Vongkot Chinda, a boxer, won gold at the Asian Games in Beijing, elevating him to a similar level in the Lao pantheon of sporting heroes. Today, the two athletes are pictured side by side at the National Sports Museum as “outstanding athletes of the past.” As Souphavanh’s long reign as Laos’ sole sporting hero suggested, conventional sporting successes were extremely rare. As before 1975, evidence of success was more typically located in qualitative areas such as character attributes. In 1978, MESRA congratulated the national men’s football and the women’s table tennis teams for their improvement after playing many foreign teams. Although the MESRA report did not mention results, it stated that “the important thing we can see is that our players’ attributes have improved greatly and are many more times advanced than before.”47 While such claims reflected the concern with progress that lies at the heart of both sport and socialism, improvement did not need to be quantified. This had also been true before 1975, but now positive character traits took on a socialist gloss. The “attributes” (khunsombat) valued now were the character traits of the new socialist person. Taking the chapter headings of an NLHS school text titled Khunsombat (1971) as an example, socialist attributes included “the habit of urgency,” “the habit of perseverance,” “the spirit of self reli-

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ance,” and so on.48 Demonstration of valued khunsombat on the international sporting stage showed that, while Souphavanh’s victory constituted the greatest moment of national achievement, winning was not the only form of success. One trait that stood out in socialist sport was mana, which usually means ambition or persistence but also referred to patience, resourcefulness, and trying one’s best. An exceptional example was Mala Sakonninyom, an eighteen-year-old runner who had just returned from the 1984 Spartak Games in the Soviet Union (and whose surname, incidentally, meant “internationalism”).49 As recounted in a Seuksa Mai (New Education) report, fittingly titled “The female runner who doesn’t know the word ‘disheartened,’ ” Mala’s story emphasized in typically self-deprecating Lao idiom that she had beaten the odds to succeed: “Even if Lao athletes are small and weak and lack experience and technique, [Mala] tried hard to dedicate all of her ability to the competition.” Having trained “tirelessly,” she made it through the qualifying round and into the semifinals. With “great pride,” she qualified for the final, summoning all of her “ability and technique” to win the bronze medal. Though she had not won, Mala reflected that the competition had given her experience and taught her lessons. As the reporter summarized, Mala “has always had a brilliant athlete’s attitude.”50 In post-1975 Laos, the association between sport and character building, promoted by all modernizing regimes as a major element of subject formation, was closely tied to notions of the new socialist person. If elusive gold medals could not boost the international reputation of Laos, showcasing the fine attributes of the new socialist person in Laos would need to suffice.

Equality between the sexes Prominent reporting of athletes such as Souphavanh and Mala reflected the party-state’s more generalized use of sport to promote its official ideology of “equality between men and women,” a staple of socialist regimes.51 One of the most visible ways the regime did this was by organizing women’s sporting events to mark International Women’s Day and other historical occasions. Whereas meetings and press coverage that marked Women’s Day could only express the ideology of gender equality in words, sporting events sought to reinforce it through physicality and performance. In 1984, for instance, volleyball and basketball tournaments were conducted over three weekends in March to celebrate Women’s Day and the first National Congress of the Lao

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Women’s Union.52 The tournament was held at the Morning Market, the largest marketplace in Vientiane and probably the city’s greatest concentration of women. One can question the practical impact of such annual events, but as symbolic statements they juxtaposed the female body, the nation, and socialism in a manner that gave dynamic expression to government policies. Contrasting with the much-ridiculed “three goods” of the Women’s Union—which urged women to be a “good wife,” “good mother,” and “good citizen”—such activity suggested the field of physical culture at least partly conformed to party-state policy on gender equality.53 Women’s sports events also featured on other days of national celebration. The Army Day sports festival of 1976, for instance, included a women’s football match between ministry teams. According to a Vientiane Mai article the following week, the women’s Army Day match had received great praise for demonstrating that women’s football was “not small” compared to men’s. Also, the standard of play had improved with better selection and training practices. As a result, the reporter believed the women’s teams had “lifted the standard of play,” making sufficient progress to conduct more competitions of this type in the future.54 Although women had played sports to some extent since at least the 1940s, the vast majority had been recreational, and “women’s sports” such as basketball and tennis had been actively encouraged over others. Not only were the choices for women now wider, but sports authorities were promoting women’s competitive sports more actively. Women’s events celebrating national occasions were not isolated cases. As one peruses the photographic archives of the Lao News Agency (Khaosan Pathet Lao, or KPL), one is struck by the prominence of women’s sports. The 1976 collection, for instance, contain pictures of a women’s football match at the Dongdok teacher training college (figure 7.1), a women’s volleyball game in Vientiane on the occasion of May Day, and a table tennis tournament featuring professional athletes (or worker athletes, as they were known in many socialist countries) at the National Stadium.55 Similarly, the national table tennis team, photographed in front of the National Stadium in 1977, was more than half women, while a montage of four photographs published by Vientiane Mai in July 1980—captioned “In the past four years, the role of Lao sports circles has expanded greatly and has taken the first step”—included one of female athletes. Individually, none of these observations would have been remarkable; together, however, they demonstrated an increased emphasis on women’s sport, suggesting it was considered an integral part of sporting progress in Laos.

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Figure 7.1. A women’s football match between Dongdok Teacher’s College and another team in Vientiane (1976). (Courtesy Khaosan Pathet Lao)

Among female sporting successes, Souphavanh’s stood out. Even compared to Vongkot Chinda, the other of the two “outstanding athletes of the past,” she enjoyed a special status as “the first [gold medalist] for Laos.” A feature published in Vientiane Mai in the lead-up to the 2009 SEA Games in Laos revisited her achievement, labeling her “Laos’ first gold medal heroine.”56 Although the one-dimensional coverage of Souphavanh’s victory suggested her individual personality was less relevant than her national accomplishment, her recognition as a national “heroine” demonstrated her transgression of perceived gender roles in Laos.57 Growing coverage of women’s sport suggested such transgressions occurred with increasing frequency in the early 1980s. Yet this should not be taken to imply that gender equality was achieved, either in sport or more generally. Tellingly, Seuksa Mai had no hesitation in describing Mala as “tall and fair,” a description that could only have been applied to a woman. In this respect, female athletes remained subject to “feminizing code” that served to “neutralize the effect of the transgressive act.”58

Moscow 1980 Participating in the Moscow Olympic Games of 1980 invoked the motifs of revolutionary atmospherics, the extended socialist family, and the world stage, ensuring that it constituted the highlight of early socialist sporting

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history in Laos. Fortuitously, the IOC awarded the 1980 games to Moscow in 1974, just a year before the LPDR was proclaimed. Laos had never before competed at the world’s premier sporting event and now it was to be held in a socialist country for the first time, at the heart of socialist civilization. The new regime represented joining the Olympic movement and participating in the games as a great victory not only for Laos, but for the revolution, celebrating its feat over and again as an unprecedented achievement in Lao history. According to IOC regulations, competing in Moscow required Laos to form a national Olympic committee and national sporting federations. This was achieved at the end of 1978, thanks to the assistance of a certain “Soviet comrade” named Rokunoski.59 After further guidance from Rokunoski— whose role reflected the growing importance of the Soviet Union in Lao sport—the Lao Olympic Committee (LOC) and its member federations were affi liated with the IOC and international sports federations. The LOC and seven sporting federations (football, athletics, boxing, shooting, basketball, volleyball, and table tennis) were situated in the Prime Minister’s Office, giving elite sport increased prominence in state affairs. The first president of the LOC, Singkapo Sikhotchounnamali, was formerly a senior party and military man, indicating the committee’s status and the continued influence of the military in sporting matters. The LOC and sports federations oversaw rapid expansion in elite sport. Before the formation of the Lao Football Federation, there had been one division of six teams and “about ten” registered referees; by 1984, the competition had grown to three divisions with a total of forty-six teams and thirtynine registered referees, including some that were qualified to officiate at international level. The LOC claimed similar improvements were observed in all sports, but did not cite statistics to verify this claim.60 The LOC also opened up new sources of funding. Between 1979 and 1981, the committee received assistance from many countries and cleared the debts of all but one of the sports federations. In 1980–1981, the committee received money from Olympic Solidarity, an IOC commission responsible for assisting national committees, which it used for sports training, equipment, and coaching. The following year the LOC received an extra $35,000 from the visiting IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch. The committee received another $50,000 in Olympic Solidarity funding for training in various sports between 1982 and 1986, and a further $10,000 for equipment in 1985–1986.61 Even more important than expansion and funding was the symbolic capital garnered by joining the Olympic movement. Looking back almost a

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decade later, the LOC boasted of its formation as the greatest achievement in the first decade of sport under the new regime. This the LOC contrasted with pre-1975 sports circles, which had only competed in Southeast Asia and “had no proper Olympic organization.”62 Despite a rivalry that developed between the two sporting bodies, MESRA also recognized formation of the LOC and sports federations as the “special” achievement of 1978–1979.63 The LOC’s participation on the world sporting stage was circumscribed by its primary allegiance to the socialist world, especially the USSR, as demonstrated by its feverish enthusiasm for Moscow and its boycott of Los Angeles four years later. Still, the party-state saw this as a far greater achievement than the RLG’s participation in the SEAP Games, typifying the way in which sport was seen to boost the LPDR’s profile in international affairs. Despite Laos competing in just three sports in Moscow—boxing, shooting, and athletics—and winning no medals, the country’s inaugural games was marked as a defining moment in the history of the nation. On the eve of the games Vientiane Mai reported: The glory and fame of our youthful Lao People’s Democratic Republic resounds on the world stage [and is] growing every day. The team representing Laos has a crucial role to play in showing our enthusiasm to the people of the world—not at the United Nations or international meetings but at the [22nd] Great [Olympic] Festival, and beyond.64

“Glory” (kiattisak) has great resonance in Lao, combining words for prestige (kiat) and authority (sak) that might typically have been applied to monarchs. Here the kiattisak accrued to the new state and of course the party, while the country as a whole would revel in the “fame” (seu siang) that came with being on the world’s biggest stage. Team manager and LOC vice president, Souli Nanthavong, conceded Laos had no hope of winning a medal, and neither press nor administrative reports gave any attention to the athletes or results. Rather, the success the Olympic Games was evidenced in participation alone, since it enhanced Laos’ international reputation by providing evidence of membership of the community of nations—just like membership of the United Nations and attendance of international meetings. By finally joining the Olympic movement, Laos had caught up with regional rivals in Southeast Asia, which (despite most boycotting the Moscow games) had been participating for decades.65 Competing in Moscow, Vientiane Mai summarized, demonstrated “greatness in the history of the nation, fi lling all Lao people with pride and enthusiasm.”66

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Press and official reports repeatedly stressed the unprecedented nature of this achievement—the fact it was the “first time” Laos had competed at this level—as evidence of its superiority to the RLG. As Vientiane Mai put it: “Although the LPDR couldn’t send greatly skilled athletes in every sport, we are proud that this is the first time in history that our Lao sports circles have been able to compete at the Olympic Games.”67 MESRA’s first five-year report (1975–1980) boasted of competing “for the first time” at Moscow, placing the Olympics at the center of Lao achievement in sports since 1975: “When compared with the old regime . . . the role and influence of Lao sports circles has been elevated on the world stage, finally achieving the honor of competing in the Olympic Games, something that had never before been achieved in the history of Lao sports circles.”68 Six years later, the LOC made a similar point, boasting of participation in the “historic games, the 22nd Summer Olympics.”69 Such boasts were made as evidence that the new regime had built a stronger nation than that it inherited. In so doing, the party claimed a unique place in Lao national history, reinforcing its claim to be representative of a unified nation and state. Beneath the self-congratulation, the party’s celebration of Olympic membership drew on divergent, even competing, notions of internationalism. On the one hand, grand statements by Lao leaders about participating on the world stage reflected the universal ideals of Olympic internationalism, the Olympic movement’s unique “status as a redemptive and inspirational internationalism,” which pervades Olympic historiography (and hagiography).70 This variety of internationalism is typified by Pierre de Coubertin’s rationalist belief in Olympic pacification. Coubertin, who had been certain that war arose from ignorance, had felt that gathering the nations of the world in a spirit of harmony would ensure mutual understanding and peace. “To attain this end,” he wrote in 1896, “what better means than to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility?” John MacAloon dubs the result a form of popular education or, more precisely, “popular ethnography”: “The Athens Olympics [of 1896] drew athletes, officials, and spectators alike not only into making contact with foreigners but into condensing, expressing, and exchanging images and judgments on exotic national characters, social institutions, and styles of life.”71 Despite recognition that the games were not above ideology, as Coubertin proclaimed, the mythology of Olympic internationalism soon became inseparable from the event itself. 72 In many cases, reports in Laos evoked motifs of Olympic internationalism in the same spirit of universalism. The pregames report in Vientiane Mai

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added: “More than [the honor of competing], we are proud that we can sincerely display our desire for cooperation and solidarity, [our desire] to be friends with all countries in the world, like five spoons attached to one another, meaning the five continents living together in solidarity and in peace with each other.”73 In this sense, the LOC was justified in drawing a parallel between competing at Moscow and membership of the United Nations. Many of its early activities also reflected a commitment to this kind of Olympic internationalism: the LOC attended IOC meetings in Japan in 1979, when it joined the IOC as a temporary member, and the following year in the United States—which it typically harangued as reactionary and imperialist—when it was made a full member. The LOC then attended the IOC Congress in Baden-Baden, West Germany, the year after the Moscow games. Lao representatives also met on several occasions with leaders of the Olympic movement, particularly Samaranch, who was said to have “built a good word picture of Lao sport continuing into the world.” In addition, at the IOC Congress in Baden-Baden, the LOC undertook to write an article titled “Peace is a condition of sport, sport is an ambassador of peace,” capturing all the mythology of Olympic internationalism.74 Alongside universalist modes of internationalism, Lao involvement in the Olympic movement served its membership of the “extended socialist family.” Although the Olympic movement was at first criticized by Marxist internationalists for enshrining the nation, socialist countries progressively accepted the national basis of the games.75 Yet the Soviet Union and other communist countries never conceded that sport or the Olympic movement should or even could be apolitical, remaining adamant that the games provided an opportunity to prove the superiority of socialist sport and socialism.76 Even before the boycott, when the USSR had bid for the games to present itself as a “normal and civilized” nation and to showcase its peaceful participation in international affairs, the Cold War history of ideological struggle that made this objective relevant was never far from view. The LOC likewise viewed sport as an instrument to serve the revolutionary political interests of the party-state, ensuring the country’s first Olympic Games were embraced for reasons of socialist internationalism as well as Olympic internationalism. Laos’ enthusiasm for the Olympics as a form of international socialist engagement was clear even before the 1980 games began. In the first instance, the decision to form the LOC and Lao sports federations was taken to facilitate Lao participation in Moscow, and the Soviet “comrade,” Rokunoski, had seen the process through.77 Shortly after that, an LOC delegation

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attended the Socialist Sports Congress for the first time in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, which reportedly “opened a new era of sporting relations with fraternal socialist countries.” Oddly, the original (typed) version of the LOC’s report did not include the words “fraternal socialist” (sangkhomninyom ai nong), the text reading only that relations had been opened “with countries.” Given that this sentence was not grammatically complete in Lao, we can only wonder as to why “fraternal socialist” was left off the original version of the report. In any case, the handwritten addition of the modifier “fraternal socialist” catches the eye, hinting at the politics of report writing and the perceived incompleteness in Laos of “countries” that are not “fraternal socialist” ones. In terms of socialist rhetoric, the formulaic phrase is weightier than the sum of its parts. In practical terms, the Socialist Sports Congress reinforced the LOC’s engagement with the socialist bloc by providing aid for Laos to participate in Moscow the following year.78 Most of all, the theme of socialist internationalism was intensified by the US-led boycott of Moscow in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which would be forever indivisible from the 1980 games. Despite the USSR having bid for the games to trumpet its integration into the international community, the boycott breathed new life into the ideological contest between East and West, transforming the event into a key arena of the Cold War.79 Early in 1980, the LOC announced its solidarity with the socialist bloc in “resisting” the boycott, which it condemned as “the overthrow of the Olympics by the American imperialists.” This so-called resistance involved participating in “secret meetings,” described as “serious and heated.” It seems unlikely the Lao would have had much impact at such meetings, but the heightened tension of the times fueled the rhetoric of socialist solidarity in the young country. Thereafter, press and administrative reports in Laos were relentless in celebrating socialist solidarity and criticizing the Americans, a skill in which Lao propagandists had a long-established penchant. The LOC also staged rallies to support the games and “denounce the biased outlook” of the Americans.80 Responses to the boycott ratcheted up the existing tenor of Cold War rhetoric in Laos. The Lao position of resisting the boycott also reinforced regional divisions in Southeast Asia, as the countries of ASEAN joined the boycott. Celebration of socialist solidarity peaked in the lead-up to the opening ceremony at Moscow. Asked before the games about the relationship between Laos, the USSR, and other socialist nations, team manager Souli Nanthavong eff used that the Soviet Union was a “great and trusted friend of Laos,” which had provided “assistance and support in many forms and col-

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ors” to improve the national economy. Noting the difficulties of the “liberation era,” he added that the Soviet Union and other “fraternal socialist countries” had supported the development of Lao sport by providing coaches and equipment.81 During the games, Vientiane Mai carried stories discussing sport in other socialist countries, including the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. It also carried reports on the successful preparations despite the boycott and the “grave error” of the boycott, quoting a Japanese official who may have given a perception of balance. Each article reinforced the ideological link between the games and socialism. Vientiane Mai again celebrated the socialist triumph of the games after they closed two weeks later: While the world’s imperialists, reactionaries, and a number of their lackeys acted extremely in not taking part, the games ultimately opened at the place and time determined by the International Olympic Committee. This was a great victory for all socialist countries as it was for all countries and all people who have ideals of solidarity, meeting, talking, and binding themselves together by not harboring divisions based on race, skin color, religion, or system of government.82

In addition to celebrating the success of the games for socialism, this excerpt implicitly claimed ideals of Olympic internationalism and nondiscrimination as socialist values. Such responses demonstrated the manifold ways in which the regime sought to draw benefit from the Moscow games. Viewed in this way, participation by Laos—a tiny nation thousands of miles from the Soviet Union with a tiny team—not only demonstrated its membership of the Marxist-Leninist world, thus sharing in a victory for socialism and all socialist nations; it also demonstrated the highest standards of humanism. In a 1987 report on the LOC’s first eight years (1978–1986), written seven years after Laos’ first Olympics, the Moscow games remained the greatest highlight of Lao sporting achievement. The LOC recalled again that the 1980 games “displayed our supreme solidarity [and] our brilliant international proletarian spirit. . . . The period of preparing and entering our team showed our complete support of the USSR in relation to sport and politics.”83 Reviewing socialist sport as a whole, the LOC noted three major achievements since being founded in 1978, each of which was related directly to socialism: (1) adopting the “true essence of socialist sport”; (2) lifting the level of sporting relations with socialist countries and international sporting

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organizations; and (3) gaining good domestic results and the spirit of the “extended socialist family.”84 “Olympism and socialism,” the LOC added, “are not in conflict,” since both “built a budding image of peace.” Whatever the merits of the LOC’s achievements, this argument was patently untrue: while Olympism was founded explicitly on the basis of sports being above politics and ideology, socialist sport was equally explicit in its political objectives. Laos confirmed the incompatibility of two ideologies when it joined the Soviet Union’s retaliatory boycott of Los Angeles in 1984. Given a choice between two forms of internationalism in the context of the Olympic Games, the Lao party-state embraced membership of the Olympic movement as a means of consolidating its place in a transnational community of MarxistLeninist nations.

Vientiane 1985 and beyond Inspired by the Moscow Olympics, domestic sports festivals were reborn in the decade after 1975 according to socialist aesthetics and ideology. Although these festivals developed over a period of time, the most impressive succession of spectacles took place in 1985, the tenth anniversary of the LPDR, and culminated in the first National Games of the socialist era. The first of these celebrations was an elaborate sports festival in January marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. Based on photographic records, one of the most striking features of this event was a placard section in the crowd, which formed montages of the hammer and sickle, the national flag, and the slogan “30th anniversary” (figure 7.2). Tiny and basic compared to the extraordinary placard sections in other socialist countries, the flags nevertheless embodied the same cooperative synergy in conveying the key images of the party, the nation, and socialism.85 Seated in the VIP grandstand overseeing the display of party-state— and the nation with which it sought to make itself isomorphic—were leaders and functionaries headed by President Souphanouvong (figure 7.3). By contrast with the undifferentiated masses in the crowd, whose job was to enjoy the atmosphere, and the performers on the stadium field, whose job was to remain in motion, the dignitaries projected an image of calm and solemnity. As discussed in chapter four, this was commensurate with their role as national leaders in the modern theatrics of power. Reinforcing the ascen-

Figure 7.2. Spectacular socialist synergy: a placard section displays the LPRP flag (the hammer and sickle), the national flag, and the words “30th anniversary,” at a sports festival marking this milestone in the history of the LPRP (1985). (Courtesy Khaosan Pathet Lao)

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Figure 7.3. President Souphanouvong presides over a sports festival marking the 30th anniversary of the LPRP in 1985. The stillness and sobriety of the leaders contrasted with the activity of participants, tasked with keeping the revolution in motion, and ordinary people in the crowd, whose job was to enjoy the atmosphere. (Courtesy Khaosan Pathet Lao)

dency of the party-state over society, their presiding role and elevated position revealed persistent hierarchies that undermined the myth of socialist Laos as an undifferentiated society. Headed by Souphanouvong, whose thirst for discipline, restraint, and physical training was discussed in chapter six, this group of men also confirmed that, despite advances made by women’s sport since 1975, the sports festival remained a ritual of masculinity in the militarist state of socialist Laos. A second sporting highlight in 1985 was the official opening of the sports season, which was marked by a special ceremony modeled on the Olympics and its derivatives. This event provided further insights into the symbolic aspects of socialist sports festivals in Laos. Like others, the ceremony included a parade of uniformed athletes marching behind signboards denoting their teams, which represented government ministries and other organs of the state. Recalling MacAloon’s theory of Olympic spectacle, the parade privileged the existence of the Lao state, as the collective unit, while also granting a place and identity to its constituent parts—in this case, the min-

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istries and other state organizations.86 The parade also featured athletes carrying a signboard reading “long live world peace,”87 giving expression to the first word of the state motto, as well as to the discursive themes of peace that feature in international socialism and Olympic internationalism, the global norms to which Lao sport aspired. Without doubt, the greatest sporting highlight of 1985 was the inaugural socialist National Games in Vientiane. In keeping with the theme of new beginnings, new society, and new people, the 1985 event was called the “First National Games,” as royalist antecedents in 1961 and 1964 were symbolically (and perhaps literally) forgotten. As the games took place in late November, just before the tenth anniversary of the LPDR, a large red banner reading “long live the spirit of December 2,” was slung across the main entrance into the stadium (as it would have appeared on all state buildings). In this manner, the National Games were linked to National Day, the climax of the socialist ritual calendar. The 1987 National Games and many events conducted since then have been similarly scheduled to coincide with December 2. The opening ceremony of the National Games employed familiar modes of Olympic spectacle: athletes’ parade and assembly, National Games torch and flame, and calisthenics displays featuring hundreds of performers. Based on global models, Olympic symbols and technologies had also featured in the National Games of the early 1960s, but they were now appropriated and adapted along socialist lines. Like the “December 2” slogan, the Olympic motto was displayed in large white characters (in Latin) on wide red banners in the stadium. Similarly, the newly minted National Games logo incorporated the national flag, olive branches, Olympic rings, Olympic torch, and a cog, a symbol of industry in both senses of the word (figure 7.4).88 In another innovation, the teams that competed in the games represented numbered “zones” rather than provinces, presumably reflecting the country’s five military zones.89 Symbolically, the assembly emphasized the national whole while reinforcing its constituent identities, the military zones, in which case these zones would have assumed a greater prominence than the provinces. While we can only speculate, the motivation may have been to reinforce a characteristically socialist mode of solidarity, since the zones were a product of the war, while downplaying existing provincial solidarities. The most distinctive features of the new National Games, if compared with similar events in colonial and royalist Laos, were mass calisthenics displays. While basic by comparison with the extraordinary spectacles of communist Chinese and North Korean, such displays relied on similar principles of choreographing large numbers of human bodies to achieve a spectacular

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Figure 7.4. Olympic symbols, including an Olympic-style torch, olive branches, and the Olympic rings, were combined with the national flag and a cog (to denote industry) in the National Games logo (1987). (Courtesy Khaosan Pathet Lao)

presentation of order, regulation, and discipline—the socialist body politic in motion.90 The result was a collective, egalitarian, and militaristic aesthetic, highlighting state discourses of discipline, regulation, and social control.91 The performers in these rituals of the socialist state—schoolchildren and college students—were represented as exemplary citizen-subjects of the new state, the first generation of new socialist people that had been brought up since 1975 (figure 7.5, top). Their youth union uniforms of dark trousers/skirts, white shirts, and, in the case of the youngest participants, red scarves flattened social distinctions based on gender, ethnicity, and class, stressing socialist motifs of uniformity, order, and motion as the dominant themes of the spectacle. Another socialist feature was large red flags carried by participants in the calisthenics displays, forming orderly patterns on the stadium field (figure 7.5, bottom).92 Whereas mass exercises promoted at schools and workplaces sought principally to create the new socialist person as a healthy citizen, the calisthenics displays of sports festivals were a creative performance, giving movement and dynamism to national ideology. Coinciding with national events and anniversaries, they were examples of what John Hoberman calls “sportive expressionism,” the expression of ideology through sport and physical culture.93 Just a decade old and facing conditions of hardship and poverty,

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Figure 7.5. Movement, order, and discipline: calisthenics displays at the first National Games of the LPDR era in Vientiane, 1985 (above), and the second National Games in Savannakhet, 1987 (below). (Courtesy Khaosan Pathet Lao)

the Lao state was much weaker than the performance suggested. Nevertheless, the notion of sportive expressionism helps to explain the appeal of mass calisthenics displays to socialist and other regimes aspiring to totalitarian rule, for they arrange the state and society the way they ought to be arranged, embodying an idealized expression of the new socialist society.

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The National Games and other sports festivals exhibited a degree of popularity and spontaneity that set them apart from formal state celebrations. Drawing on research by Grant Evans, James Scott cites official National Day parades in socialist Laos as an exemplary “authorized” state celebration. Highly stage-managed affairs, such events structured the hierarchy of the nation under the aegis of the party-state, linking it to a wider MarxistLeninist world. Yet the ordinary people (pasason) in whose name the Lao republic had been created were conspicuously absent from such events. By contrast with the “all actors and no audience” performance of such state pageantry, sporting events constituted “a kind of substitute for popular participation” combining the official and the popular.94 With party-state leaders seated prominently in a new grandstand of the National Stadium (fittingly designed and funded by the Soviets), the spatial organization of such events reinforced the leadership role of the party, just as the National Day parades did. Unlike those events, the presence of spectators at state sporting spectaculars reinforced the categories of the people and society, permitting the symbolic ordering of relations between them and the ruling partystate.95 The combination of popular participation and official pomp in official sporting events situated them between authorized state celebrations and traditional festivals that were curtailed by the new regime, representing an effective means of popularizing official occasions and ordering social relations in socialist society. In her discussion of ideology and terror, Hannah Arendt argues that the key feature of totalitarianism is the ideological obsession with impermanence, as expressed through motifs of constant reconstruction and development. Whereas other governing systems craft laws in pursuit of stability, “in the interpretation of totalitarianism, all laws have become laws of movement.”96 Although there are valid reasons to question whether socialist Laos was really totalitarian, totalitarianism remains a valuable concept for capturing the totalizing ambitions of the LPRP regime, as expressed in its objective to build a new society and new socialist person, and in its motifs of constant reconstruction and development.97 As Arendt stresses, totalitarian movements “can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion.”98 If the movement stops, so does the government and so, ultimately, does the revolution. As in other socialist societies, motifs of motion were exemplified by the ideology of physical movement. In China, writes Susan Brownell, “Mao linked the training of the body with the strength of the nation in a new way—through the notion of continuous revolution, which was to be carried

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out by an active body on behalf of a nation that was forever in motion.”99 Likewise in Laos, the regimented physical movement that defi ned socialist sports festivals literally mobilized—by putting into motion—the socialist mantra of perpetual revolution. Through this motion, sports spectacles not only linked the active body with the nation in motion, ostensibly forever, but projected an image of the united party-state, with which the nation was isomorphic, residing at the axis of the centripetal force revolving around it. Th rough the various modes of movement examined in this chapter—linguistic, literal, and symbolic—socialist spectator sport kept the Lao revolution in motion, metaphorically turning (pativat) around the party-state.100

Demobilizing the revolution Laos remained a minnow in the sporting world after the formation of the LPDR in 1975. Victories were rare and, from outside the country, Lao sport was probably imperceptible. Inside the country, however, the new regime placed an increased emphasis on sport, mobilizing it as a means of promoting socialist revolution and national progress. The party-state created its own sporting heroes, raised the profi le of gender equality, and forged international sporting relationships with the socialist bloc. It joined the Olympic movement, attended its first Olympic Games, and marked domestic political occasions with spectacular sporting events and festivals, culminating in the socialist National Games. It also talked endlessly about sport. Through these efforts, the party-state aimed to mobilize the population in the name of the revolution. The RLG had embraced similar events and performances, but by virtue of privileging physical endeavor over intellectual pursuits, the LPDR adopted them with greater ideological fervor. In a miniature recreation of Soviet socialist sport, socialist spectator sport in Laos provided a means for the party-state to assert the superiority of socialism and the glory of the socialist revolution. Although it is hard to gauge the success of this project, it is unlikely that the new sports administration achieved its goals in the tactical sense of actually mobilizing the population to carry out the revolution. Besides anything else, it lacked resources, and more generally, the population was most interested in getting by under difficult circumstances than the excitement of revolutionary fervor. Nevertheless, this chapter has sought to document how, irrespective of success or failure in these terms, mobilization campaigns

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constituted forces of movement in and of themselves. Through such processes, socialist spectator sport put into motion the party’s conceit that it  exercised unified and uniform power across the national territory. In doing so, spectator sport lent motion—if not substance—to the “partystate idea,” producing an image of perpetual movement that gave expression to the ideology of ongoing reconstruction and development under the new regime. The tragic irony, of course, was that early socialist Laos was characterized not by dynamic reconstruction and development but by poverty and stasis. The impact of natural disasters, material limitations, and, above all, disastrous policies hobbled the revolution from the outset. Initially, the profound shortcomings of the economic and technological revolutions did not terminate the revolution in culture and thought, instead boosting its importance relative to the first and second revolutions.101 Given the imperative of constant movement, the dynamism of spectator sport—both on the field and on the page—offered one of the few means of keeping the revolution moving. Despite aesthetic and symbolic similarities, then, the dynamics of socialist sport reversed the theatrics of power embodied in Phoumi Nosavan’s National Games of the 1960s. In those games, mirroring the theatre state, the emphasis had been on assembling the nation on the stadium field, and on the stillness that reigned as Phoumi symbolically contained the national citizenry within the confines of the nation/stadium. In socialist sporting spectacles, by contrast, the priority was to keep the revolution in motion. But it was too much to ask: movement alone—be it literal, linguistic, or symbolic—does not a revolution make. The problem with perpetual motion, to extend the metaphor, is its physical impossibility. Just as the laws of thermodynamics rule in the world of physics, time inevitably caught up with revolutionary Lao politics. When it did, the revolution—in sport as in every other field—ground to a halt. As Grant Evans wrote after its collapse, “Socialism in Laos lasted barely fi fteen years. The roots it sunk were shallow and they were easily uprooted.”102 To put it another way, the revolution was easily demobilized; inertia achieved much of the job by itself. Literal and metaphorical demobilization did not spell the end of the regime, however, nor of its enthusiasm for sport and physical culture. As the Lao party-state embarked on major reforms aimed at fostering capitalist economic development, particularly after the fourth congress of the LPRP in 1986, it was able to retain its stranglehold on political power. In postsocialist Laos, as scholars have called what followed,

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motifs of socialist mobilization and construction would quickly morph into an orthodox mantra of national development, both in sport and in government more generally, while themes of building a new socialist person and new socialist society transformed into an equally orthodox narrative of cultural nationalism.

8 Vientiane Games, 2009

It is late 2009 and final preparations are underway for the 25th Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in Vientiane.1 A relatively vast new stadium complex has been completed on the city’s outskirts; flags of the eleven competing nations—Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam— flutter in the December breeze above pretty flower beds, constructed for the occasion in front of sports venues, national monuments, and government buildings; and finishing touches are applied to roads and other new infrastructure. Lao organizers are thrilled to finally be hosting the SEA Games, especially as this year marks the 50th anniversary of the first SEAP Games in 1959, the forerunner of the current event. Somsavat Lengsavad, chairman of the organizing committee, boasts of the pride and honor of hosting the games, adding that Laos is “one of the founding fathers of this event.” The SEA Games will “put Laos on the map,” “showcase the fine tradition of the country to our friends from overseas,” promote tourism, and attract foreign investment.2 More immediately, the SEA Games represent a spectacular means of boosting the prestige of the LPRP regime. With almost 5,000 athletes competing in 25 sports and 383 events, it will be the biggest state spectacle in living memory, and almost certainly in Lao history. Hosting a major international event is said to demonstrate Laos’ credentials as a modern nation. “The SEA Games in Laos is a magnificent example of what sports can do . . . and Laos has joined the giants in this respect,” a spokesman tells the Bangkok Post.3 Just as the previous year’s Beijing Olympics announced China’s emergence as a global power, Vientiane 2009 represents a regional comingout party for the Lao party-state, the culmination of the revolutionary struggle for independence and more than three decades of development under the LPRP. As the high-profi le Somsavat, who is also deputy prime minister and former foreign minister, summarizes: “The SEA Games [are] an

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important way of showing the development of Laos over the last 34 years [since 1975]. Friendly countries have praised our political stability while national socioeconomic development has continued to grow.”4 Less expected is widespread support for the 2009 SEA Games among the transnational Lao diaspora, formed from the exodus of refugees after the party-state’s 1975 rise to power. Overseas Lao fans discuss the event in a Facebook group and on websites, some set up well before the official SEA Games site.5 Some contributors plan to travel to Laos for the games, with one enthusing: “I have built my whole year around this.”6 Identified by the flag of the pre-1975 Kingdom of Laos, this poster’s enthusiasm suggests the event may be linking Lao communities still otherwise separated by politics, more than three decades after the revolution. Yet controversies have dogged the games from the start and many people are anxious. Due to the lack of suitable venues, the number of sports in Vientiane has almost been halved from the previous games in Thailand. The omission of Olympic sports such as basketball and gymnastics has outraged some countries, while the addition of novelty sports has prompted additional ridicule.7 Regional officials have emphasized the “obstacles” faced by these “frugal SEA Games” and the event’s loss of “glamour.”8 Malaysia’s sports minister has dismissed the event as “community Games,” leading Lao organizers to counter that Laos is “a poor country with limited facilities.” If this defense is realistic and designed to generate sympathy, it nevertheless undermines the narrative of national development championed by the ruling party.9 Most alarmingly for many observers, preparations have highlighted Laos’ dependence on its neighbors, especially China. The China Development Bank has financed the $100 million stadium complex, Vietnamese company Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) has funded the $19 million athlete’s village, and the Asian Olympic Committee, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, and Brunei have underwritten various other facilities.10 Although smaller venues have been gifted to the government, the main stadium and athlete’s village are part of secretive commercial deals. With little fanfare, HAGL has been awarded a 10,000 hectare concession to plant rubber in southern Laos, which will initially yield vast amounts of timber. Most controversially, the Chinese stadium consortium, according to initial reports, was to be granted a fift y-year concession on 1,640 hectares of marshland near the That Luang stupa to develop a gleaming “New City Development Project,” featuring up-market housing, an industrial zone, shopping centers, and hotels. As rumors circulate that up to 50,000 Chinese immigrants

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will settle this new “Chinatown,” opponents have condemned the deal for undermining Lao sovereignty. An anonymous web critic sums up misgivings when he or she slams the deal as treason (khai sat), literally selling out the nation.11 The development has been scaled back, but this raises the specter of more debt when rumors suggest that teachers have not been paid for months. “Laos stumbles on path to sporting glory,” summarizes the New York Times.12 On December 2, Lao National Day, the first football matches kick off at the new stadium. Oddly, given the occasion, the evening’s fi xture does not feature Laos, but the main match boasts its two greatest rivals, Thailand vs. Vietnam. With both teams among the gold medal favorites, this should be a great match for “the neutrals,” in sporting parlance. But as the stands fill with the red and yellow of Vietnamese shirts and flags, it is clear the local fans have different ideas. The Vietnamese bias is not unexpected—the local press predicted it after Vietnamese tour companies snapped up wads of tickets— but many are Lao fans, not Vietnamese. After Vietnam’s late equalizer sparks delirium and relief, a few fans I speak with admit they are of Vietnamese background, but most profess simply to “hating” (sang) Thailand more than Vietnam. One woman says Thailand is hard (khaeng) while Vietnam is soft (on). Many fans suggest Vietnam and Laos are ai nong kan, older brother/ younger brother, since both are communist, mirroring the “special relationship” rhetoric of the party-state. One fan, intriguingly, contrasts this relationship with the Lao and Thai, who she says are phi nong kan (older/younger sibling), explaining this means they are not as close as the ai nong Lao and Vietnamese. Another fan explains later that “we understand the Thai . . . Thai language and Lao are 90 percent the same, but Lao people get along well with Vietnam.” After seeing a Thai TV report reporting the anti-Thai bias in Vientiane, a Lao friend exclaims to me: “I say you [the TV show] are right. Don’t you know [we hate the Thai]?” Five days later Laos meets Indonesia in its second group match in men’s football. Having already drawn with Myanmar, the team must win to keep its tournament hopes alive. The small grandstands of the Chao Anouvong Stadium—the former national stadium in downtown Vientiane—overflow with young Lao fans, dressed in white with blue and red trim, the Lao colors, waving national flags and wearing “Lao su su” headbands. Lao su su! Lao su su! Lao su su! they cry—“Laos go go” or, literally, “Laos fight fight.” Horns and drums add to the cacophony, as laughter, teasing, and squeals fi ll the air (figure 8.1). Laos fails to score in the first half. But in the sixty-sixth minute, Lao striker Lamnao threads the ball through the Indonesian defense, sparking

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Figure 8.1. Vientiane 2009: Laos’ first SEA Games as host sparked an unprecedented outpouring of popular nationalist sentiment, as seen here before the decisive men’s football group match between the host team and Indonesia. (Photo by author)

a Geertzian symbolic outbreak of energy. He and his teammates jump the advertising hoardings and embrace the ecstatic crowd, joining with their people. Ten minutes later, Lamnao scores again, cementing the result and his new status as national hero. A festival mood reigns; supporters hold aloft portraits of two more national heroes, Kaysone Phomvihane and Souphanouvong, sparking yet more communal revelry. A few days later, the SEA Games are officially opened by President Choummaly Sayasone in a spectacular ceremony at the new National Stadium. Also watching on are the prime ministers of Laos’ Southeast Asian neighbors—Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam—with the state press boasting that this is the first time so many leaders have attended the games. The ceremony constitutes spectacular state theatre, reinforcing the symbols of nationalism and regional fraternity as party-state VIPs look down from their loft y and visible perch in the VIP grandstand.

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With local flourishes added, the ceremony follows the familiar script of the Olympics, National Games, and five decades of SEAP/SEA Games. National and SEA Games flags are raised, a military marching band plays revolutionary music, athletes parade and assemble on the stadium field, President Choummaly declares the games open, the flame is ignited, and thousands of schoolchildren perform cultural demonstrations of Lao history. The polite smile of the Thai prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, disappears as the announcer declares in Lao then English: “The nation Lao has been invaded, the capital sacked, and the people . . . heavily, bitterly, and bloodily oppressed by foreign powers,” a reference to the Siamese sacking of Vientiane in 1828 and the colonial era that followed. Yet, besides revolutionary music and a reference to “beloved leader Kaysone Phomvihane,” the Lao revolution is surprisingly absent. Though older and more subdued than at the football game, the crowd erupts on numerous occasions, including moments when the faces of Somsavat and Choummaly flash onto the giant screens. As the flame is ignited—by the arrow of Lao folk legend “Sinxay of the new era”—there is another symbolic outbreak of energy as fireworks fi ll the sky.13 At this moment, a member of an overseas delegation later tells me, visiting representatives of overseas Lao communities—having returned to Laos for the first time since escaping decades earlier as refugees—weep with joy at the emotion of the event. At this moment of national glory, there is again one Laos, a single transnational Lao community centered on the Lao homeland. Nine days and hundreds of events later, the SEA Games close in similar style at the same location. By now everyone—the crowd, participants, and especially officials—is visibly more relaxed. Laos has won thirty-three gold medals, easily surpassing its ambitious target of twenty-five (for the 25th Games) and smashing its previous best of five. Organizers have been roundly praised for a successful event, far outstripping expectations at home and abroad. Most of all, the games have provided great national pride and joy for the vast majority of Lao, particularly the country’s youth, who had probably doubted they’d ever see anything like this event in Laos. Somsavat has been irrepressible, each day attending events and being photographed with Laos’ gold medalists, who rush to hug him before their families. Now, he accepts the International Olympic Committee (IOC) President’s Trophy from IOC Vice President Ng Ser Miang, who says it is “in recognition of your outstanding effort in the promotion of sport in Laos . . . [and] for fulfi lling the Olympic ideals as expounded by Pierre de Coubertin. . . . You have orga-

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nized excellent Games.”14 The national flag is ubiquitous and Lao su su has become the national moniker. There have been problems, of course. The ticketing system has been inadequate, leading to dangerous scenes when tickets for Laos’ football semifinal went on sale. Visitors have encountered problems with information, transport, and unhelpful security guards and police. Local fans are perplexed there has been no Lao-language version of the official website. Some are disappointed at what they consider poor organization and a lack of civility—one interlocutor despairs that the atmosphere was like that of a rowdy temple festival. As always, there have been murmurings of cheating among foreign delegations, which accuse the hosts and Vietnam, in particular, a less flattering reference to the two countries’ alliance. But none of this has dampened the pride and, frankly, astonishment at the success of the SEA Games. All—even those with complaints—declare their “pride” (phum chai) at the success of the event, the performance of the Lao team, and the popular support of the Lao people, all of which was utterly unprecedented for Lao fans. Local pride is reinforced by effusive praise abroad. In the Philippines, where criticisms had perhaps been most scathing, the Lao games are reported to have resulted in “tourism gold” and much improved investment prospects, such was the positive image left by the games.15 In Thailand, an editorial in The Nation (Bangkok) is titled, “First-time SEA Games host gives us a lesson or two,” a stark reversal of the commentary Lao usually expect from the Thai press.16 The Associated Press has perhaps captured the surprise most colorfully. In a widely syndicated article, published partway through the event, its correspondent declared: “A coup of sorts is under way in dirt poor, Communist-ruled Laos: contrary to dire predictions, it’s staging the biggest sporting event in its history to rave reviews.”17

The SEA Games in historical context The day after the closing ceremony, the official website celebrated the 2009 SEA Games as a “Games of many firsts,” when Laos had finally hosted the event and “shed its ‘whipping boys’ or ‘minnows’ tag.”18 This was not surprising, but beneath these surface realities—and the sporting clichés favored by the Malaysian website operators—the games represented the country’s latest and undoubtedly greatest performance of the link between physical contests, ideas, and practices, on the one hand, and politics and culture, on the other. It is in this historical context that the 2009 event must be considered.

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Such an overview provides a valuable means of summing up the arguments of this book, and of offering conclusions based on them. Just as the development of sport and physical culture emerged from and molded colonial, royalist, and socialist societies, the successes and controversies of the 2009 SEA Games stemmed from and shaped postsocialist history, politics, and culture. Despite jettisoning its goal, from the 1980s, of building new socialist people and socialism, the LPRP retained its monopoly of state power based on its new, if hardly original, mantra of enhancing “national socioeconomic development.” Within a few short years, the collapse of communism in Europe intensified the imperative for new foreign investment laws and fresh sources of foreign aid, and in 1997 Laos acceded to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).19 Besides the possibilities of regional trade and cooperation that ASEAN membership would open up, Lao officials saw accession as “one big confidence-building mechanism.”20 This was reflected in the profound implications of Laos’ discovery of a pan-Southeast Asian identity, which replaced socialist solidarity between the Indochinese states as Laos’ primary window into world politics and economy. Although the joy of ASEAN accession was dulled by the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the seventh Congress of the LPRP in 2001 adopted the official goal of harnessing economic growth of 7 percent per year, with the grand aim—tagged “Vision 2020”—“graduating” from least developed country (LDC) status by 2020.21 Four years later, Laos assumed the chair of ASEAN, leading to a frenzy of construction in preparation for hosting the country’s first ASEAN Summit, foreshadowing preparations a few years later for the SEA Games. In the field of sport and physical culture, the shift to postsocialist developmentalism was reflected in the formation of the National Sports Committee (NSC) in 1993. Positioned alongside the Lao Olympic Committee within the Prime Minister’s Office, and funded through the national sports lottery, the NSC promoted sport and physical culture according to the ideology of national development. When it was established in 1999, the committee’s newspaper Khao Kila (Sports News) adopted the slogan, “Sport builds people; People build the nation.”22 A year later, the NSC asserted: “Lao sport in the new millennium . . . must be concerned with the nation’s socioeconomic development plan,” meaning it was expected to help achieve growth targets associated with Vision 2020. The NSC also laid out its plan, “beginning with the twenty-first century,” to “harmonize” sport with “national defense and construction activities under the strategic slogan of globalization”:

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Satavat mai / visaithat kwang kai / kila lao kao pai / pathetsat sivilai (New century / far-sighted vision / Lao sports march forward / civilized nation).23

Sport now had a key role to play in fostering human resource development, a buzzword of the international development industry that had also taken root in Laos. The party aimed for human resource development to “foster knowledge, improve capacity, and build intelligence among the Lao people,” but first of all these people needed a “complete body and strong health.” To attain strong health, according to the NSC plan, the people of Laos must have “a good environment, good sanitation, and must play sport.”24 Performative technologies and the messages behind them also changed with the influx of global norms of capitalism. Socialist-style placard sections remained a feature of the National Games into the late 1990s, but instead of displaying the hammer and sickle, as in the mid-1980s, they spelled out the slogan kila-sukkhaphap-mittaphap-santiphap (sport-health-friendshippeace). By 2005 in Savannakhet, the placard montages had disappeared completely, and on the ubiquitous banners and billboards that remained, “peace” had been replaced with “development” (kanphatthana). Reflecting another critical transformation, these banners and billboards were no longer red with white writing, like the ubiquitous party slogans that appear around National Day each year, but were in the colors of local and multinational sponsors, notably Beer Lao and Pepsi. In this way, they now resembled billboards linking sport and health to Thai consumer products, such as M-150 (an energy drink) and Vitamilk (soymilk).25 Refracted through regional networks of commerce and distribution, the commodification of sport under global capitalism had finally reached Laos. Parallel changes in sports festivals encapsulated the postsocialist partystate’s adoption of “the reformulated concept of ‘culture in the new era,’ ” a euphemism for the return of Buddhist-infused traditionalism in the cultural domain.26 From the late 1980s, National Games opening ceremonies featured increasingly elaborate cultural performances. With men depicted as warriors and women as dancers, such performances were visibly more gendered than the uniformed calisthenics of socialist Laos. At the 2005 National Games in Savannakhet, a new breed of Lao pop stars, who were just starting to make a dent in a market saturated by Thai music, sang specially penned theme songs, adding modern sensibility and national pride to the occasion. Calisthenics displays were retained because they depicted a youthful, energetic, and disciplined nation, but these too were more modern and

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gendered than before—if also inescapably kitsch—with flashier uniforms, including short skirts, sequins, and pom-poms for the girls. The crescendo saw three athletic men in tracksuits waving the NSC, national, and party flag. The last of these flags was the hammer and sickle, but like slogans including “Long live the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party” and “Long live the spirit of December 2nd,” which also remained, the flag now referred purely to the party as an entity rather than to socialism as an ideology. National history was also incorporated into these occasions, extending a marriage between physical culture and historiography that emerged as early as the 1940s. The most obvious example was efforts in the 2000s to extend the “Kaysone cult,” as Grant Evans terms efforts to form a leadership cult around Kaysone Phomvihane, into the realm of sports, by wedding him and his image to the National Games.27 At the sixth National Games in Vientiane in 2000, a large portrait of Kaysone was positioned prominently on a light tower; five years later in Savannakhet, Kaysone’s birthplace, this handsome portrait had grown into an enormous billboard. Towering behind the public grandstand on the far side of the stadium, the former leader faced dignitaries in the VIP stand opposite and smiled benevolently upon the masses below. In addition, the 2005 games were opened on December 13, the 85th anniversary of Kaysone’s birthday, and, most enduringly, the host city of Savannakhet was renamed after the former leader. While many efforts to sanctify Kaysone had fallen flat over the years, the popularity of Kaysone and Souphanouvong portraits at the SEA Games a few years later suggested the mix with sport is a potent one. Still, the return of royalist historiography in recent years has forced Kaysone to share the stage of major sporting events with former kings who, together with select revolutionary leaders, are mythologized as national ancestors (banphabulut).28 Laos’ famous SEA Games match against Indonesia was played at the recently rebadged Chao Anou Stadium, named after the most famous Lao king, while fans and sports journalists hailed the Lao players as luk lan (descendants or, literally, children and nephews/nieces) of Fa Ngum, the first king of Lan Xang.29 Laos began its march towards hosting the 2009 SEA Games in Kuala Lumpur in 1989, when it rejoined the regional event just a few years after its first reforms—and almost a decade before joining ASEAN. The country won its first gold medal ten years later in Brunei, before claiming additional golds in 2001 and 2003, a further three in 2005, and five in 2007. If this represented a great improvement on the 1960s and 1980s, gold medals were only one measure of success. With its raison d’être of fostering national development and improving the nation’s image, the NSC’s 2001 vision for Lao

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sport and physical culture in the new millennium included hosting “international level” events, beginning at the “regional level” with the 2009 SEA Games.30 The SEA Games Council meeting of 2003 duly awarded Laos the 2009 games as anticipated.31 Although officials stressed the benefits of hosting the games for socioeconomic development, the primary consideration was national glory. As organizers later made clear, hosting the games demonstrated national capacity to organize a major international event, to be a “civilized nation.” If such hopes appear naive and clichéd, hosting the SEA Games mirrored the official mantra of development very closely. Most obviously, funding arrangements reflected the party-state’s policy of “turning land into capital”—using concessionary development as a lure for foreign investment.32 Likewise, regional investment in infrastructure for the SEA Games largely mirrored foreign investment in Laos, the vast majority of which came from Vietnam, China, and Thailand (though the latter was not as large an investor in the games as the other two).33 Unlike previous eras, when Laos depended on France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the communist bloc for investment and know-how, in the early twentieth century it looked to its Asian neighbors for foreign capital, and especially to China and Vietnam for a model for national development—the “Leninist road to capitalism,” as Evans calls it.34 Just as significantly, the entire undertaking of hosting the SEA Games resembled an enormous development project, even one of the party-state’s favored “mega-projects,” which featured prominently in the country’s 7th National Socio-Economic Development Plan of 2011. With the irrepressible Somsavat dressed in the LPDR team tracksuit and business trousers, presenting a fitting amalgam of sportive activity and commercial acumen, and almost daily handover ceremonies of everything from stadiums to tracksuits, the games provided a close-up of Lao-style development, particularly its dependence on foreign donors and investment, and particularly the opaque deals struck by LPRP leaders.35

Paradox and history The twin themes of national glory and foreign investment point to the central paradox of the 2009 SEA Games: although the event was immensely successful in projecting an image of national arrival, producing an unprecedented outbreak of popular nationalist sentiment under the LPRP, it was

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utterly dependent on foreign capital, sparking a controversy that defined the lead up to the event and genuinely seemed poised to undermine it. This paradox reflects broader antipathies in postsocialist Laos. The growing presence of the region’s reemergent hegemon, China, offers investment and know-how, but stokes latent xenophobia and is seen to threaten national sovereignty. Accusations of treason stemmed from the perception that Somsavat, who is of Chinese descent, was acting in Chinese rather than Lao interests, tapping into more general concerns at the growing presence of the Chinese in Laos. More recently, similar anxieties have coalesced around controversial plans to build a railway between Vientiane and Boten on the Chinese border. Heading up this project, too, not least because of his connections in China, Somsavat promised the train would link Laos with a pan-Asian network running from China to Singapore. But the cost was expected to be tremendous, a risk that could be defined in different ways. While foreign commentary centered on the dubious economics of the project, and implications for national sovereignty, everyday Lao concerns revolved around the belief that, as in the national stadium project and the proposed Chinatown development, Chinese workers would be used rather than locals. The SEA Games also gave life to Laos’ complex relationships with Thailand and Vietnam, historically the most important countries in Lao foreign affairs. On the one hand, organizers gratefully—even gleefully—took ownership of a new Thai-funded boxing stadium, and a Thai sporting goods company produced smart official merchandise. On the other, Lao were peeved by Thai coverage of the games—easily accessible in Laos—which predictably confirmed their conviction that the Thai disrespect them as inferiors. It is difficult to overstate the pervasiveness of such sentiments in contemporary Laos, which escalate from time to time into minor international incidents.36 A few years before the SEA Games, one controversy concerned the Thai fi lm Mak Te (Lucky Loser, 2006), a comedy in which the Lao national soccer team hires a Thai coach before beating Thailand and qualifying for the World Cup.37 The Lao ambassador to Thailand complained at the film’s mocking portrayal of the Lao as backward and stupid: “Our team is less developed than the Thai team, but it’s not fun to see it made into a joke in a Thai fi lm.”38 The fi lm was reedited to replace Laos with a fictional country, “Awee,” but, as a Thai fi lm critic recognized, “Lucky Loser represents a case of thoughtlessness, amplified by our patronizing attitude towards a poorer country whom we sometimes perceive as ‘cute’ or ‘simple.’ ”39 As Thongchai Winichakul puts it more generally, Laos remains in Thai eyes

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“the pitiful sibling of earlier days.”40 Lao perceive such scorn implicitly—as registered in visceral support for Vietnam in its SEA Games match against Thailand. Just as the fi lm controversy crystalized sport’s special capacity to distill national self-worth, the SEA Games match against Vietnam showed how sport provides a means for expressing feelings towards the Thai. Although Lao fans professed to “hate” the Thai, this was not hatred in the ultranationalist sense, which has been known to mar international sport elsewhere, but a rhetorical form framed by the dialectic of emulation and rivalry—or “lovehate” in a more popular idiom. Just as in the past, aspirational Lao continue to look to Thailand as a model of modernity and aspiration—minus its dark underside, which, in their own superior way, they contrast with Lao cultural purity.41 As the Lao ambassador’s comment suggested, it is not the issue of inequality that color Lao relations with the Thai—Thailand’s greater size and power is obvious—but perceived attitudes of arrogance that come with it.42 Lao critics of Thailand, often grinning as they professed to “hate” the Thai, hardly personified nationalist hatred. Their response indicated the complexities of a relationship defined by power and hierarchy, on the one hand, and cultural and geographic proximity, on the other, a paradox captured in the fact that the relationship remains far more of a concern for the Lao than the Thai. In the sense that social groups define themselves in terms of boundaries, booing Thailand and cheering for Vietnam—comparatively remote, culturally and geographically, from lowland Laos—defined the crowd as Lao and not Thai.43 Sport and other aspects of physical culture had been serving this purpose since the early twentieth century. In the opposite direction, popular support for Vietnam against Thailand would have warmed the hearts of the regime’s aging former revolutionaries. But many Lao remain suspicious of Vietnam’s overbearing political influence and xenophobic, even racist, towards the Vietnamese. In many ways, the HAGL land deal in return for the athlete’s village better reflected the cleavages that characterize development in contemporary Laos than did the more prominent Chinese stadium deal. Whereas the That Luang development met with rare public controversy, apparently because party members were among those who stood to lose their land, HAGL faced no such barriers in faraway Attapeu. A few years later, after the company had cleared forest and agricultural land for rubber plantations, allegedly displacing villagers and destroying livelihoods, an international NGO estimated its modest $19 million investment—consisting of a $4 million grant and $15 million

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no-interest loan—would reap timber worth $60 million and, upon maturity, rubber income of $128 million a year. Such lopsided deals, they pointed out, benefit only HAGL and corrupt officials in Laos who facilitate their plunder.44 In their defense, company executives and Lao leaders pointed to the development HAGL is funding in Attapeu, including hospitals, bridges, and roads.45 What few people recognized at the time of the pregames controversies in Laos were the ways in which they mirrored historical paradoxes. In its various iterations, Lao nationalism has always emerged from the intersection of national, regional, and global factors. In precolonial times, minor Lao kingdoms paid tribute to one or more overlords, retaining substantial autonomy by doing so. Similarly, for its undeniable injustices, French colonialism helped to create the modern idea of Laos, initially as a cultural and, ultimately, as a political entity. National identity solidified under the RLG, in spite—and partly because—of regional ideological confrontations, the Second Indochina War, and a budget underwritten by American development and military aid. Simultaneously, a communist conception of Laos was being forged in a parallel set of regional relationships with the Vietminh. After 1975 the new regime looked to the socialist bloc, especially Vietnam and the Soviet Union, for assistance. For more than a decade, it was possible to think of the LPDR as a client of socialist Vietnam, not least because the latter stationed 50,000 troops there, yet notions of Lao culture and identity continued to evolve. Despite Laos’ engagement with and dependence on a succession of foreign powers, the enduring theme in this history was the efflorescence of successive national identities, albeit identities that were often contested from within. The regime’s early twentieth-century strategy of under writing market-based development through ASEAN integration, foreign investment, and foreign aid to shore up its monopoly on political power, continues the trend. The region’s bewildering flows of capital and culture, which superficially appear to threaten small nations like Laos, must be viewed in this historical context. To be sure, the balance between local dependence and autonomy can appear uneasy at times, threatening to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. As Somsavat might attest, the distinction between perceptions of skill in harnessing foreign support and accusations of “treason” can be a fine one. The Chinatown controversy demonstrated that a tipping point exists, at which the former turns into the latter. In spite of these contradictions, the SEA Games gave physical expression to national identities not only despite, but also thanks to, foreign assistance and even dependence. Far

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from being undermined, the party-state ultimately reveled in the SEA Games, projecting itself as the all-powerful and benevolent conductor of foreign forces, rather than a victim of them. In this worldview, hosting the SEA Games demonstrated not the government’s lack of independence but its consummate skill in harnessing investment and aid from the wider region. This view was summed up by a senior NSC official I had known since beginning research for this book four years before. When towards the end of the SEA Games I asked him for clarification of exactly which donors had paid for what, my interlocutor rummaged around on his desk and, with visible pride and satisfaction, thrust a piece of paper into my hand listing it all. It seemed like an in-joke that Laos had pulled off this event with other people’s money. The LPRP drew on its relations with its neighbors—however unequal—to assert its membership of the Southeast Asian region, and its stewardship of the benefits that flow from it. The popular jubilation sparked by hosting the games backed up such sentiments. The games made Lao people proud: proud of their team’s performance, and proud to have successfully hosted the games. They also gave Lao people the feeling of being part of the region. The nature of this region was unclear to many: the Lao si kaem lacks the geographical referent of the English, and the Lao for “Southeast Asia,” asi tawen ok siang tai, is not part of common speech. Yet hosting the games made Laos part of something bigger, something defined self-fulfi llingly as the SEA Games or ASEAN group, invoking the organization that is synonymous with Southeast Asia and enjoys exceptionally strong public support in Laos.46 Most potently, the SEA Games consolidated Lao national symbols, bringing together official and popular notions of nationalism and national success. Such a grand expression of patriotism—the collective donning of Lao colors, chanting of slogans, waving of flags, and cheering of Lao leaders, past and present—simply had no precedent in the country, particularly among the young. Just as when their forebears watched or participated in sport and physical culture they saw a future under the flag of France, the national symbol of the king, or the socialist hammer and sickle, these fans would grow up thinking of the national prosperity and possibility under party rule. But beneath the color and excitement—also as in earlier times—the reality of such “success” was decidedly mixed. On the one hand, the unprecedented outpouring of national pride was genuinely inclusive and joyous, sparking a striking assertion of communal sentiment as the population attended events, waved flags, and gathered around TV sets. On the other, the other big winner was of course the LPRP, a secretive and authoritarian regime

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that brooks no dissent, acts unilaterally in its own interests and those of its leaders, and looks set to retain its monopoly on state power for the foreseeable future. This side to the SEA Games was reflected in an apparent security crackdown in the weeks prior to the event, resulting in the arrest of more than 300 rural residents for allegedly planning to conduct a protest in Vientiane. Authorities quickly released most of the would-be protesters—or petitioners, as they themselves claimed—but detained nine of them for longer. As is usual in Laos, the regime dismissed the incident as a fabrication designed to smear the government’s international image in the lead-up to the games.47 Long after the joyous communal sentiment of the games faded into the everyday realities of authoritarian politics in Laos, the LPRP continued to reinforce its rule through more mundane means: the harnessing of foreign capital through extractive resource development projects; the arbitrary implementation of the rule of law, especially in providing compensation for acquired land; and its stubborn refusal to open political space to nonparty actors, including nascent civil society organizations permitted by a 2009 decree.48

Sport, physical culture, and state power in Laos The relationship between physicality and state power, particularly authoritarian state power, has coursed throughout this book. Since early in the twentieth century, the changing imaginings of Laos—colonial, royalist, revolutionary, and postsocialist—have hinged on an abiding concern with physicality, which has been fundamental to how Lao people have seen themselves and their place in the world. This concern has changed considerably over time, just as the ideas and ideals shaping Laos and notions of Lao identity have transformed. Given the wide range of international events and ideological forces that have shaped Laos over the past century, these shifts have allowed each generation to assert the novelty of its physical culture. At the same time, much of its content has remained remarkably similar, irrespective of political creed. Irrespective of such change and continuity, and regardless of the tendency for sport and physical culture to appear value neutral, successive regimes have called on sport and physical culture as modes of subject formation with the ultimate objective of constituting, performing, and reinforcing state power. The unique appeal of sport and physical culture in this respect can be traced to the inherent popularity and physicality of such practices. Not only

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have these pursuits given mass expression to ideas and ideologies; political subjects have, viscerally and enthusiastically, experienced these ideological forces for themselves, often through their own bodies. This experience has also taken performative, linguistic, and symbolic forms. As discussed in the introduction, in extending observations made by Ana Maria Alonso, sport and physical culture have operated as “strategies of substantialization by which the obligatory is converted into the desirable.”49 They have transformed national consciousness and other ideologies—and, through these, state power—into everyday structures of feeling, watching, and doing. Physical practices have constituted political power in a multitude of its dimensions. The book began with the game of tikhi, which traditionally helped to renew sacred power by ensuring happiness and prosperity for the coming year. With the colonial encounter, this game was reinterpreted as a unique feature of a quasi-national culture, helping to create modern ideas of Laos and the Lao that justified the conceit of French colonialism, as well as to reinforce links between masculine symbols and strength, on the one hand, and political power, on the other.50 From early in the twentieth century, colonial sports and physical training programs introduced corporeal representations to Laos, which facilitated the shaping of a subject population. These were expanded comprehensively in the Lao Nhay movement of the early 1940s as a key part of efforts to build a Lao subjectivity in conjunction with Indochinese and imperial identities. Structured to counter the putative Lao habit of seu seu (being lazy and disinterested), these efforts impressed upon the Lao how sport and physical culture might mold a healthy, modern, and masculine population—messages that have remained prominent in Laos, in one way or another, ever since—but only in order to win back the “hearts and minds” of the Lao population after French humiliations. After the Second World War, these foundations were reimagined in terms of Laos’ coming-of-age, as legal-juridical steps towards independence were consecrated in aesthetic and ideological representations of military masculinity. Then, in the 1960s, sport merged with an older theatrics of power as Phoumi Nosavan strode the stage of state in his extraordinary National Games. Around the same time, Phoumi, his royalist rivals, and erstwhile communist enemies began to assert Laos’ membership of Southeast Asia’s postcolonial community of nations by competing in regional sports events, calling on the resultant legitimacy to assert their national authenticity at home. After the upheaval of 1975, the new regime of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party mobilized sport and physical culture to build the new socialist person, popularize socialist ideology, and keep the revolution in

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motion. Most recently, the Vientiane SEA Games of 2009 ignited an unprecedented efflorescence of collective nationalist sentiment, particularly among youth, along with an equally preternatural boost for the ruling regime—propagating the spectacular fusion of official and popular nationalism under the aegis of the party-state. In their evolution as strategies of substantialization in modern Laos, sport and physical culture have been shaped by ever-present but always changing notions of modernity, gender, and race and/or nation. Although the association between sport and physical culture, on the one hand, and modernity, progress, and civilization, on the other, has rarely been explained, this book has emphasized four ways in which such parallels have been drawn. First, and most obviously, on-field sporting achievements have been cited as evidence of national progress, according to the idea of equating athletic success with national worth. Second, the association of sporting success with wealthier, more developed countries—especially Laos’ most important neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam—has provided a scale on which to measure Lao national progress, together with the promise and occasional evidence that Laos can metaphorical ly “catch up” with them and the world more generally by performing better on the sports field. Third, notions of sportsmanship—long translated into Lao but rarely defined—have been invoked as a desirable social value related to modern ideas of manners, conduct, and therefore civilization. Fourth, and perhaps most pervasively, notions of progress have been represented as containing a physical dimension, so the healthy, toned, and muscular form has itself come to symbolize material development and prosperity (khwam charoen). Crucially, parallels between physical culture and notions of national progress and modernity have not required sporting success as evidence of their existence. Despite endless discourses explicitly associating physical culture with progress and prosperity, existing social values, such as notions of completeness and abundance, and Buddhist values of discipline have been incorporated into modern sporting culture, representing physical endeavor as meritorious behavior. In this respect, this book has historicized notions of modernity and tradition as they play out in the realm of sport and physical culture, demonstrating the complex and mutually constitutive relationship between these two categories. Just as the modernist need for national traditions ensured tikhi’s conception as a Lao ritual, so the modern imaging technologies of Olympic-style sports festivals modernized the existing theatrics of power in Lao political culture.

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The second key motif that has defined ideas and practices of sport and physical culture is gender. Although sport and other areas of physical culture have not excluded women altogether, they have overwhelmingly prioritized men’s bodies in discourses of somatization that have identified the human body as a means of national amelioration. Constituting rituals of the masculine state, major sporting festivals have saturated state spectacle with muscular, athletic, and at times aggressive forms of the male body. In striking ways, such aesthetics have symbolically bonded these forms to the militarist ethos of successive ruling regimes.51 This was as clear in the “great sports days” of the Vichy era, which sought to consolidate imperial values through physical culture, as it was in the National Games that took place under the watch of General Phoumi, in the 1960s, and President Souphanouvong, in the 1980s. By the 2000s, discourses of gender equality that had characterized socialist sport had faded into more familiar and more starkly gendered modes of representing national culture. At the Lao National Games of the 2000s, dynamic and militarist bodies of soldiers could once more be contrasted with those of traditionally attired women, including those dressed as lao lum (lowland Lao), lao thoeng (Lao of the mountain slopes), and lao sung (Lao of the mountaintops), to reflect the officially obsolete but still popular system of trinomial ethnic classification. In the resurgence of such patterns, women’s bodies again represented metaphors of the nation, ornaments to ethnic diversity, which stood in stark contrast to the uniform, masculine, and militarist form of the male body, the synonym or metonym of the nation. To be sure, women’s sport in Laos has changed enormously since the 1930s, when it was barely visible, and the 1940s, when the major concern was with preserving reproductive organs. But even as Lao women have achieved a disproportionate share of the nation’s successes on the international stage, representations and popular perceptions have continued to reinforce links between physical culture, masculinity, and state power, representing one of the most overt connections between gender, the body, and power in modern Laos. When power is analyzed in terms of gender rather than through the prism of colonial relations, sport and physical culture highlight patterns of continuity over the past century in Laos rather than a history defined by changes of sovereign regime—in 1946–1954 and 1975, respectively. The third and most ubiquitous theme in the development of sport and physical culture as strategies of substantialization is the powerful metaphorical link between individual and collective health. Here, in the most

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transparent of sportive metaphors, the health of the individual body represents that of the body politic. As early as the 1930s, when the Bédier Cup match between Amusporta and Police-Sport degenerated into farce, it was clear that sport gave frenzied expression a distinct Lao identity within Indochina, albeit one that was subject to French rule. Having proliferated under the subsequent colonial, royalist, and socialist regimes of the twentieth century, associations between individual and national well-being and worthiness climaxed in the SEA Games in 2009, which, among the general population as well as the government, did more than anything in living memory to “put Laos on the map” of Southeast Asia, that is, to build the country’s image at home and abroad. Beneath these and the metaphorical associations between the athletic body and the body politic resides the notion of strength, the equation of strong bodies with a strong race or nation. This is the basis of somatization, the tendency to represent social crises in physical idiom so that their resolution rests upon physical amelioration. Such conceptions were at the heart of the Lao Nhay movement for national renovation of the 1940s, just as they characterized metaphors of socialist construction following the 1975 revolution. In each case, it was the ruling regime of the day— French colonial and Lao socialist—that stood to gain from physical amelioration in the name of Lao nation and/or race (sat). The irony of linking the human body to racial and national strength has, if anything, been even more arresting. With the single, if highly notable, exception of the 2009 SEA Games, Laos has failed by any conventional measure to achieve sustained success on the sports field. Indeed, on one register it might be possible to read this book as a catalogue of failures, in which the enfeebled Lao body and athlete represents the sorry political and economical state of the nation and/or race. This history of “failure,” as it is tempting to call it, has resulted from a number of factors, including disinterest, the limited capacity of the state, and basic limitations in any state’s ability to mold people and their perceptions. Just as the French colonizers could not prevent the outbreak of anti-Annamese sentiment in the Bédier Cup of 1936, despite its undermining effect on intra-Indochinese relations, state efforts to produce an “Indochinese personality” during the Vichy years foundered, and youth, sport, and physical culture movements could do little to promote allegiance to France. Similarly, participating on the regional and international stage reinforced the weakness of both royalist and socialist Laos at sport, especially vis-à-vis its erstwhile “brothers” and rivals, Thailand and Vietnam. Finally, and perhaps most critically, programs to popularize sport and physical culture often failed, none more so than the mass move-

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ment of the high socialist era, when the most furious activity seemed to take place on the pages of newspapers and official reports. In such ways, it is ironically the country’s lack of sporting success (conventionally defined) that has been the chief characteristic of Lao sport and physical culture. This too is a reflection of modern Lao history, characterized throughout by a “discourse of lack.”52 Even the unprecedented buzz of the Vientiane SEA Games of 2009 faded, quickly and inevitably, into a less glittering reality, as illustrated in Laos’ participation in the London Olympic Games, three years later. “When it comes to the Olympics, there are the strong nations, the less good, the weak and the abject. Communist Laos is in the last category,” wrote Agence France-Presse (AFP), prior to the 2012 London Olympics, as Laos prepared its team of just three athletes. The Lao team’s long-serving chef de mission Kasem Inthara had a similar, if more refined, view: “We’re not strong like the USA or the British. . . . We’re in a group like Brunei or East Timor. We’re a small country. . . . If we can beat only one country in the first heat, that would be a success.” Besides well-documented limitations in terms of equipment and facilities, he explained, Lao sport suffered from a more basic shortcoming, even compared to its SEA Games rivals: “If compared to the morphology of more talented people, we are short! Shorter than the others.”53 Though meant in humor, one hears such comments frequently in Laos. But body size is not just a joke—the country’s historical anxiousness with physicality has often been traceable to anxiety at the Lao physique. In any event, Laos’ three athletes—who gained entry thanks to wildcard entry or “universality places”— performed as expected. Sprinters Kilakon Siphonexay and Laenly Phoutthavong were eliminated in the preliminaries in the men’s and women’s 100 meters, respectively, while swimmer Phathana Inthavong finished fifty-sixth of fifty-eighth in the men’s 50 meters freestyle.54 This is not to discredit the individual athletes, who not only joined a select group of just forty compatriots in having competed at the Olympics, but beat another country in their heats, as Kasem had hoped. Rather, the modest reality of Lao sport serves to emphasize that linking the athletic body to notions of racial and national merit has never depended upon conventional measures of sporting success, as construed in major sporting countries such as the United States or Australia, or even in regional powerhouses such as Thailand. On one level, relativist notions of sporting “success” embody the Olympic spirit; Pierre de Coubertin might smile at the knowledge that a country like Laos, a recently acquired colony of his native France when he founded the modern Olympics in 1896, can take part in the games

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and apparently gain something from Olympic competition. But, more fundamentally, the malleability of what counts as success demonstrates how epistemes of physicality are remolded to the capacity of nations, so that sport and physical culture have a way of serving nations and nationalism across the globe, irrespective of national performance. Because of this malleability, it would be a mistake to view the history of Lao sport and physical culture through the prism of failure. As this book has argued, these pursuits have given aesthetic and physical expression to the epistemologies, cosmologies, and ideologies that have formed modern Laos, irrespective of on-field performances and institutional limitations. As the SEA Games showed so emphatically—though hardly for the first time—the aesthetics and physicality of sport and physical culture possess a degree of popularity paralleled by few other cultural forms. In this respect, human bodies have represented a carte blanche to be shaped, disciplined, and inscribed with the political, social, and cultural values of the day. As the SEA Games in 2009 reconfirmed, such “successes” have a long history of being double-edged in Laos, where, in a variety of ways, they have reinforced authoritarian state power, often quite overtly. Less obviously, physicality has in turn exercised a profound impact on the mental, intellectual, and cultural realms. Not only has physical culture given expression to politics, culture, and ideology; notions of physicality have informed the values and ideologies that have created and shaped modern Laos, and the regimes that have ruled the country. Th is epistemological effect was most pronounced in the embodied idiom of socialist Laos, but has been evident throughout the modern history of the country. The ubiquitous motifs of national birth, resuscitation, progress, development, and growth— which in their differing ways have defi ned each of Laos’ modernizing regimes—are physical metaphors. The epistemologies and ideologies that have created modern Laos each contain a concern with physicality; to this extent, their makeup is partially reflective of the underlying concern with physicality. The concern with physicality has not only pervaded popular notions of individual health, wealth, and well-being, but—through these ideas and autonomously—given substance and subtlety to state ideology and power. It is this aspect of physical culture that has exercised the most profound impact in Laos, as perhaps in all modern societies.

Notes

Introduction 1. Annam Nouveau, Feb. 23, 1936: 3. I am grateful to Chris Goscha for bringing this incident to my attention. 2. Annam Nouveau, Feb. 27, 1936: 3. Following Goscha, I use “Annamese” for the period before “Vietnam” came into vogue in the 1940s. Since Annam could refer to the central Indochinese protectorate of Annam, situated between Tonkin and Cochinchina, or to the “Ancient Kingdom of Annam,” which combined Annam, Tonkin, and Cochinchina, “Annamese” could refer to the people of Annam or those of all eastern Indochina. In Laos, the term generally referred to the latter (as did the derogatory “Annamite”). Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? 10, 14. 3. Annam Nouveau, Apr. 5, 1936: 3. 4. It is possible the writer was translating the Vietnamese moi or man, both of which mean “barbarian,” since there was no real equivalent of “aborigine” in the language. A more common translation of these terms was sauvage, in which case the author may have thought he was being polite in using aborigènes. Whatever his thinking, there is no escaping the racism of the term. I am grateful to Bruce Lockhart for these observations. On the sensitivities of Annamese officials serving in Laos, see Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 100–111. 5. Without French intervention, in this view, the Lao kingdoms that were already tributaries of Siam would have been integrated into the Siamese state, just as Lan Na (Chiang Mai) was. For example, see Evans “What Is Lao Culture and Society?” 21. Thai historians, including Chatthip Natsupha, also make this claim. Thongchai Winichakul, “Nationalism and the Radical Intelligentsia in Thailand,” 575. 6. Evans provides several examples of scholars questioning the existence of Laos as a national entity. “What Is Lao Culture and Society?” 1. 7. Evans, “What Is Lao Culture and Society?” 1. For the perennialist and modernist views of the nation, see Smith, Nations and Modernism, 18–24. 8. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 4. 9. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 120. 10. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped, 97; Stuart-Fox, Buddhist Kingdom, Marxist State, 7–8. 11. Stuart-Fox, Buddhist Kingdom, Marxist State, 7–8. The exception was Vientiane itself, whose population was relocated after Anou’s failed rebellion.

248 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

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Notes to Pages 4–11

Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped, 96. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 1. Evans, “What Is Lao Culture and Society?” 23. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 11; also see Anderson, Imagined Communities, xiv. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 11, 19, 67, 104. For the role of Phetsarath, see Ivarsson and Goscha, “Prince Phetsarath.” More recently, Ivarsson has suggested the Siamese—“the ‘historical enemy’ of modern Lao historiography”—might also have inspired Lao nationalism. Ivarsson, “Cultural Nationalism in a Colonial Context,” 255. For example, Adams and McCoy, Laos: War and Revolution; Dommen, Conflict in Laos; Halpern, Government, Politics and Social Structure in Laos; Halpern, Economy and Society of Laos; and Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos; Evans, Short History of Laos. Stuart-Fox, “On the Writing of Lao History,” 121. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 3. Stuart-Fox, “On the Writing of Lao History.” Evans, Short History of Laos, 150–158. Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 4. Also see Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism and Post-Socialism, xi–xx. Pholsena, Post-war Laos, 11. Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 23. Alonso, “Politics of Space, Time and Substance,” 382. Alonso, “Politics of Space, Time and Substance,” 386. Billig, Banal Nationalism, 8. Markula and Pringle, Foucault, Sport and Exercise. Gordon, “Government Rationality,” 2; also see Arnold on the state, though he does not mention Foucault’s later work. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 7–10. Hoberman, Sport and Political Ideology. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 22. For khwan, see Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults, 223. In the sense that yoga deals with mind, body, and spirit as a single entity. Alter, “Yoga at the Fin de Siècle,” 769. Hancock et al., “Introduction,” 10. Ong and Peletz, Bewitching Women, Pious Men, 1. For discussions of the status of women in mainland Southeast Asia and Laos, respectively, see Van Esterik, Materializing Thailand, 14; and Ireson, Field, Forest, and Family, 21. Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 243. Ong and Peletz, Bewitching Women, Pious Men, 9–10. For queer/LGBT studies, see most notably Peter Jackson, Dear Uncle Go, and subsequent works by the same author, most recently Queer Bangkok. Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 243 (original emphasis). There is a danger, of course, that critiquing masculine power through masculinity studies

Notes to Page 11

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42. 43. 44.

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merely provides a new excuse to focus on men and overlook women. In noting this concern, I stress the debt of masculinity studies to feminism, and the two fields’ shared goals of understanding how gender relates to formal and informal constellations of power. In this respect, Southeast Asian studies can be contrasted with Chinese and South Asian studies, which have contributed significantly to the emergence of masculinity studies as a subfield of gender studies. See, for example, Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity. Connell, Masculinities, 77. Bjarnegard, Gender, Informal Institutions and Political Recruitment, 18. See, in particular, Ford and Lyons, eds., Men and Masculinities in Southeast Asia. See also Clark, Maskulinitas, 13. Clark, who is interested in uncovering “new Indonesian masculine identities, with or without recourse to traditional narratives,” and similarly emphasizes the diversity of gender identities among Indonesian men over hegemonic modes of masculinity. A partial exception in the former volume is Lyons and Ford’s “Defending the Nation,” but the authors’ concern is with minority Malay soldiers in Singapore rather than the hegemonic ethnic-Chinese. A more notable exception from the same volume is Jacobsen, “Being Broh,” which stands out because it focuses on “the good, the bad and the successful man in Cambodia,” rather than marginalized masculinities. In this sense, Jacobsen’s essay resonates with earlier work on political culture in Southeast Asia by Benedict Anderson and others. Although Anderson may not mention masculinity by name, his essay “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture” can be read as a treatise on traditional notions of hegemonic masculinity in Java, which helped to understand the dictatorships of Sukarno and Suharto (Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”; also see Clark, Maskulinitas, 8). With a more explicit focus on manhood, Charles Keyes considers the intersection of two ideal masculine types in Thai society: the monk that is detached from worldly possessions and the nakleng, a rural tough whose capacity for violence is matched only by his magnanimity and generosity (Keyes, “Ambiguous Gender”). Inspired by Thak Chaloemtiarana’s study of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, political scientists have examined the military officer/politician as nakleng, capable of distributing bounty and retribution in his quest for power (Thak, Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism; also see Craig Reynolds, “Rural Male Leadership,” 52–54). But such studies, as products of their time, pay little attention to the issue of masculinity itself—what it represents in such political cultures, the means through which it is produced, and the particular ways in which it articulates to power (Reynolds, “Rural Male Leadership,” 42). Ford and Lyons, “Introduction,” in Men and Masculinities in Southeast Asia, 5–9. McCoy, Closer than Brothers. On the “ ‘masculine’ Southeast Asian state,” also see Day, Fluid Iron, 78–88, though he does not develop the theme in detail.

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47. The major exception is Pattana, “ ‘Lives of Hunting Dogs,’ ” 58. Pattana was also interested in how modes of masculinity associated with Thai boxing articulate with formal political power, but did not publish on this topic before his premature passing in 2012. 48. See, for instance, McKay, Messner, and Sabo, Masculinities, Gender Relations, and Sport; Messner, Power at Play. 49. MacClancy, “Sport, Identity, and Ethnicity,” 1; Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 6. 50. Colin Brown makes this point in “Playing the Game,” 71, although it is obvious to anyone researching the field. Notable exceptions include this article and another by Brown, “Sport, Modernity and Nation Building,” and recent work on youth and physical training movements in Vichy Indochina; see Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, and Raffin, Youth Mobilization in Vichy Indochina. Also see articles on Singapore, Malaya/Malaysia, and Indonesia in Mangan, “Asian Sport: From Recent Past,” and Gems, “The Athletic Crusade,” on the Philippines. Although a little more work has emerged in the past few years, Southeast Asian studies has tended to neglect the study of sport, just as sport studies has tended to overlook Southeast Asia. This book is the first academic monograph on sport and/or physical culture in Southeast Asia. 51. Hargreaves and Vertinsky, “Introduction,” in Physical Culture, Power, and the Body, 1. Typifying this trend, a 2009 special issue of an Asian studies journal on “Globalisation and Body Politics” included articles on maids, travel, cosmetic surgery, assisted reproduction, grief, and war, but none on physical culture as it is defined here. See Mackie and Stevens, “Globalisation and Body Politics.” 52. Lao Nhay, Dec. 15, 1942: 9. In contrast with the Lao Literary Committee’s recognition that kila (in Lao) was a modern neologism for “sport,” McFarland’s definition of the same word in Thai, also in the 1940s, reflected the wider meaning of the original Sanskrit term (krīá): “sports; plays; amusements; past-times; pleasures and play; the pleasure of playing or the enjoyment of amorous sport” (see McFarland, Thai-English Dictionary, 109; and, for the Sanskrit, Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 321). But kila did not appear in Guignard’s Dictionnaire Laotien-Français (1912), nor in major nineteenth-century Thai dictionaries, e.g., Bradley, Dictionary of the Siamese Language. 53. For the discussion of the possible Thai role in importing kila to Lao, see Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 192. For early Thai sport, see Sakchye, “The Role and Function of Physical Education and Sport,” 78–84. 54. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho khong pheuan lao phu neung.” 55. Sila Viravong, Vatchananukom phasa lao, original edition, 13; Kerr, LaoEnglish Dictionary, 30.

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56. Sepak takraw is the international name for the Southeast Asian game, resembling volleyball but played with the feet, in which three-person teams kick a woven rattan (or plastic) ball over a net. The name combines the Malay (sepak raja) and Thai (takraw) words for the game. The Lao call the game kato. 57. Hashimoto, “Boat Racing in Contemporary Laos.” 58. Sila Viravong, Vatchananukom phasa lao, 21. 59. For the historical distinction between sport and physical culture, see Keys, Globalizing Sport, 19–24. 60. Known for most of its existence as the National Sports Committee, the National Sport and Physical Culture Committee (Khanakamakan Kila Kainyakam Haeng Sat) was absorbed into the newly merged Ministry of Education and Sport in 2011. 61. Bradley, Dictionary of the Siamese Language, 42; Siviangkhaek Konnivong, Vatchananukom phasa lao, 105. 62. I am grateful to Nathan Badenoch for helpful discussions of this section. 63. For abundance as a Buddhist value, see McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk, 14, 165–166, 211. 64. I offer an earlier analysis of this concept in Creak, “Muscular Buddhism for Modernizing Laos,” 16, though I have modified aspects of the original argument here. To be clear, muscular Buddhism is not a formal ideology, as is muscular Christianity or muscular Hinduism, but there is a tendency to incorporate values salient to Buddhist practice into ideas and practices of modern physical culture that also draw on ideas of muscular Christianity. Cf. MacAloon, “Introduction: Muscular Christianity after 150 Years”; Alter, “Yoga at the Fin de Siècle.” 65. For the quote, see Brocheux and Hémery, An Ambiguous Colonization, 15. 66. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (hereafter ANOM), Gouvernement Général de l’Indochine (hereafter GGI) 65539, Troupes de l’Indochine, Étatmajor, 3e Bureau. No. 434. (Hanoi) December 19, 1922; ANOM, GGI 65539, Ministère des Colonies, Direction des Ser vices Militaires, 1er Bureau-1e Section. No. 706/1. Paris, 1924. 67. ANOM, GGI 65539, Draft decree for the purpose of creating the Comité Central d’Instruction Physique et de la Préparation Militaire, Hanoi, Sep. (n.d.), 1925. 68. ANOM, GGI 65539, Résidence Supérieure du Laos (hereafter RSL) no. 12/91. Vientiane, Feb. 12, 1924; ANOM, GGI 66574, Année scolaire 1923–1924, no. 194, Hanoi, Jun. 10, 1924. 69. ANOM, RSL No. 12/91, Vientiane, Feb. 12, 1924; ANOM, GGI 66574, Comité Central d’Instruction Physique et de la Préparation Militaire (hereafter CCIPPM): Année 1927–1928, Rapport annuel des pays de l’Union, n.d.;

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85.

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Notes to Pages 16–22

ANOM, GGI 39733, Consul de France à Oubone no. 290, Oubone [Ubon], Aug. 28, 1928. ANOM, Fonds Ministériels (FM), France d’Outre-Mer (FOM) 244, dossier 332. “Le Sport au Laos,” n.d. [late 1930s?]. Khamtanh Chantala, “La politique de l’enseignement secondaire au Laos,” 56–59. ANOM, GGI 65539, No. 469, “Objet: Education Physique,” Vientiane, Sep. 29, 1927. ANOM, GGI 66574, CCIPPM: Année 1927–1928. Rapport annuel des pays de l’Union, n.p. Sée, Manuel d’Éducation Physique. Sée, Manuel d’Éducation Physique, 7–8. ANOM, GGI 66574, CCIPPM: Année 1927–1928, Rapport annuel des pays de l’Union, n.p. Ser vice Local de l’Enseignement, Thammacharinya, 84–85. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 43. Nouvelle Dépêche, Feb. 10–11, 1935. Larcher-Goscha, “Sport, colonialisme et identités nationales,” 21. Brocheux and Hémery, Ambiguous Colonization, 192; Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 104. Larcher-Goscha, “Sport, Colonialisme et Identités Nationales,” 19. Arnold, Colonizing the Body. Craig Reynolds makes a similar point when he stresses that Thai handbook knowledge is not limited to an elite social class, even if it is “asymmetrically distributed.” See Reynolds, “Thai Manual Knowledge,” 214. Lao colonial records are poor by comparison with those of other territories of Indochina, but positively comprehensive compared to those available for the royalist period. Archival documents, the rumor goes, were used to wrap sandwiches in the austere revolutionary years after 1975. True or not, I was not able to access any significant records for this period. On the other hand, I was fortunate to gain access to the LPDR’s Department of Archives, located in the Prime Minister’s Office, though there were tight limitations on what could be used. Although few foreign researchers (besides Vietnamese) have been able to access these archives, this seems to be changing.

Chapter 1: Making a Modern Tradition 1. It is also correct to say tikhi means “to play hockey,” where ti means “play” and khi refers to the actual game, a structure used in sports such as tae-ban (lit. kick-ball, or football) and ti-pik-kai (lit. hit-wing-chicken, or badminton). I follow the sources cited in this chapter, which refer to the ball as the khi.

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2. Archaimbault, “Une cérémonie”; “La fête du t’at à Sieng Khwang”; “Religious Structures in Laos”; “La fête du t’at à Luong P’rabang.” 3. Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 15–55. 4. Guttmann did not mention “modernization” in his original book but cited Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, and defended modernization interpretations in an afterword to his updated edition in 2004. Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 16, 166–168. 5. Elias, “Introduction,” in Quest for Excitement, 21–22; Maguire, Global Sport, 79. 6. Stuart-Fox, “The French in Laos,” 111. 7. Streckfuss, “The Mixed Colonial Legacy in Siam,” 128. 8. “Colonialists-cum-amateur anthropologists” is Streckfuss’s term, “The Mixed Colonial Legacy in Siam,” 125; for Pavie, see Stuart-Fox, “The French in Laos,” 125. 9. Phouvong, “The That Luang of Vientiane,” 100. 10. Barthélemy, En Indochine 1896–1897, 263. 11. Edwards, Cambodge, 7. 12. Barthélemy, En Indochine, 263. Despite the initials, Barthélemy’s M. M*** N*** was apparently Pierre Morin, the first administrator of Vientiane, who undertook the stupa’s first restoration under the French in 1900. Askew, Logan, and Long, Vientiane, 93. 13. Phouvong, “The That Luang,” 100. 14. It is well known that Laos remained fragmented administratively, even after 1900, not least since Luang Prabang remained a protectorate. Officially, however, Laos existed as a single pays (territory or country) within Indochina. 15. Barthélemy, En Indochine, 267. 16. Barthélemy, En Indochine, 267. 17. Walter Tips, “Introduction,” in Raquez, Around Laos in 1900, vii. 18. Raquez, Around Laos in 1900, xi–xii. The map, ironically, was produced by Phaya Si Sing Ha Thep, a dignitary of the Siamese court, in 1891. 19. Raquez, Pages laotiennes, 103. 20. Raquez, Pages laotiennes, 122–123. Also see Walter Tips’ recent translation, Raquez, Around Laos in 1900, 124–125, which I consulted to polish this translation. 21. Raquez, Pages laotiennes, 108. 22. The festival’s name derives from the twelfth month of the Lao lunar calendar, which is usually around November. 23. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 100–111. 24. Askew, Logan, and Long, Vientiane, 95. 25. Eutrope, “Avant-Propos,” ix–xi.

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26. Anonymous, “Douze traditions et des quatorze rites du royaume de Luang Prabang,” Manuscript Book 1, EFEO Microfi lm no. 30, 1936: 91. Cited in Archaimbault, “Une cérémonie,” 229 n.2; “Religious Structures,” 65 n.3. 27. The coconut game seems to have resembled rugby: “Two camps fight for an oiled coconut and try to score goals by depositing it at the opposing side’s end.” Archaimbault, “La fête du t’at à Luong P’rabang,” 32 n.27. 28. Archaimbault, “La fête du t’at à Luong P’rabang,” 19. 29. Ministry of Religious Affairs, Hit sipsong lae khong sipsi. 30. Archaimbault, “Religious Structures,” 65 n.3. 31. Nhouy, “Fêtes laotiennes.” Also see updated versions: Nhouy, “Les fêtes du That Luang,” in Aspects du Pays Lao (1956) and “The That Luang Festivities,” in Kingdom of Laos, ed. R. de Berval (1959). 32. Nhouy, “Fêtes laotiennes,” pt. 1, p. 9. 33. Nhouy, “Fêtes laotiennes,” pt. 1, p. 9. 34. Askew, Logan, and Long, Vientiane, 95; Evans, The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 50. Nhouy expressed approval of the second reconstruction in “The That Luang Festivities” (1959) but did not mention it in his original article, “Fêtes laotiennes,” in 1936. 35. Nhouy, “Fêtes laotiennes,” pt. 1, p. 9. 36. Nhouy, “Fêtes laotiennes,” pt. 1, p. 9. 37. Nhouy, “Fêtes laotiennes,” pt. 1, p. 9. 38. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism; Weber, “Pierre de Coubertin and the Introduction of Organised Sport in France.” 39. MacAloon, “Introduction: Muscular Christianity after 150 Years,” in Muscular Christianity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds, xi. 40. Bayly, “French Anthropology and the Durkheimians,” 583. 41. Edwards, Cambodge; Hansen, How to Behave. 42. Ivarsson, Creating Laos; Ivarsson and Goscha, “Prince Phetsarath.” 43. Nhouy, “Deux contes laotiens”; “Notes sur la Versification laotienne”; “Contes laotiens”; Souvanna, “Musique Laotienne”; “Restauration du Vat Ho-Pra-Kêo à Vientiane.” 44. Thierry, “In memoriam, Paul Lévy,” 5–7; Gaillard, Dictionary of Anthropologists, 183. 45. Gaillard, Dictionary of Anthropologists, 183. 46. Thierry, “In memoriam,” 5. 47. Also see Ivarsson, Creating Laos, ch. 4. 48. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 4. 49. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 7. 50. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 7–8. 51. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 8. 52. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 8. 53. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 9.

Notes to Pages 38–46 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

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Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 6. For the Vichy-era flags, see Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 154. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 10. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 9. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 10. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 12. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 14. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 14–15. Bayly, “French Anthropology and the Durkheimians,” 582–583. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 10. Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 11. Gaillard, Dictionary of Anthropologists, 183; Thierry, “In memoriam,” 7. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 145–146. See, for example, Lao Nhay, Nov. 1, 1942: 6; Nov. 15, 1942: 5. Goudineau, “Charles Archaimbault (1921–2001),” 8. Davis, “Review of La course de pirogues au Laos,” 138. For useful discussions of the Lao cosmogony, see Aijmer, “Reconciling Power with Authority,” and Frank Reynolds, “Ritual and Social Hierarchy.” It is well known that kha (slave) is a pejorative marker for Mon-Khmer groups. In this context, however, the term was used as an ethnonym, albeit imprecise, and I have capitalized it accordingly. The Kha were, to borrow Thongchai’s felicitous phrase, the “Others within” to the Lao majority. Thongchai Winichakul, “The Others Within,” in Civility and Savagery, ed. Turton. Archaimbault, “Religious Structures,” 57–58. Also see Aijmer, “Reconciling Power with Authority,” 735–736. Archaimbault, “Religious Structures,” 59. Also see Archaimbault, “Une cérémonie,” 230. Archaimbault, “Une cérémonie.” Archaimbault, “Une cérémonie,” 226–227. Archaimbault, “Une cérémonie,” 226. Archaimbault, “Une cérémonie,” 231. Archaimbault, “Religious Structures,” 61. Archaimbault, “La fête du t’at à Sieng Khwang,” 187 n.193. Archaimbault, “Religious Structures,” 60. Archaimbault, “La fête du t’at à Sieng Khwang,” 195. Archaimbault, “La fête du t’at à Sieng Khwang,” 192–195. Archaimbault, “La fête du t’at à Sieng Khwang,” 195. On Archaimbault’s use of theory, see Barber, “Review of The New Year Ceremony at Basak,” 307; for the critique, see Davis, “Review of La course de pirogues au Laos,” 138–144. Archaimbault, “Religious Structures,” 57. Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, from Saa’ to Thai. Archaimbault, “La fête du t’at à Sieng Khwang,” 198–199 n.15.

256 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

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Notes to Pages 46–55

Archaimbault, “Une cérémonie,” 224. Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 45–46, 46 n.6. Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 16–26; Maguire, Global Sport, 79. Vientiane Mai, Nov. 13, 2008 (online). Lévy, “Ti-khi,” 10. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 12 (Mar. 20, 1942): 3. Krüger, “Sport in the Context of Non-European Cultural Tradition,” in Ritual and Record, ed. Carter and Krüger, 86. Brownell, “The Problems with Ritual and Modernization Theory,” 31. Brownell, “The Problems with Ritual and Modernization Theory,” 38. Guttmann, “A Laconic Response,” 56. Archaimbault, “Religious Structures,” 59. Davis, “Review of La course de pirogues au Laos.”

Chapter 2: Renovating the Body 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 146. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 2, 188–198. Raffin, Youth Mobilization, 2, 109. Raffi n, Youth Mobilization, 138–139. Jennings, who does not discuss sport and youth in Laos in any depth, appears to agree with Raffi n on its insignificance. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 153, 185. Geoffrey Gunn also mentions the “Pétainist character of the Lao Nhay,” including its emphasis on “leading the young Lao generation to the stage of harmonious physical development,” but fails to expand on the issue. Gunn, Political Struggles in Laos, 105. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 22–23. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 129. Paxton, Vichy France, 148. Halls, The Youth of Vichy France, 8–9, 186. Halls, The Youth of Vichy France, 190–191. MacAloon, “Introduction: Muscular Christianity after 150 Years”; Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism; Weber, “Pierre de Coubertin.” Allison, The Global Politics of Sport, 10. Faure, “National Identity and the Sporting Champion,” 90. This colorful description appeared in an earlier version of Borotra’s International Tennis Hall of Fame (ITHF) entry on the ITHF website. It has been removed from the current entry (http://www.tennisfame.com/hall-of-famers/ jean-borotra) but is available at Association of Tennis Professionals Tour, “Jean Borotra—Biarritz, France,” ATP World Tour (2014), http://m.es.atpworldtour .com/Tennis/Players/Bo/J/Jean-Borotra.aspx.

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15. Smyth, Jean Borotra, 199. 16. Borotra, “L’éducation général et les sports.” 17. Gay-Lescot, Sport et education sous Vichy, 70–71. Reflecting the strong emphasis on amateurism, professional sports declined in popularity in the same period. 18. Gay-Lescot, Sport et education sous Vichy, 47–48. 19. Gay-Lescot, Sport et education sous Vichy, 50–51; Halls, The Youth of Vichy France, 192–193. 20. Hellman, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France, 50, 72–73. 21. Halls, The Youth of Vichy France, 195–196. 22. Halls, The Youth of Vichy France, 192. 23. Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine, 2. 24. Pollard, Reign of Virtue, 86. 25. Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine, 255. 26. Pollard, Reign of Virtue, 71–72; Capdevila, “The Quest for Masculinity,” 423–445. 27. Capdevila, “The Quest for Masculinity”; Mosse, The Image of Man. 28. Ricklefs, et al., A New History of Southeast Asia, 139. 29. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 146. 30. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 138. 31. Decoux, À la Barre de l’Indochine, 388–389. 32. Decoux, À la Barre de l’Indochine, 389. 33. Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina?, 74, 80–88. 34. Journal officiel de l’Indochine Française ( JOIF), April 23, 1941: 1153. 35. ANOM, GGI L8.444 (41) [unindexed], Lebas à Monsieur le Directeur des Affaires Politique au Gouvernement Général, Nov. 12, 1941: 6; and Note du Commissariat Général à la Jeunesse: Historique de l’organisation des Oeuvres de Jeunesse, n.d.; JOIF, Oct. 4, 1941: 2813; Dec. 17, 1941: 3627. 36. Sports d’Indochine, no. 3 (Jan. 10, 1942): 2; Ducoroy, Ma Trahison en Indochine, 29. 37. Ducoroy, Ma Trahison en Indochine, 24; Decoux, À la Barre de l’Indochine, 141. 38. JOIF, Nov. 29, 1941: 3383–3385. 39. JOIF, Nov. 19, 1941: 3268–3269; JOIF, Dec. 3, 1941: 3443. 40. ANOM, GGI L8.444 (41), Pour Monsieur le Directeur du Personnel, Cabinet Note, Nov. 28, 1941. For Decoux’s praise of Ducoroy, see his “Préface,” in Ducoroy, Ma Trahison en Indochine, 13–17. 41. Raffin, Youth Mobilization, 81. 42. ANOM, GGI 65295, CFI, Séance de décembre 1941, Rapport No. 9: Éducation physique de la jeunesse, 2–5. 43. ANOM, GGI 65295, CFI, Séance de décembre 1941, Rapport No. 9: Éducation physique de la jeunesse, 6.

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Notes to Pages 59–64

44. For the Sports Charter, see JOIF, Mar. 18, 1942: 830–836; Sports d’Indochine, no. 3 (Jan. 10, 1942): 2. 45. ANOM, GGI 65295, CFI, Séance de décembre 1941, Rapport No. 9: Éducation physique de la jeunesse, 14–16. 46. Ducoroy, Ma Trahison en Indochine, 103. 47. ANOM, GGI 65296, CFI, session de juillet 1942, Question IX: Éducation physique de la Jeunesse Indochinoise, 3; Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, No. 51 (Dec. 19, 1942): 4. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 1 (Jan. 27, 1941): 2; no. 51 (Dec. 19, 1942): 2. The magazine was later renamed Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine. 48. ANOM, GGI 65295, CFI, Séance de décembre 1941, Rapport No. 9: Éducation physique de la jeunesse, 6. 49. Ducoroy, Ma Trahison en Indochine, 147. 50. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 38 (Sept. 19, 1942): 2. 51. Raffin says that Laos was not involved in the Pétain Cup. Raffin, Youth Mobilization, 78. Lao press reports indicate otherwise, as described later in this chapter. 52. GGI, Méthode indochinoise d’ éducation physique, 3. 53. ANOM, GGI 65295, CFI, Séance de décembre 1941, Rapport No. 9: Éducation physique de la jeunesse, 16. 54. Sports d’Indochine, no. 3 (Jan. 10, 1942): 2. 55. Sports d’Indochine, no. 7 (Feb. 7, 1942): 2. 56. Sports d’Indochine, no. 7 (Feb. 7 1942): 2. 57. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 10 (Mar. 7, 1942): 3. 58. Raffin, Youth Mobilization, 177. 59. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 13 (Mar. 28, 1942): 10. 60. Parmentier, Méthode indochinoise de gymnastique rythmique. 61. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 188. 62. ANOM, GGI 65295, CFI, Séance de décembre 1941, Rapport No. 10: Affaires d’ordre morale et social, 3–4. 63. Lao Nhay, Oct. 15, 1942: 5; Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 38 (Sep. 19, 1942): 2. 64. Lao Nhay, Sep. 1, 1943: 2, Sep. 15 1941: 6; Sports d’Indochine, no. 2 (Jan. 3, 1942): 5; Le Nouveau Laos, Sep. 1, 1943: 3; Bulletin des Ancient Élèves de l’École Supérieure d’Éducation Physique d’Indochine, no. 5 (1942): 15–17. 65. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 13 (Mar. 28, 1942): 2; no. 14 (Apr. 4, 1942): 2. 66. Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina?, 84. 67. Lao Nhay should be transliterated Lao Nyai here, but since the French transliteration was also the Romanized name of the movement’s newspaper, I retain it for both the publication (italicized) and the movement (nonitalicized). 68. Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, History of Thailand, 132. Siam was renamed Thailand in 1939, an expression of the pan-Thai irredentism being discussed in these paragraphs. Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan, 147–149. 69. Decoux, À la Barre de l’Indochine, 409.

Notes to Pages 64–70 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

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Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 149. Lao Nhay, Jan. 4, 1941: 2. Lao Nhay, Jan. 4, 1941: 8. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 150–152. Whatever the colonial map showed, these plans for renovation came up against the ongoing reality of geographic and cultural fragmentation. Although the scope of the newly designated protectorate of Luang Prabang was expanded to include Vientiane and Xieng Khouang, the south remained under direct French rule rather than the formal sovereignty of the Lao ruler, raising doubts about geographical unity, let alone its cultural equivalent. The idea and identity of Laos would nevertheless flourish among Lao urban elites between 1941 and 1945. Decoux, À la Barre de l’Indochine, 409. McCoy, “French Colonialism in Laos,” 94. Rochet, Pays Lao, 43. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Young Lao Official,” 149–150. Le Nouveau Laos, Aug. 1, 1943, cited in Gunn, Political Struggles in Laos, 104. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 208. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 18. JOIF, Nov. 19, 1941: 3268–3269; Dec. 3, 1941: 3443–3444; Bulletin administratif du Laos (BAL), “Analyses par sujet,” 1942: 61; Feb. 1942: 560; Aug. 1942: 829. JOIF, Nov. 11, 1942: 3239; BAL, May 1942: 702, June 1942: 743; Lao Nhay, June 1, 1942: 6. BAL, July 1942: 793. Laotienne Artistique et Sportive appears to have been abbreviated from Association Laotienne Artistique et Sportive. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 159. Lao Nhay, Apr. 1, 1942: 5. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 22 (May 30, 1942): 6; Le Nouveau Laos, July 15, 1943: 3. For Route 13, see Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 157. Lao Nhay, Dec. 1, 1943/Jan. 1, 1944: 6. Lao Nhay, Mar. 1, 1942: 5. All players mentioned were Vietnamese. For discussion of the Vietnamese population of Lao cities, see Evans, Short History of Laos, 71. Le Nouveau Laos, Jan. 25, 1944 : 2. Keys, Globalizing Sport, 35–36. The third paragraph of this quote is extracted from Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 13 (Mar. 28, 1942): 2; the remainder is from Lao Nhay, Apr. 1, 1942: 5. See MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle,” 252. This idea is developed further in chapter four. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 223. JOIF, Dec. 5, 1942: 3505; Mar 6, 1943: 719; BAL, Jan. 1944: 7–9. Le Nouveau Laos, May 15, 1943: 4; July 1, 1943: 3; Oct. 25, 1944: 4; Lao Nhay, Jan. 1/15, 1945: 4.

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Notes to Pages 70–76

96. Lao Nhay, Jul. 15/Aug. 1, 1944: 8. 97. Bruce Reynolds, “Phibun Songkhram and Thai Nationalism,” 108. 98. Lao Nhay, May 15, 1943: 6; Jan. 1/15, 1945: 4; Le Nouveau Laos, May 15, 1943: 4; July 1, 1943: 3; Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Young Lao Official,” 150. 99. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Young Lao Official,” 149–157. 100. I explore these parallels in Creak, “Muscular Buddhism for Modernizing Laos,” 18–19. Also see Craig Reynolds, “Power,” 223–224. 101. Adapted from Lao Nhay, July 15/Aug. 1, 1944: 10. For the ESEPIC training regime, see Sports d’Indochine, no. 2 (Jan. 3, 1942): 6. 102. First performed at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, the Olympic salute was embraced in the 1920s and early 1930s but dropped by most countries after the easily confused fascist salute became established in Italy and Germany. Barney, “A Research Note on the Origins of the Olympic Victory Podium,” 225, n.25. 103. Similar aesthetics developed in Thailand at the time. Bruce Reynolds, “Phibun Songkhram and Thai Nationalism,” 109; Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, History of Thailand, 125. 104. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 73–105. 105. McDonald, “Political Somatics,” 58. 106. Mangan, “Prologue: Global Fascism and the Male Body,” 1. 107. Le Nouveau Laos, July 1, 1943: 3. 108. Lao Nhay, Jan. 15, 1942: 5. 109. Evans, Short History of Laos, 62–64; Evans, “Interview with James Chamberlain,” 93; Nginn, Adittanutson, 13. 110. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho.” 111. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho,” 33. 112. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 176. 113. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho,” 34–35. 114. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho,” 36–37. 115. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho,” 48–49. For Thailand, see Craig Reynolds, “Introduction: National Identity and Its Defenders,” 6–7; and Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan, 157. 116. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho,” 40. 117. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho,” 35. 118. Lao Nhay, June 15, 1941: 10. 119. Lao Nhay, July 1, 1942: 6. 120. Lao Nhay, Nov. 1, 1943: 1. 121. Mo narok yu nai chai mo fai daeng yu nai pak mo thuk nyak yu nai meu. Nginn, “Kham tak teuan bang kho,” 37. 122. As discussed in the introduction, also see McDaniel’s discussion of “abundance” in The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk, 14, 165–166, 211.

Notes to Pages 76–89

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123. Creak, “Muscular Buddhism for Modernizing Laos,” 16; also see this book’s introduction. 124. Arnold, Colonizing the Body. 125. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Young Lao Official,” 150. 126. MacAloon, “Introduction: Muscular Christianity after 150 Years,” xi. 127. The Lao/French terms used were as follows: bo mi khwam kangvon/insouciant; bo seua theu an dai/sceptique (sceptical); seusat/droit (honest); chingchai/franc (frank); yu sia/rester (idle); chai yen/ne pas s’emballer (impassive); and pen thuk pen hon/ne pas se faire de mauvais sang (imperturbable). 128. Lao Nhay, Oct. 1, 1942: 1, 5. 129. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 168. 130. Lao Nhay, Oct. 1, 1942: 1, 5. 131. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 22. 132. Lao Nhay, Oct. 1, 1942: 1. 133. Lao Nhay, June 15, 1942: 10. Though both Evans and Ivarsson use this cartoon, neither explores the central theme of achieving national/racial amelioration through physical training. Evans, Short History of Laos, 80; Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 184. 134. Lao Nhay, Feb. 1, 1942: 10. 135. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 12 (Mar. 20, 1942): 3. 136. Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai,’ ” 533. 137. I am grateful to Bruce Lockhart for making the point about transliteration. 138. Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai,’ ” 531. 139. E.g., Lao Nhay, Aug. 15, 1943: 1; Aug. 15, 1944: 1; Nov. 1, 1944: 1. 140. Paxton, Vichy France, 268; Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 173. 141. Sports-Jeunesse d’Indochine, no. 14 (Apr. 4, 1942): 4. Raffin also mentions the team in Youth Mobilization, 139. 142. Lao Nhay, Nov. 15, 1941: 6; July 15/Aug. 1, 1944: 10.

Chapter 3: Embodying Military Masculinity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Goscha, Historical Dictionary, 44. Kingdom of Laos, Pathet lao 1950, 4–5. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia,” 119–120. Kovitz, “The Roots of Military Masculinity,” 6. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West, 2. Morgan, “Theater of War,” 167–168. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West, 5–8. Evans, Short History of Laos, 83. Goscha, “Vietnam and the World Outside.”

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Notes to Pages 89–93

10. For a comprehensive account, see Gunn, Political Struggles, 127–162; for a concise summary, see Lockhart, “Narrating 1945 in Lao Historiography,” 132–138. 11. Lockhart, “Narrating 1945 in Lao Historiography,” 134. 12. Lockhart, “Narrating 1945 in Lao Historiography,” 133. 13. Goscha, Historical Dictionary, 435–436; Stuart-Fox, A to Z of Laos, 318. 14. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 65. 15. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 65–68. 16. ANOM, FM FOM 264, dossier 422, Constitution du Royaume du Laos, May 11, 1947: 2. 17. ANOM, RSL D8, Documents relatifs aux problèmes indochinois, II.— accords entre la France, le Cambodge, le Cochinchine et le Laos, Feb. 22, 1947: 10–12. For the “puppet” reference, see Gunn, Political Struggles, 174. 18. Evans, Short History of Laos, 94. 19. Halpern, Economy and Society of Laos, 188. 20. ANOM, RSL D8, Documents relatifs aux problèmes indochinois, II.— accords entre la France, le Cambodge, le Cochinchine et le Laos, Feb. 22, 1947; Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 69; for teacher-training college, Lao Mai, July 15, 1948: 6; for education statistics, see Halpern, Government, Politics and Social Structure, n.p. (app. 2, table 6) and, in graphic form, Creak, “Muscular Buddhism for Modernizing Laos,” 6. 21. It is noteworthy that the BCLs formed the core of the Lao forces. In the French military tradition, chasseurs, or chasseurs à pied (on foot), were recruited from hunters and woodsmen (chasseur literally means hunter). The Lao term for chasseur, thahan phan, combined separate nouns for soldier (thahan) and hunter (phan), thus retaining the reference to hunting. 22. Bodin, “Les laotiens,” 5–11. 23. ANOM, RSL D8, Documents relatifs aux problèmes indochinois, II.— accords entre la France, le Cambodge, le Cochinchine et le Laos, Feb. 22, 1947: 14. 24. ANOM, RSL D8, Documents relatifs aux problèmes indochinois, II.— accords entre la France, le Cambodge, le Cochinchine et le Laos, Feb. 22, 1947: 14. 25. Kingdom of Laos, Pathet Lao 1950, 70. 26. Bodin, “Les laotiens,” 9. 27. Goscha, Historical Dictionary, 44. 28. “Le mois en Indochine,” Sud-Est, no. 6 (Nov. 1949): 62. 29. Kingdom of Laos, Pathet Lao 1950, 76. 30. Derunes, “L’essor de la nouvelle armée Lao,” 44. 31. Bodin, “Les laotiens,” 9–10. 32. Derunes, “L’essor de la nouvelle armée Lao,” 44; Bodin, “Les laotiens,” 14. 33. Bodin, “Les laotiens,” 10–13. 34. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 72–73; Goscha, Historical Dictionary, 238.

Notes to Pages 93–99

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35. Goscha, Historical Dictionary, 347. 36. Stuart-Fox, A to Z of Laos, 113; Goscha, “Vietnam and the World Outside”; Goscha, Historical Dictionary, 436. 37. Deuve, Histoire de la police nationale, 54. 38. Mémorial de Caen, Fonds Deuve (hereafter MC, FD) dossier 29 (Laos 1950), École de Police, Cours: Elémentaire, 1950; Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense (hereafter ECPAD), LAOS 51–21 (Aug. 1–30, 1951), Activités de la Police Nationale Laotienne (PNL). 39. The scouts were formed in the 1940s. Raffin, Youth Mobilization, 139. 40. Nouvelles du Laos, Dec. 30, 1952, n.p. 41. I am indebted to Grant Evans for clarifying the political positions of Pheng and Bong. 42. For militarism in scouting, see Warren, “Popular Manliness,” 200–201. 43. Romilly, “Scouts Laotiens,” 53. 44. Romilly, “Scouts Laotiens,” 52. 45. The Lao name of the school was Hong Hian Oplomkhru Nyuvason lae Kainyaborihan. 46. For the decree creating ENCJEP, see Bulletin officiel du Royaume du Laos (hereafter BORL), vol. 3, no. 8 (Aug. 1950): 923–929; also see BORL, vol. 5, no. 9 (Sep. 1952): 165–166; Journal Officiel du Royaume du Laos (hereafter JORL), Sep. 1, 1954: 879–880. For photographs, see ECPAD, LAOS 51–20. “Activités d l’École National des Cadres de Jeunesse et des Sport [sic], 1–30 août 1951.” 47. ECPAD, LAOS 51–20–08, LAOS 51–20–13. 48. ECPAD LAOS 51–20, “Texte introductive,” in reportage. 49. “Texte introductive”; BORL, vol. 3, no. 8 (Aug. 1950): 924. 50. According to French military photographic records (ECPAD LAOS 51–20, “Texte introductive”), the school director was “Phoumi Sananikone,” but it was unmistakably Phoumi Nosavan. For a similar photograph of Phoumi from 1955, see Evans, Short History of Laos (rev. ed.), 128. The confusion was with Phoui Sananikone, who was prime minister in 1950–1951 and again in the late 1950s. 51. See Goscha, Historical Dictionary, 381. By contrast with Goscha, Hugh Toye states simply that Phoumi started negotiations with the French in 1948, as the Lao independence movement lost momentum, but does not explain the reason for his change of heart. Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground, 145–146. 52. Goscha, Historical Dictionary, 118–119. I return to Coutard’s photography later in this chapter. 53. Michel Bodin notes that Lao recruits were reluctant to serve far from home, their performance considered “variable,” and that they were often illiterate, resulting in a lack of trained “specialists.” Most seriously, Lao companies were seen to “literally break up at the first encounter with APVN [Vietnamese People’s Army] regulars.” Bodin recounts a time in 1953 when the 5th and

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54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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Notes to Pages 100–111

8th BCLs, confronted by a Vietminh offensive in Xam Neua, pushed past their officers, threw down their arms, and absconded to rejoin their families. Despite notable exceptions such as being excellent on the move—when marching and climbing through scrub, for instance—Lao troops were “often reproached for their weak taste for prolonged effort and a certain nonchalance, even a slowness to respond.” Bodin, “Les laotiens,” 18–19. Connell, Masculinities, 77–78. Saowapha Viravong, “Kong Le’s Unforgiven Glory”; Jim Chamberlain, personal communication, Feb. 24, 2012. Naklop Lao, no. 1 (Aug. 6, 1947): 1 (all issues obtained at Mémorial de Caen, Fonds Deuve). Bodin, “Les laotiens,” 19. Naklop Lao, no. 1 (Aug. 6, 1947): 2. Naklop Lao, no. 1 (Aug. 6, 1947): 4–5. Kovitz, “The Roots of Military Masculinity,” 10–11, n.9. Naklop Lao, no. 1 (Aug. 6, 1947): 5. Naklop Lao, no. 14 (Sep. 1, 1948): 3 Naklop Lao, no. 14 (Sep. 1, 1948): 6. Naklop Lao, no. 14 (Sep. 1 1948): 6. The French is again used here due to the illegibility of the Lao. Naklop Lao, no. 12 (July 1, 1948): 9. Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground, 134. For another example, see Naklop Lao, no. 1 (Aug. 6, 1947): n.p. On the histories of bodies and the limits of writing, see Foster, “Choreographing History: Manifesto for Dead and Moving Bodies.” For a useful critique of the “gaze,” see Ranger, “Colonialism, Consciousness and the Camera.” Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. 90–113. Radcliffe, “Embodying National Identities,” 214. Naklop Lao, no. 5 (Dec. 1, 1947): 9. Naklop Lao, no. 6 (Jan. 8, 1948): 8. Naklop Lao, no. 4 (Nov. 1, 1947): 2. Naklop Lao, no. 2 (Sep. 1, 1947): 1–2. MC, FD dossier 27, Éphémérides et presse local de 1950 (originaux). Naklop Lao, no. 39 (Oct. 1, 1950): 1. Kingdom of Laos, Pathet Lao 1950. The French title is Laos: Mil neuf cent cinquante. Kingdom of Laos, Pathet Lao 1950, 69. Fall, Street without Joy, 18. Coutard, “Indochine Sud Est Asiatique.” Griffin, “The Great War Photographs,” 123. Derunes, “L’essor de la nouvelle armée Lao,” 43.

Notes to Pages 111–122

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84. Derunes, “L’essor de la nouvelle armée Lao,” 45–46. 85. Ministère de la Défense Nationale, Instruction Ministérielle Provisoire (I) fi xant les Conditions d’Admission et les modalités du Concours d’Entrée à l’École des Elèves-Officiers Laos, Dong-Hène (1ère Section), May 26, 1952. I thank Grant Evans for providing this source from his personal collection. 86. Instruction Ministérielle Provisoire (I), 1. Uppercase used in original. 87. Instruction Ministérielle Provisoire (I), 2. 88. Instruction Ministérielle Provisoire (I), 7–12.

Chapter 4: Sport and the Theatrics of Power 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

See, respectively, Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power; Geertz, Negara. Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground, 147. See Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 112; Evans, Short History of Laos, 115. Geertz, Negara, 13. Geertz, Negara, 13, 123. Nordholt, “Negara: A Theatre State?” 473–474. Tambiah, Culture, Thought, and Social Action, 321. Geertz, Negara, 131–132. In skipping from Bali to Laos, I am suggesting that a Geertzian theatrics of power existed in precolonial Lao kingdoms, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. This question awaits proper analysis but seventeenth-century accounts of the Lao kingdoms suggest such an investigation would be fruitful. See Houmphanh Ratthanavong, Than kerit vanvustof lae khana ma viangchan 1641–44; Mariani and Bertuccio, A New and Interesting Description of the Lao Kingdom. For Southeast Asia more generally, see Errington, Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm; and Gesick, Centers, Symbols, and Hierarchies. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle,” 245. Peter Jackson uses the term “imaging technologies” in discussing the modernization of the theater state in twentieth-century Thailand.” Jackson, “SemiColoniality and the Tyranny of Images,” 226–229. Goscha, “Vietnam and the World Outside,” 163–168. For details of American aid, see Viliam Phraxayavong, History of Aid to Laos, 85. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 103–104. Stevenson, End of Nowhere, 14. Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thailand: Politics of Despotic Paternalism, 161. Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground, 146; Stuart-Fox, A to Z of Laos, 258. Evans, Short History of Laos, 115; also see “Laos: Tale of Two Cities,” Time Magazine, Aug. 22, 1960, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171 ,869802,00.html. Stuart-Fox, A to Z of Laos, 25.

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Notes to Pages 123–127

20. See, respectively, Dommen, Laos: Keystone of Indochina, 69; Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground, 170. 21. Taillard, Le Laos, Stratégies, 48. 22. Evans, Short History of Laos, 114–115. 23. Evans, Last Century of Lao Royalty, 22. 24. Evans, Last Century of Lao Royalty, 217. 25. Evans, Last Century of Lao Royalty, 208–209. 26. Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground, 145. 27. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 31–32, 46–48. Another decree in September detailed the principles and regulations of the games. JORL, Sep. 30, 1961: 297–298. 28. Bounkhong Padichit, “Khampasai khong athibodi,” 2. 29. Organizing Committee for the First South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games, “Official Report,” 1–2. 30. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 31. 31. Sat Lao, Mar. 3, 1964: 1. 32. Stevenson, End of Nowhere, 14. 33. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 31. 34. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 47. 35. National Games were also founded in Indonesia in 1951. See Brown, “Sport, Modernity and Nation Building.” 36. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 47. 37. Organizing Committee for the First SEAP Games, “Official Report,” 17. Also see chapter five. Seven teams took part but, as Singapore was not originally a member of the federation, there were six rings for six countries. 38. The five Olympic rings were probably meant to represent the number of modern Olympiads to that point. However, as the rings are often assumed to represent the continents (with North and South America as one and Antarctica omitted), it seems likely SEAP Games organizers adapted this meaning in its six-ring logo. See Barney, “This Great Symbol,” 627–641. 39. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 47. 40. Bounkhong Padichit, “Khampasai khong athibodi,” 2. 41. While ekkaphap is often translated as unity, it was not used in the games, perhaps because samakkhi is more common and colloquial. 42. Bounkhong Padichit, “Khampasai khong athibodi,” 2. 43. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle,” 248. 44. Copeland, “Contested Nationalism,” 17–31. 45. As indicated in the frequency of articles such as “Sang khwam samakkhi nai sat” [Building samakkhi in the nation], Sat Lao, Sep. 21, 1965: 3. 46. Evans, Last Century of Lao Royalty, 173. 47. Bounkhong Padichit, “Khampasai khong athibodi,” 3–4. 48. Bounkhong Padichit, “Khampasai khong athibodi,” 2. 49. Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 16.

Notes to Pages 128–133 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

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Bounkhong Padichit, “Khampasai khong athibodi,” 2. Bounkhong Padichit, “Khampasai khong athibodi,” 3. Royal Lao Government, Baephian sukhavithanya, 135. The others were intellectual, moral, and vocational. For more on the magazine Seuksathikan (Education), see Creak, “Muscular Buddhism for Modernizing Laos,” 9. Naiphai Sisakda, “Kanseuksa maen nyang?” 29. Royal Lao Government, Baephian nathi phonlameuang, 5. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 22. The prefi x khwam is an abstract noun-forming prefi x meaning “the state of.” Thongchai Winichakul, “Quest for ‘Siwilai,’ ” 531. Royal Lao Government, Baephian nathi phonlameuang, 1. Phatthana (development) was also used widely in the 1960s. For an interesting discussion of differences between phatthana and chaloen (as charoen is now spelled), see Whitington, “Laos,” in Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity, 92. Royal Lao Government, Baephian nathi phonlameuang, 1; High, Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos, 143. Elias, “Introduction,” in Quest for Excitement, ed. Elias and Dunning, 26–40. Thongchai Winichakul, “Quest for ‘Siwilai,’ ” 528, 533. Bounkhong Padichit, “Khampasai khong athibodi,” 3. Phon Chantharat, “Kila laem thong khang thi 2,” 11. This was a year later than originally scheduled. To this point, no press coverage of the first National Games in Vientiane has been located. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 122. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 129–132. Bale, “Spatial Development of the Modern Stadium,” 132. Gaffney and Bale, “Sensing the Stadium,” 26. Sat Lao, Mar. 6, 1964: 1. The Olympic rings and the gate are still there today. Laos would join the IOC in 1979. Geertz, Negara, 116. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle,” 243–244. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle,” 251–253. Sat Lao, Mar. 2, 1964: 8; Mar. 8, 1964: 1; Mar. 9, 1964: 2, 7. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 47; Sat Lao, Mar. 2, 1964: 2, 7; Mar. 3, 1964: 1; Mar. 6, 1964: 1. Evans, Last Century of Lao Royalty, 208. Sat Lao, Mar. 3, 1964: 1; Mar. 6, 1964: 1. The following account is based on Sat Lao, Mar. 2, 1964: 7–8; Mar. 9, 1964: 7–8; and JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 46–48. The original Olympic torch relay was designed with a different meaning in mind. “Carl Diem, who invented the ritual, meant it to symbolize the transit of civilization from the Greeks to the Germans, a topos of German anthropological

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82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99.

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Notes to Pages 134–141

thought from the late nineteenth century on.” Allen Guttmann, personal communication, Aug. 13, 2013. Souvanna Phouma and Boun Oum did not attend as originally scheduled, but little should be read into this. Souvanna travelled to Cambodia to meet Sihanouk that day while Boun Oum remained close enough to Phoumi to oversee third-anniversary celebrations of the National Directorate of Coordination with him the following day. Sat Lao, Mar. 3, 1964: 1; Mar 4, 1964: 1. Geertz, Negara, 114. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 47. Sat Lao, Mar. 7, 1964: 1. See front covers of Khao Nyuvason Kila, 1, no. 3 (1961) and Seuksathikan 1, no. 12 (1960). Geertz, Negara, 118. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle,” 252. Sat Lao, Mar. 7, 1964: 1. Unfortunately, the quality of the image is too poor to reproduce here. Sat Lao, Mar. 3, 1964: 1; Mar. 6, 1964: 1. JORL, Mar. 6, 1961: 47. Sat Lao, Mar. 4, 1964: 1. Geertz, Negara, 120, 129–130. Gray, “Hegemonic Images,” 51. Geertz, Negara, 132. I thank Grant Evans for this observation and phrasing. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 146. For example, see Brown, “Sport, Modernity and Nation”; Hong, Sport, Nationalism and Orientalism. For critiques of modernization theory in sports studies, see Carter and Krüger, Ritual and Record and Brownell, “Problems with Ritual.” As discussed in chapter one, Allen Guttmann is the most prominent sports scholar to employ a modernization framework, although he also stressed the persistence of ritual in modern sport, notably in a case study of baseball’s popularity in the Americas. See Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 91–116. See chapter one and Brownell, Training the Body for China, 120–152.

Chapter 5: Representing Meuang Lao in Southeast Asia 1. See, respectively, Andrews and Ritzer, “The Grobal in the Sporting Glocal”; John Hargreaves, “Globalisation Theory, Global Sport, and Nations and Nationalism,” 27. Also see Rowe, “Sport and the Repudiation of the Global.” 2. See chapters one through four of this book and Appadurai, “Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket,” in Modernity at Large, 89–113.

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3. For an example, see Cho, Leary, and Jackson, eds. “Glocalization and Sports in Asia,” a special issue of Sociology of Sport Journal. Although the authors focus on Asia as a geographical context, they fail to consider regional dynamics as a structural force that mediates between the global and local. 4. Hong, Sport, Nationalism and Orientalism. For the founding of the Asian Games, see Sisodia, “India and the Asian Games,” in Hong, Sport, Nationalism and Orientalism. 5. Hong, “Epilogue: Nationalism, Orientalism and Globalization,” in Sport, Nationalism and Orientalism, 113. Although the author does not explain her usage of the term “Orientalism,” it correlates more closely with pan-Asianism than Edward Said’s better-known usage in Orientalism. She refers, for instance, to the role of sport in Asia in “stimulating political reassertion, a sense of national identity and the arousal of Orientalism.” Hong, “Epilogue: Nationalism, Orientalism and Globalization,” in Sport, Nationalism and Orientalism, 111. 6. Maguire, Global Sport, 210. 7. Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” 5–6. 8. Hannerz, Cultural Complexity, 221. 9. The classical works include Coedès, Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Wolters, History, Culture, and Region. Also see Evans, “Between the Global and the Local.” 10. Maguire, Global Sport, 29. 11. Walker, “Borders in Motion.” 12. ANOM, GGI 39733. Le consul de France (Rougni), Au sujet du match de football entre l’équipe Oubone et celle de Paksé, Oubone [Ubon], Aug. 29, 1928. 13. See chapters one and two of this book. 14. Acharya, The Quest for Identity, 34; Emmerson, “ ‘Southeast Asia,’ ” 8–9. 15. Goscha, Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks, 256, 281, 344–355. For DRV-Lao communist relations, see Goscha, “Vietnam and the World Outside.” 16. Christie, Southeast Asia in the Twentieth Century, 212. 17. In the Lao language, no distinction was made between the two terms. Lockhart, “The Fate of Neutralism,” 209. 18. Evans, Short History of Laos, 107; Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 40. 19. Usnisa Sukhusvasti, “Remembering Luang Sukhum Naiyapradit,” Bangkok Post, Apr. 30, 2003: 8. Also see Lamnao Eamsa-ard, “Thai Popular Music,” 84. Luang Sukhum’s most significant position was his long tenure (1934–1964) as secretary-general of the Office of the Civil Ser vice Commission. 20. The Lao representative was Nakhala Souvannavong, a noted sportsman in the Vichy years and inaugural council member of the SEAP Games Federation. The Souvannavong family was prominent in RLG politics, but Nakhala’s political activities are unknown.

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21. Bangkok Post, May 12, 1958: 6; May 26, 1958: 6; also see SEAP Games Federation Office, “SEAP and SEA Games History.” 22. For the temple dispute, see Chandler, History of Cambodia, 234; Singh, “The Thai-Cambodian Temple Dispute,” 23–26. For Singapore’s inclusion, see Seneviratne, Golden Moments, 8. 23. “Cambodia Stops Construction of SEAP Games Sports Compound,” News Bulletin Antara, Nov. 1, 1963: sports, 6. 24. Olympic Council of Malaysia, History of the SEA Games. 25. Seneviratne, Golden Moments, 52–53. Numbering was continued from the SEAP Games, emphasizing continuity between the two events. 26. A minor exception is Hugh Tertrais’ brief reflection on the role of the SEAP/ SEA Games in developing regional identities, in “Sport et identités régionales.” In addition, two nonscholarly books chart aspects of the event’s history. See Anonymous, Moments in Southeast Asian Sport; Seneviratne, Golden Moments. The history of the SEAP/SEA Games, including their establishment in 1958–1959 is the subject of my ongoing research. 27. Bangkok Post, May 26, 1958: 6. 28. Bangkok Post, May 12, 1958: 6. 29. Organizing Committee for the First South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games, “Official Report,” 1–2. 30. Organizing Committee, “Official Report,” 2. 31. Bangkok Post, May 12, 1958: 6. 32. Organizing Committee, “Official Report,” 17. 33. Olympic Council of Malaysia, History of the SEA Games. If true, Thailand was prescient to be wary of Indonesia’s sporting strength. After being admitted to the SEA Games in 1977, Indonesia topped the medal count in nine of the following eleven games, the only exceptions being when Thailand hosted in 1985 and 1995. 34. Thongchai Winichakul, “Trying to Locate Southeast Asia from its Navel,” 116. 35. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 77. 36. Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, History of Thailand, 128–129. 37. Thongchai Winichakul, “Trying to Locate Southeast Asia from its Navel,” 122. 38. Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, History of Thailand, 148. 39. National Archives and Records Administration (United States), RG 84, UD 3267, Box 111 [Old box 8], 600.3 Sports. Bangkok to Dept. of State, “Thai National Athletic Program,” May 13, 1958. The history of the SEAP Games, including the roles of Thai and American officials, is the subject of my continuing research. 40. The king’s association with the games was consecrated in 1967, when he and his daughter famously tied for a gold medal in the sailing regatta. Handley, The King Never Smiles, 158.

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41. These medals came in nine events: badminton (men), boxing (men), basketball (women), football (men), judo (men), tennis (men and women), sepak takraw (men), shooting (men), and volleyball (men). Various sources. 42. Olympic Council of Malaysia, History of the SEA Games. 43. Phon Chantharat, “Kila laem thong,” 11. 44. Phon Chantharat, “Kila laem thong,” 19. 45. Phon Chantharat, “Kila laem thong,” 19. 46. For this description of Phoumi, see chapter four. 47. Phon Chantharat, “Kila laem thong,” 12, 18. 48. As Allen Guttmann writes, “Modern sports are characterized by the almost inevitable tendency to transform every athletic feat into one that can be quantified and measured.” Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 47. 49. Sat Lao, Dec. 25, 1965: 1. 50. Sat Lao, Dec. 27, 1965: 3. 51. Sat Lao, Dec. 6, 1967: 1. 52. Also see chapter four. 53. It is important to note that Lao elites could also locate “others within”—nonLao ethnic minorities living in mountainous areas of Laos—who existed beneath them on this hierarchy. See Thongchai Winichakul, “The Others Within”; also see chapter eight for further discussions on the issue of Thai-Lao hierarchy. 54. Evans, “Different Paths,” 103. 55. Sat Lao, Nov. 27, 1969: 1, 8. 56. For a brief analysis of the sporting relationship between Laos and Thailand, see Creak, “Sport as Politics and History,” 18. Also see chapter eight. 57. Sat Lao, Nov. 29, 1969: 1, 2. 58. Sat Lao, Nov. 29, 1969: 2. 59. Sat Lao, Nov. 29, 1969: 1; Dec. 2, 1969: 1. 60. Sat Lao, Nov. 29, 1969: 4. 61. Sat Lao, Nov. 29, 1969: 2. 62. Sat Lao, Nov. 29, 1969: 2, 7. 63. Pauker, “Ganefo I,” 172. 64. Lutan and Hong, “The Politicization of Sport,” 428. 65. Sukarno, “Keynote Address,” 6. 66. Sukarno, “Keynote Address,” 3 (original uppercase). This model represented a more polarized version of Sukarno’s earlier division of mankind into three “communities of people,” namely, the West, the communist bloc, and the nonaligned movement, which he had outlined at Bandung in 1954. 67. Sukarno, “Keynote Address,” 6; also see Pauker, “Ganefo I,” 173–175. 68. Xu Guoqi, Olympic Dreams, 53. 69. Ngo Luan, “Vietnam,” 21. 70. Pauker, “Ganefo I,” 174–175.

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71. Pauker, “Ganefo I,” 174–175. 72. For the full list, see Pauker, “Ganefo I,” 171–172, n.1. 73. Brown, Short History of Indonesia, 194. One slogan at the games was “Sukseskan GANEFO Ganjang Malaysia” (Success to GANEFO, Crush Malaysia), the second part of which was the slogan of the Confrontation. Pauker, “Ganefo I,” 179. 74. Antara News Bulletin, Nov. 1, 1963: sports, 6. The IAAF had insisted that Cambodia declare it had competed the previous year in Jakarta in an “international competition,” not the “Asian Games.” Feeling this amounted to condemnation of Indonesia, a friendly country, and an unreasonable ultimatum, Cambodia withdrew from the IAAF and thus lost the right to host the SEAP Games. Monash University, David Chandler Cambodia Collection, Series 1: US Diplomatic Reports US Embassy, Phnom Penh Cambodia 1956–1981, Box 6 (1963), No. A-480, Apr. 18, 1963, (Joint WEEKA 16); No. A-487, Apr. 23, 1963 (Bi-Weekly Economic Review No. 8, Mar. 30-Apr. 12, 1963). 75. Antara News Bulletin, Nov. 1, 1963: sports, 6. 76. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 126–128. 77. Pheng Sithat, “Le Laos,” 50. 78. I am grateful to Bruce Lockhart for pointing this out. 79. Le National, no. 38 (Sep. 26, 1963): 1–2. 80. Antara/AFP, “GANEFO,” Antara News Bulletin, Nov. 26, 1966, sports, 4. 81. The countries that competed in Phnom Penh were Cambodia, Ceylon, the PRC, Indonesia, Iraq, Japan, North Korea, Laos, Lebanon, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Palestine, Singapore, Syria, North Vietnam, and Yemen. Kolatch, Sports, Politics and Ideology, 200. 82. Kolatch, Sports, Politics and Ideology, 198. 83. Sat Lao, Dec. 2, 1966: 1, 8. 84. Antara News Bulletin, Nov. 15, 1966: sports, 4; Kolatch, Sports, Politics and Ideology, 198. 85. Sat Lao, Dec. 2, 1966: 1. 86. I could just as easily label the authentic Laos as Pathet Lao, but Meuang Lao is used more often among people from this generation. I also prefer Meuang Lao in order to avoid confusion with the Pathet Lao communist forces. 87. Kolatch, Sports, Politics and Ideology, 200. 88. See note 81, above, for the list of participants, many of which were not socialist. 89. This accusation was reported in Lent, “Mass Media in Laos,” 174, but needs to be balanced with the knowledge that it was leveled by a former Sat Lao journalist who was by then a rival editor. 90. Sat Lao, Dec. 24, 1966, 3. 91. Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 1–2. This appears to have been the first time this pamphlet was published.

Notes to Pages 163–169 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

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Lao National Sports Museum, Vientiane (Feb. 1997). Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 3. Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 3. For the medals table, see Kolatch, Sports, Politics and Ideology, 200. Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 3. Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 1. Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 57. Stuart-Fox, A to Z of Laos, 306–307. Kolatch, Sports, Politics and Ideology, 199; Connelly, “The Politics of the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO).” Kolatch, Sports, Politics and Ideology, 200. Program of Action of the Neo Lao Hak Sat (Neo Lao Hak Sat Publications, 1964 n.p.). Reprinted as Appendix A2 in Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 288–290. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 94. Lao National Sports Museum, Vientiane (Feb. 1997). This might have been the Arirang Festival, which takes place in April, the month the photo was taken. Hannerz, Cultural Complexity, 233. Evans, “Between the Global and the Local.” Goscha and Ivarsson, Contesting Visions of the Lao Past.

Chapter 6: Socialist Cultures of Rhetoric and Physicality 1. Riordan, Sport, Politics and Communism, 48–49. 2. Other elements of physical culture included physical education, active leisure pursuits, and playful activities. For a schematic of the Soviet Marxist view of sport in society, see Riordan, Sport, Politics and Communism, 30. 3. Riordan, Sport, Politics and Communism, 21. 4. Riordan, Sport, Politics and Communism, 24–25. Original emphasis. 5. Riordan, Sport, Politics and Communism, 25. 6. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 57. 7. Phung, “Ho Chi Minh’s Thought,” 6. 8. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 22. 9. Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism, 7. As khon (person) is not gendered, “new socialist person” seems a more accurate translation of how khon mai sangkhomninyom would have been understood. Most importantly, both women and men were part of the ideal, as discussed later in this chapter. 10. Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism, 6. 11. Pholsena, Post-war Laos, 60; Pholsena, “(Transformative) Impacts of the Vietnam War,” 177–178.

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12. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 24. 13. Verdery, “Theorizing Socialism,” 430; the critique is from Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 37. 14. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 231–240. 15. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. It is also relevant to note Ken Maclean’s critique that the “public” and “hidden” scripts are not always as discrete as literature on domination and resistance implies. Maclean, “Manifest Socialism,” 27–79. 16. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 17. Evans, Short History of Laos, 178; Bounsang Khamkeo, I Little Slave; also see Nakhonkham Bouphanouvong, Sixteen Years in the Land of Death. 18. Pholsena, “(Transformative) Impacts of the Vietnam War.” 19. Munslow, The New History, 157. 20. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State, 4. 21. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 236. 22. For example, Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 45. 23. I thank Bruce Lockhart for the comparative reference. 24. For similar comments on dismissing “propaganda” in socialist Vietnam, see Maclean, “Manifest Socialism,” 64. It might also be possible to use “discourse” in the Foucauldian sense of the term, but to my mind the centralized production of official language under a Leninist party-state differs from the diffuse processes highlighted in Foucauldian notions of power/knowledge. 25. Ministry of Education, Sport, and Religious Affairs (hereafter MESRA), Kila kainyakam, p. ko (the first letter of Lao alphabet). 26. For the three revolutions, see Kaysone Phomvihane, Revolution in Laos, 181–182, and Doré, “The Th ree Revolutions in Laos.” Concerning translation of the third revolution (kanpativat vatthanatham lae naeokhit), naeokhit literally means “way of thinking.” A different word, latthi, is normally glossed as “ideology.” I thank Grant Evans for pointing out this distinction. Naeokhit may be a reflection of the Vietnamese word tu tuong, which literally means “thought” but is widely used in communist rhetoric with the meaning of “ideology,” even though (as in Lao) there is another word that specifically means “ideology.” I am grateful to Bruce Lockhart for this comparative note. 27. Reprinted as Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” cited extensively below. 28. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 234, 418 n.40. 29. Doré, “Three Revolutions in Laos,” 101. 30. For similar rhetoric in Vietnamese to that quoted here, see Salemink, “Enclosing the Highlands.” 31. By contrast, Soviet advisers were mostly employed in technical areas. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 234, 209–212.

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32. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 176; Evans, Short History of Laos, 188; Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 186. 33. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 36. 34. Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 59. 35. Kaysone Phomvihane, “Chut phiset khong saphapkan,” 30–31. 36. Doré, “Three Revolutions in Laos,” 104–106; Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism, 88–89. 37. Verdery, “Theorizing Socialism,” 430. 38. Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism, 1. 39. Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 59–61. 40. Doré, “Three Revolutions in Laos,” 104. 41. Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 62–63. 42. Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism, 4. 43. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 300–309; Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 63. 44. The same metaphor was used in southern Vietnam after 1975. Taylor, Fragments of the Present, 32. 45. Prime Minister’s Office, Department of Archives (hereafter PMO DA), 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya 1978–1986 [Summary of LOC activities, 1978–1986], May 31, 1986: 3. 46. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 4. It should be noted that the LPDR, like other socialist countries, had its own professional or “worker athletes” (nakkila asip). 47. For example, Sat Lao, Mar. 6, 1964: 7. 48. Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 63. 49. Others that have made this point have paid little attention to the relevant Lao terms, which show how physicality shaped rhetoric (see below). Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 234–237; and Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism, 1–7. 50. Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 63. 51. Kaysone Phomvihane, Revolution in Laos, 194. 52. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan sokhian 1975–1976 [Summary of education, sport, and religious affairs work, academic year 1975–1976], n.d. (late 1976?): 14. For socialist boxing historiography, see Seuksa Mai, Sep. 1984: 15; and Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao.” 53. See chapter seven, particularly concerning the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. 54. Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 63. 55. Kaysone Phomvihane, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 59–60. 56. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 5.

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57. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 308. 58. Although this was also a translation from Vietnamese, the Lao phrase pen chao permits an additional revolutionary play on words. Not only does chao khong mean “owner,” but chao means “lord” or “royalty,” meaning the socialist usage quite literally democratized the usual connotation of this term. 59. Lentz, “Mobilization and State Formation,” 563. 60. Pholsena, “(Transformative) Impacts of the Vietnam War,” 171. 61. I thank Grant Evans for mentioning the teleological connotation of khabuan. 62. Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 5. 63. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Phaenkan seuksa 2 pi (naptae sokhian 1979–1980 theung sokhian 1980–1981) [Two-year education plan (academic years 1979– 1980 to 1980–1981)], July 31, 1979: 30. 64. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan sokhian 1975–1976, n.d. (late 1976?): 14. 65. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1976–1977 [Summary, academic years 1976–1977], Sep. 5, 1977: 11; PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan sokhian 1975–1976, n.d. (late 1976?): 15. 66. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi 1977 khong kasuang seuksa kila lae thammakan [Summary, 1977, of the Ministry of Education, Sport, and Religious Affairs,], Dec. 16, 1977: 22. 67. PMO DA 08/22 (MESRA), Kansangket tilakha viak ngan seuksa kila lae thammakan ton sokhian 1979–1980 [Evaluation of education, sport, and religious affairs work, academic year 1979–1980], May 30, 1980: 17–19; PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980 [Summary of education, sport, and religious affairs work: 5 years from 1975 to 1980], Dec. 19, 1980: 19–22. 68. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1976–1977, Sep. 5, 1977: 2. MESRA counted 4,395 primary schools, 13,830 classes, and 414,423 pupils. PMO DA 08/13 (MESRA), Salup viakngan deuan 10 khong kasuang seuksathikan kila lae thammakan [Summary of Ministry of Education, Sport, and Religious Affairs work, October], Oct. 28, 1977: 2. 69. The Lao original was kom lai meuai aeo/khian lai meuai khaen/hat kai baep ni cheung hai itmeuai. MESRA, Kila kainyakam, 37. 70. MESRA, Kila kainyakam, 71. 71. MESRA, Kila kainyakam, 105. 72. Also see Edelman, Serious Fun, x. 73. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan sokhian 1975–1976, n.d. (late 1976?): 14; PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 20. It seems likely the school was the same one that still exists at Thongpong, on Route 13 (North), though this is not confirmed in the sources.

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74. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Phaenkan seuksa 2 pi (naptae sokhian 1979–1980 theung sokhian 1980–1981), July 31, 1979: 31. 75. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi hian 1978–1979 [Summary of 1978–1979 academic year], n.d. (July 1979): 7. 76. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 20; PMO DA 08/22 (MESRA), Kansangket tilakha viak ngan seuksa kila lae thammakan ton sokhian 1979–1980, May 30, 1980: 17. 77. PMO DA 08/34 (MESRA), Botlaingan saphap kanseuksa 6 deuan ton pi 1983 [Report on the state of education, first six months 1983], July 1983: 4. 78. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan sokhian 1975–1976, n.d. (late 1976?): 14; PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1976–1977, Sep. 5, 1977: 12; PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1977–1978 [Summary, 1977–1978 academic year], n.d. (July 1978?): 22. 79. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 19–21; PMO DA 08/22 (MESRA), Kansangket tilakha viak ngan seuksa kila lae thammakan ton sokhian 1979–1980, May 30, 1980: 18. 80. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 20. 81. PMO DA 08/13 (MESRA), Salup viakngan deuan 10 khong kasuang seuksathikan kila lae thammakan, Oct. 28, 1977: 3. 82. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1977–1978, n.d. (July 1978?): 22. 83. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 20. 84. PMO DA 08/13 (MESRA), Salup phon khong kankuatka lae kepkam saphap kanseuksa khweng kamphaeng viangchan [Summary of results, inspection of education conditions, Vientiane Prefecture], n.d. (1980?): 15–16. 85. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 21–22. 86. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 3. To some extent, the Lao Olympic Committee’s criticism was probably explained by the fact that the LOC was not founded until the end of 1978. But the statistics, such as they exist, support the proposition that mass sport had failed to expand. 87. PMO DA 08/34 (MESRA), Bot laingan kiaokap kansalup viakngan seuksa nai lainya 10 pi (1975–1985) [Report concerning summary of education work in the 10 year period 1975–1985], June 17, 1986. 88. I thank Kathryn Sweet for this important observation. 89. PMO DA 08/34 (MESRA), Bot laingan kiaokap kansalup viakngan seuksa nai lainya 10 pi (1975–1985), June 17, 1986: 1–2. 90. Kaysone Phomvihane, Ekasan khong kongpasumnyai khangthi IV, 66.

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Notes to Pages 186–195

91. Evans, Short History of Laos, 178. 92. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 178. 93. Bounsang Khamkeo, I Little Slave; Nakhonkham Bouphanouvong, Sixteen Years in the Land of Death. 94. While there had been women’s sport before 1975, the more prominent images of femininity produced in women’s magazines such as Nang were of beauty and deportment, images that quickly returned in postsocialist Laos. 95. Doré, “Three Revolutions in Laos,” 109–112. 96. In November and December 2005, the Kaysone picture was included in exhibitions held to coincide with the LPDR’s 30th anniversary and the 7th National Games in Savannakhet. I thank Grant Evans for the tai chi observation. 97. Cf. Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 32–40. 98. Evans, Last Century of Lao Royalty, 289. 99. Indochine, Mar. 18, 1934: 10–11. 100. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 433 (Appendix D2). Souphanouvong was born in 1909, meaning this recollection refers to 1922, twenty years before the Lao Nhay movement. While we unfortunately lack the Lao language sources to check whether language such as seu seu was being used in the 1920s, it was characteristic of the Lao Nhay movement. Notions of racial degeneration, on the other hand, were certainly associated with the 1920s, suggesting he was probably mixing references from different periods here. 101. Lao National Sports Museum (Feb. 28, 2007). Also see Evans, Last Century of Lao Royalty, 287. 102. Evans, Last Century of Lao Royalty, 290. 103. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 57. 104. Creak, “Creating and Monopolizing Political Space,” 56–57. 105. Kaysone Phomvihane, Ekasan khong kongpasumnyai khangthi IV, 26. 106. Doré, “Three Revolutions in Laos,” 112. 107. I was asked in 2006 to translate the resume of a former senior bureaucrat, which included a section of such “weak points.” 108. This observation is based on MESRA reports, many of which are cited in this chapter, but reports of other ministries and departments would reveal the same. 109. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1977–1978, n.d. (July 1978?): 21. 110. For example, Canning, “The Body as Method?”; Mackie and Stevens, “Globalisation and Body Politics.”

Chapter 7: Mobilizing the Revolution 1. Having boycotted the Olympic movement after 1917 for its “bourgeois” sporting values, the Soviet Union rejoined the games in 1952, bid unsuccessfully for the 1976 games, and eventually hosted the controversial Moscow games of

Notes to Pages 196–199

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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1980. Hill, Olympic Politics. The PRC withdrew from the Olympic movement in the 1950s in protest at the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s recognition of Nationalist China (Taiwan) and remained estranged from the Olympic movement throughout the 1960s and the Cultural Revolution, when competitive sport was denounced for promoting “medals and trophyism.” It was not until the reform period that China fully embraced competition and joined the IOC, though it joined the US-led boycott of the Moscow games before finally taking part in Los Angeles in 1984. Kolatch, Sports, Politics and Ideology, 180–187; Xu Guoqi, Olympic Dreams, chapters 4, 5, and 7. Riordan, “The Impact of Communism on Sport,” 62. Original emphasis. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 303; Xu Guoqi, Olympic Dreams, 202. Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism. Lentz, “Mobilization and State Formation,” 566. Pholsena develops a similar argument for the period of the “revolutionary struggle.” See Pholsena, “(Transformative) Impacts of the Vietnam War.” As mentioned in the previous chapter, khabuan implies movement towards a telos, explaining why it can also mean procession. Kankheuanvai is formed from kheuan vai, a verb meaning “to move.” Edelman, Serious Fun, x. Edelman distinguishes spectator sport from what I have called elite sport, notably the Olympic Games. While the former was most important as a form of consumption, the latter was focused on production (Edelman, Serious Fun, viii-ix). In Laos the small size of the country and sporting society made the two types of sport more difficult to separate, except in terms of ideal types. Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 59. For example, Pitouphoum, Jan. 22, 1971: 2. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1977–1978, n.d. (July 1978?): 21. Vientiane Mai, Jan. 6, 1976: 2–3. Vientiane Mai, Jan. 14, 1976: 2. Vientiane Mai, Feb. 10, 1976: 2. Neo Lao Hak Sat, Khunsombat matthanyom neung. Also see Vientiane Mai, Jan. 14, 1976: 2. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 21. Vientiane Mai, Feb. 27, 1984: 3; Feb. 28, 1984: 3. Vientiane Mai, Mar. 1984: 3. Vannasin, Mar. 13, 1984: 8 (original emphasis). PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980. The full ritual calendar consisted of Pathet Lao Day (Jan. 6), Army Day (Jan. 20), Women’s Day (Mar. 8), LPRP Day (Mar. 22), May Day (May 1), Children’s Day (June 1), Lao Issara Day (Aug. 13), Liberation Day (Aug. 23), Freedom from

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

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Notes to Pages 200–204

the French Day (Oct. 12) and National Day (Dec. 2). Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 57. Vientiane Mai, Jan. 23, 1976: 2. Vientiane Mai, Jan. 23, 1976: 2. Riordan, Sport, Politics and Communism, 52. Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 59. Life nevertheless remained bo muan for most, especially after the 1977 rice crop failed due to drought and flood. Far Eastern Economic Review, Dec. 16, 1977: 12; also see Evans, “Buddhism and Economic Action in Socialist Laos,” in Socialism, ed. Hann, 134–135. See Pholsena, “(Transformative) Impacts of the Vietnam War,” 180; “La Production d’Hommes et de Femmes Socialistes Nouveaux,” 63. For the treaty, see Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 369–372. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan sokhian 1975–1976, n.d. (late 1976?): 14; PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1976–1977, Sep. 5, 1977: 11; PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi 1977 khong kasuang seuksa kila lae thammakan, Dec. 16, 1977: 6; PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi seuksa 1977–1978, n.d. (July 1978?): 21; PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi hian 1978–1979, n.d. (July 1979): 7; PMO DA 08/22 (MESRA), Kansangket tilakha viak ngan seuksa kila lae thammakan ton sokhian 1979–1980, May 30, 1980: 17. See Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 59–60. Also see discussion later in this chapter. In unofficial contexts ai nong, with its Vietnamese resonance, could be used pejoratively to refer to the new regime, when it implied party secrecy, impenetrability, and nonsophistication (as in ban nok, “country bumpkin”). I thank Grant Evans for this observation and Nathan Badenoch for insights into the term’s use during the war. Also see Badenoch and Tomita, “Mountain People in the Muang,” 54. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 6. Enfield, “Lao as a National Language,” 275. Vientiane Mai, Nov. 23, 1976: 1. Vientiane Mai, Dec. 1, 1976: 1. PMO DA 08/34 (MESRA), No. 376, MESRA/84, Laingan nyo kiaokap kan patibat sannya lae anusannya lavang kasuang seuksa haeng so po po lao kap kasuang lae thabuang tang tang haeng so so viatnam tae pi 1976 thoeng pi 1984 [Report on implementation of agreements and protocols between the Lao PDR Ministry of Education and the various ministries and sub-ministries of SR Vietnam from 1976 to 1984]: 1, 2 (annex). Seuksa Mai, Feb. 1984: 15. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 4.

Notes to Pages 204–209

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39. Brown and Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries, 260. ASEAN initially consisted of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. The SEA Games included these countries in addition to Burma and Brunei. 40. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi 1977 khong kasuang seuksa kila lae thammakan, Dec. 16, 1977: 1. 41. Bedlington, “Laos in 1980,” 103. 42. PMO DA 08/22 (MESRA), Kansangket tilakha viak ngan seuksa kila lae thammakan ton sokhian 1979–1980, May 30, 1980: 17. 43. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 20. For ongoing incidents, see Vientiane Mai, July 17, 1980: 1. Hiebert, “ ‘Socialist Transformation’ in Laos,” 176–177. 44. Pattana Kitiarsa, “ ‘Lives of hunting dogs.’ ” 45. Vientiane Mai, Oct. 29, 1976: 1. 46. Vientiane Mai (online), July 3, 2009. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 20. 47. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi hian 1978–1979, n.d. (July 1979): 21–22. 48. See Neo Lao Hak Sat, Khunsombat. 49. The Spartak Games were an international event for workers and youth from socialist countries. 50. Seuksa Mai, Aug. 1984: 15. 51. Kaysone often discussed this policy (khwam samoephap lavang phu sai kap phy nying) in his speeches. “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 60. 52. Vientiane Mai, Mar. 20, 1984. 53. Kaysone, “Lainya mai, thitthang mai, nathi mai,” 60; for the “three goods,” see Stuart-Fox, History of Laos, 187. 54. Vientiane Mai, Jan. 30, 1976: 2. 55. Lao News Agency, Photographic Archives (KPL PA), ref. 91:2.430; 91:2.511; 91:2.512. As in other socialist countries, worker athletes were paid by the state to train and compete; the fact that these troupes included women was significant in itself. 56. Vientiane Mai (online), July 3, 2009. 57. For the transgression of gender norms required in the production of sporting heroines, see Jennifer Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 2. Ian McDonald argues, in contrast to my interpretation here, that in fascist Italy feting female successes on the world stage reinforced patriarchal rule. While such critiques may apply to fascist (or fascist-inspired) regimes, particularly in view of their extreme nationalism and gender essentialism, they are less relevant to socialist regimes, which maintain a strong ideology—if not necessarily practice—of gender equality. C.f. McDonald, “Political Somatics,” 58. Souphavanh received more attention in the lead-up to the 2009 SEA Games, thirty-four years later. Vientiane Mai (online), July 3, 2009. 58. Jennifer Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 2, citing Tuttle, Heroines, 10.

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59. It seems likely the Soviet Union would have done the same with other small socialist countries in the developing world. 60. PMO DA 08/43, Lao Football Federation, Bot lae salup kankeuanvai viakngan sahasamakhom taeban lao lae thitthang kankheuanvai nai sapho na [Report and summary of activities and work of the Lao Football Federation and directions for future activities], 1989: 2–3; PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 4. 61. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 7. 62. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 4. 63. PMO DA 08/14 (MESRA), Salup pi hian 1978–1979, n.d. (July 1979): 7. 64. Vientiane Mai, July 19, 1980: 2. The original says the 11th (khang thi 11) great festival, perhaps confusing the Roman numerals (XXII in 1980) that are used to denote Olympiads. 65. Philippines first competed in 1924; Burma and Singapore in 1948; Thailand, Indonesia, and South Vietnam in 1952; and Malaya and Cambodia in 1956. 66. Vientiane Mai, July 19, 1980: 2. 67. Vientiane Mai, July 19, 1980 : 2. 68. PMO DA 08/15 (MESRA), Salup viakngan seuksa kila lae thammakan 5 pi tae 1975 thoeng 1980, Dec. 19, 1980: 21. 69. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 6. 70. This phrase is John Hoberman’s, which he uses critically rather than literally. Hoberman, “Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism,” 1. 71. MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 262. 72. Hoberman, “Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism,” 1. 73. Vientiane Mai, July 19, 1980: 2. 74. The title in Lao was: “Santiphap maen ngeuankhai khong kankila, kila maen ekakkhalatthut khong santiphap.” PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 5–7. 75. Hoberman, “Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism,” 7. 76. Hill, Olympic Politics, 123. 77. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 4. 78. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 6. 79. Hill, Olympic Politics, 124–126; Edelman, “Moscow 1980,” 149–153. 80. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 6. 81. Vientiane Mai, July 19, 1980: 2.

Notes to Pages 215–223

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82. Vientiane Mai, Aug. 6, 1980: 2. 83. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 6. In large part, 1980 remained the highlight because Laos had not yet competed in another Olympics, having joined the Soviets’ retaliatory boycott of Los Angeles in 1984. 84. PMO DA 08/43 (LOC), Salup sangluam kankheuanvai khong ko o lo phan lainya, 1978–1986, May 31, 1986: 7. 85. For examples from China, see Brownell, Training the Body for China, 138–148. 86. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle,” 252. 87. KPL PA, ref. 91:1.529–591:1.530. 88. This description is based on the 1987 logo, which, according to a display at the National Sports Museum in Vientiane, was used in the first games as well. 89. KPL PA, ref. 91:1.532. 90. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 314. 91. KPL PA, ref. 91:1.521; 91:1.525–591:1.537. 92. Also see KPL PA ref. 91:1534; 91:3269. 93. Hoberman, Sport and Political Ideology, 7–8. 94. The first quote is from Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 59–60, and the second from Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 22, though Evans does not pursue this aspect of sport in detail. Scott’s analysis, including the absence of people on National Day, draws extensively on a paper by Evans, later published as Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 15–23. 95. Lentz, “Mobilization and State Formation,” 566. 96. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 463; Mayer provides an excellent summary of these points before critiquing Arendt with respect to national socialism in Nazi Germany. Mayer, “Hannah Arendt.” Arendt’s argument remains apposite to Laos and other socialist regimes with totalitarian designs. 97. In general, notions of totalitarianism overlook the unevenness of power, even in one-party states. In Laos, moreover, the party-state lacked the material means to successfully carry out the wholesale transformation of society. Evans, Peasants under Socialism, 183. 98. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 306. 99. Brownell, Training the Body for China, 57. 100. Like the English “revolution,” the Lao word pativat, deriving from Pali, can mean to “revolve” or “rotate.” Kerr, Lao-English Dictionary, 763. Although LaoLao and Thai-Thai dictionaries typically translate the word as “change” (kanpianpaeng), or more specifically, as “change of the political system” or “change of the industrial system” (Sila Viravong, Vatchananukom phasa Lao, 234; Siviangkhaek Konnivong, Vatchananukom phasa Lao, 873), pativat has weightier, more dynamic connotations than “change,” which connotes extreme change or movement—again like the English “revolution.” Such ambiguities stem from

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the word’s recent introduction to Lao (and Thai, for that matter—the word does not appear as pativat in McFarland’s 1944 Thai-English Dictionary) and emphasize the dynamism of such neologisms. I am grateful to David Streckfuss for discussions of pativat and other neologisms. 101. Verdery, “Theorizing Socialism,” 430. 102. Evans, Lao Peasants under Socialism and Post-Socialism, xi.

Chapter 8: Vientiane Games, 2009 1. This section is based on ethnographic research carried out at the 2009 SEA Games in Vientiane. Parts of this chapter were developed in blog posts for New Mandala (http://asiapacific .anu .edu .au/newmandala /category/sea -games/) and have appeared in different formats in Creak, “Little Laos Awaits its big moment”; “Sport as Politics and History”; and “Laos: National Celebrations and Development Debates.” 2. Somsavat Lengsavad, “Interview Given by H. E. Mr. Somsavat Lengsavad,” 33; Vientiane Games, Dec. 2, 2009, 1. 3. Edward Thangarajah, “Land-locked Laos ready to perform its sports miracle,” Bangkok Post, Aug. 30, 2009, http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/sports /22948/land-locked-laos-ready-to-perform-its-sports-miracle. 4. Vientiane Games, Dec. 2, 2009: 1. 5. The most comprehensive fan website was http://25thseagames.blogspot.com/. A group called “SEA Games XXV, Laos. Vientiane 2009” was also set up on Facebook. 6. Vongkhaophet, “SEA Games XXV, Laos. Vientiane 2009” (Facebook group), Oct. 13, 2009 [viewed Oct. 28, 2009], http://www.facebook.com/pages/SEA -Games-XXV-Laos-Vientiane-2009/90526473177?v=info & ref=ts #!/pages/ SEA-Games-XXV-Laos-Vientiane-2009/90526473177?v=wall&ref=ts. 7. Letchumanan, “Laos Want Sports Like Shuttlecock, Fin Swimming in 2009 SEA Games,” Bernama, Apr. 28, 2008, http://www.bernama.com/bernama/ v5/newsindex.php?id=329433. 8. “Is the SEA Games Losing Its Glamour?” Bernama, Mar. 4, 2009, http://www .bernama.com.my/bernama/v3/news_sports.php?id=394003; June Navarro, “Frugal SEA Games face big obstacles,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, Feb. 2, 2009, http://sports .inquirer.net /inquirersports/inquirersports/view/20090204 –187292/Frugal-SEA-Games-face-big-obstacles. 9. Jugjet Singh, “Minister gives Sea Games thumbs down,” New Straits Times, Jan. 4, 2009, http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Sunday/Sport/ 2443329/. Martin Petty, “Games—Laos asks for Support after ‘Community Games’ jibe,” Reuters via Yahoo! Asia News, Jan. 6, 2009, http://asia .news .yahoo.com/090106/3/3udvx.html.

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10. McCartan, “New-age Chinatown has Laotians on edge,” Asia Times Online, July 26, 2008, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JG26Ae02. html. Somsavat, “Interview,” 30. 11. Stuart-Fox, “The Chinese Connection,” 142–143. Associated Press, “ ‘Chinatown’ stirs unusual rumblings about a small neighbour’s independence,” International Herald Tribune, Apr. 6, 2008, http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly .php?id=11693775; “More photos of venues in Laos,” 25th Sea Games, Laos (blog), viewed Nov. 6, 2009, http://www.activeboard.com/forum.spark?foru mID=130642&p=3&topicID=28821949. 12. Thomas Fuller, “Laos Stumbles on Path to Sporting Glory,” New York Times, Oct. 6, 2009, http://www.nytimes .com/2009/10/06/world/asia/06laos .html. 13. For discussion of the symbolic outbreak of energy, a term coined by Geertz, see chapter four. 14. ICT Committee, “IOC Award for Laos as gracious hosts of 25th SEA Games.” Lao SEA Games 2009 (website), Dec. 19, 2009 [viewed Mar. 22, 2010], http:// www.laoseagames2009.com/v1/newsx2009xdecx19.aspx. 15. Lomibao, “Games host Laos reaps tourism gold,” Business Mirror, Dec. 28, 2009, http://businessmirror.com.ph/home/top-news/20282-games-host-laos -reaps-tourism-gold.html?tmpl=component&print=1&page. 16. Editorial, “First-time SEA Games host gives us a lesson or two,” The Nation, Dec. 22, 2009, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2009/12/22/opinion/opinion _30118918.php. To be fair, the English-language press in Thailand is typically less reactionary than the Thai-language counterpart. 17. Gray, “Laos wins rave reviews for SEA Games,” Yahoo/AP, Dec. 16, 2009, [viewed Dec. 29, 2009], http://sg.news.yahoo.com/ap/20091216/tsp-southeast -asian-games-laos-6e81073.html. 18. ICT Committee, “Laos SEA Games—Games of many firsts,” Lao SEA Games 2009 (website), Dec. 18, 2009 [viewed Feb. 22, 2010], http://www.laoseagames2009 .com/v1/newsx2009xdecx18e.aspx. 19. Evans, Short History of Laos, 195–198. 20. Severino, Southeast Asia in Search of an ASEAN Community, 56. 21. Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 5. 22. National Sports Committee, Pavatkhwampenma khong kankila lao, 6. 23. Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 5. In English-language references to the slogan in bilingual publications, satavat is often mistranslated as “millennium” (which would be sahatsavat). 24. Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 7. 25. I attended and conducted research at the 2005 National Games in Savannakhet. Such billboards included a 2005 Vitamilk advertisement showing an athletic sportsman drinking a bottle of the soy drink with the slogan (in Lao): “This much protein will make your body strong and healthy.” A 2007 billboard

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

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Notes to Pages 233–238

advertising M-150 displayed the Lao champion muai lao boxer, Langsanh Masopha, with the slogan (in Lao) “refreshing power, excess power.” Pholsena, Post-war Laos, 56. Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, 24–40. Grabowsky and Tappe, “Important Kings of Laos.” Creak, “Sport as Politics and History,” 17. Thipthiangchan, “Pavatkhwampenma khong kila lao,” 5. Vientiane Games, Dec. 2, 2009: 1. It should be noted that Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia had long-standing offers to host when they were able to, so this was not a competitive bidding process. McCartan, “New-age Chinatown.” Jonsson, “Laos in 2009,” 245; Kenney-Lazar, “Land Concessions, Land Tenure, and Livelihood Change,” 10. Evans, Short History of Laos (rev. ed.), 227–265. For a longer discussion on this theme, including statistics on donor activity, see Creak, “Laos: National Celebrations and Development Debates.” Thongchai Winichakul, “Trying to Locate Southeast Asia from its Navel,” 123. It is worth stressing that these incidents have not reached the level of those between Thailand and Cambodia. The Lucky Loser incident was probably diffused so promptly precisely because a much more serious Thai-Cambodian spat had sparked the torching of the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh a few years earlier, in 2003. Supalak Ganjanakhundee, “Love-Hate Relationship between Neighbours Rises Again,” The Nation (online), May 16, 2006, http://nationmultimedia .com/2006/05/16/national/national_30004104.php. Kong Rithdee, “Lucky Loser: National Lampoon,” Thai Film Foundation (website), http://www.thaifi lm.com/articleDetail_en.asp?id=88. Thongchai, “Trying to Locate Southeast Asia from its Navel,” 123. From the other direction, of course, such attitudes play to stereotypes of Lao cuteness and simplicity among the Thai, drawing tourists to Laos in evergreater numbers to rediscover a more innocent past. Thongchai, “Trying to Locate Southeast Asia from its Navel,” 125–126. Lao scholars have asserted (in the so-called Ai-Lao interpretation of regional prehistory) that the terms “Tai” or “Thai” did not exist before the sixth century, only “Lao,” making the Lao senior to the Thai. Pholsena, Post-war Laos, 80. On the other hand, today’s Thai would “universally” assert that they are phi due to their greater size, wealth, and power, and many Lao would in fact agree with them. Chulanee Thianthai and Thompson, “Thai Perceptions of the ASEAN Region,” 52. Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 15. Kenney-Lazar, “Plantation Rubber, Land Grabbing and Social-Property Transformation”; Environmental Investigation Agency, “Checkpoints,” 9; Global Witness, “Rubber Barons,” 23.

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45. “HAGL Boss Denies NGO’s Accusations of Laos-Cambodia Land Grab,” Vietnam News (website), May 18, 2013, http://vietnamnews.vn/environment/ 239519/hagl -boss -denies -accusations -of-laos -cambodia -land -grab -by -ngo .html; “Laos, Cambodia back VN Firms against Global Witness Accusation,” Tuoitrenews.vn (website), Jun. 8, 2013, http://tuoitrenews.vn/business/10450/ laos-cambodia-back-vn-firms-against-global-witness-accusation. 46. These remarks are based on discussions with onlookers at the SEA Games. For discussion of Lao popular support for ASEAN, see Thompson and Chulanee Thianthai, Attitudes and Awareness towards ASEAN, 16–17. 47. The details are unverified but reports suggested the protest or petition was planned to coincide with the tenth anniversary of student protests in 1999. Radio Free Asia, “Laos Detains 9 Planning Protest,” Nov. 3, 2009, http://www.rfa .org /english/news/laos/detain-11032009192837.html; Radio Free Asia, “Laos Denies Detentions,” Nov. 6, 2009, http://www.rfa .org /english/news/laos/ laosdenies-11062009131535.html. Radio Free Asia, “Lao Group Wanted Help.” Nov. 13, 2009, http://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/petitioner-arrested -11132009140412.html. Also see Baird, “The Secret Party and State of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic,” 18–19. 48. The authoritarian realities of Lao politics were subjected to rare international scrutiny in late 2012 and 2013 after the unexplained disappearance of prominent civil society figure Sombath Somphone. Creak, “Laos in 2013,” 154–155. 49. Alonso, “Politics of Space, Time and Substance,” 386. 50. Though not examined in detail in this book, boat racing would likely reveal a similar link between ritual, masculinity, and power. Archaimbault, La course des pirogues au Laos; Davis, Muang Metaphysics; Platenkamp, “The Canoe Racing Ritual of Luang Prabang.” 51. I develop this theme in Creak, “Rituals of the Masculine State.” 52. Pholsena, Post-war Laos, 209. Pholsena coins this phrase to describe the contemporary condition of the Lao Front for National Construction, but as this book shows, for the fields of sport and physical culture, it can be generalized across Lao history and society. 53. Talek Harris (AFP), “Pumping concrete with the Laos Olympic team,” Yahoo 7 Sport, May 17, 2012, http://au.sports.yahoo.com/news/pumping-concrete -laos-olympic-team-102256329.html. By citing Laos’ only two SEA Games rivals that were in fact smaller and less successful than Laos, Kasem was not just managing expectations, but actually downplaying Laos’ chances—an impressive feat in itself! 54. Universality or invitation places are granted to “strengthen the principle of universal representation at the Games by allowing a number of NOCs [National Olympic Committees] without or with few athletes qualified to participate in the Olympic Games.” Wild card entry is similar. http://www.ittf.com/ World_Events/2012OG/3.Tripartite_Commission_Invitations.pdf. Considering that universality places were granted to swimmers from no fewer than

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notes to pages 245

ninety-six countries in London—far more than the nineteen that won medals— this form of participation is far from a peculiarity. See the following pages of the London 2012 website: “Men’s 100m,” http://www.london2012.com/athletics/ event/men-100m/phase=atm001p00/doc=results.html; “Women’s 100m,” http:// www .london2012 .com /athletics /event /women -100m /phase= atw001p00/doc=results.html; “Men’s 50m Freestyle,” http://www.london2012 .com/swimming/event/men-50m-freestyle/phase=swm010900/doc=summary .html; “Swimming medal count,” http://www.london2012.com/swimming/ medals/medal-standings/; and “Universality places,” FINA http://www.fina .org/H2O/docs/events/london2012/sw/universality _places.pdf.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in boldface type refer to illustrations. Abrams, Philip, 197 Alonso, Ana Maria, 8–9, 12, 241 Amusporta (Association Mutuelle et Sportive des Annamites), 1–2, 16, 244 Anderson, Benedict, 4–5, 8, 67, 249n. 44 Annam (territory of Indochina), 68, 70 Annam (previous name for Vietnam) and Annamese, 1–2, 57, 65, 142, 244, 247n. 1, 247n. 4 Appadurai, Arjun, 141–142 Archiambault, Charles, 22, 36, 42–46 Arendt, Hannah, 197, 222, 283n. 97 armed forces, 91–94, 96–97, 104, 111, 199–200, 279n. 21. See also military culture/training Armée Nationale Laotienne (ANL), 92–93, 96–97 Army Day celebration, 199–200, 279n. 21 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), 204, 214, 232, 234, 238–239, 281n. 39 Asian Games, 206; history of, 141, 156; international reputation and, 196, 205–207; Olympic internationalism and, 141; regional sport and, 138, 141, 144–145, 149, 156, 162, 272n. 74; RLG anticommunism in context of, 162 Asian Games Federation, 156–157, 162, 204 ASL (Association Sportive du Laos), 67, 259n. 83 Association Mutuelle et Sportive des Annamites (Amusporta), 1–2, 16, 244 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 204, 214, 232, 234, 238–239, 281n. 39

Association Sportive du Laos (ASL), 67, 259n. 83 Badenoch, Nathan, 280n. 31 Bandung Conference, 143–144, 271n. 66 Barthélemy, Marquis de (Pierre Sauvaire), 24–27, 33–34 Bataillons Chasseurs Laotiennes (BCL), 91, 104, 111 Bayly, Susan, 35 BCL (Bataillons Chasseurs Laotiennes), 91, 104, 111 Bédier Cup, 1–3, 16, 18, 32, 142–143, 244 Bhumibol, King (Thailand), 149, 270n. 40 Billig, Michael, 9 the body/embodiment: body cult/culture and, 9, 56, 72, 260n. 103; female, 53, 87, 208; health in context of, 18, 102–103, 244; military culture/training in context of, 9; muscular Christianity and, 15, 251n. 64; physical culture in context of, 9–10, 12, 250n. 51; physicality in context of, 10, 15, 18, 248n. 35, 251n. 64 Borotra, Jean, 55–56 Bounkhong Padichit, 126–128, 130–131, 135, 137 Boun Oum, Prince, 3, 85, 89–90, 102–103, 122, 124, 126, 131, 268n. 81 Brasey, Louis, 66, 68–69, 73 Brown, Colin, 250n. 50 Brownell, Susan, 9, 49, 131, 138, 222–223 Brunei, 204, 226–227, 234, 245, 281n. 39 Buddhism, 7, 15, 36, 41, 76, 87, 100, 187, 251n. 64 Burma (Myanmar), 130, 144–145, 147–149, 150, 152, 226, 228–229, 281n. 39, 282n. 65

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Cambodia: Asian Games and, 145; CRIP in, 15–16; GANEFO and, 158, 272n. 74, 272n. 81; Khmer language, 81; neutralism and, 144; Olympic Games and, 282n. 65; physical culture during Vichy era and, 57, 63, 77; privileging of physicality and, 185; rituals and, 31; SEAP and, 158–159, 272n. 74; sports and, 52–53; Thai relations with, 147, 286n. 37; tikhi and, 46 CCIPPM (Comité Central d’Instruction Physique et de Préparation Militaire), 15–16 Centre Local d’Éducation Physique (CLEP), 70 Centre Régional d l’Instruction Physique (CRIP), 15–16 CGEPSJ (Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Physique, aux Sports et à la Jeunesse), 58–60 CIS (Comité Indochinois des Sports), 58–59 civilization: 2–3, 26, 74, 76–77, 80–81, 128, 130, 153–154, 203, 210, 213, 233, 235, 242. See also charoen/chaloen; national progress; sivilai charoen/chaloen, 74, 76, 78, 79, 81, 127–130, 132, 242, 267n. 60. See also civilization; development (socioeconomic) and developmentalism; national progress CLEP (Centre Local d’Éducation Physique), 70 Cochinchina, 15–16, 247n. 1 coconut game (nyat mak phao), 31, 33, 254n. 27 Comité Central d’Instruction Physique et de Préparation Militaire (CCIPPM), 15–16 Comité Indochinois des Sports (CIS), 58–59 Commissariat Général à l’Éducation Physique, aux Sports et à la Jeunesse (CGEPSJ), 58–60 Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), 173, 176. See also Indochinese Communist Party; Vietnamese Workers’ Party Condominas, Georges, 45

Confucianism, 52–53, 57 Connell, R. W., 11, 100 Cooper, Frederick, 53 cosmology: and physicality, 3, 9–10, 190–192 Coubertin, Pierre de, 34, 126, 149–150, 212, 230–231, 245–246 Coutard, Raoul, 99, 110, 116–117 CPV (Communist Party of Vietnam), 173, 176. See also Indochinese Communist Party; Vietnamese Workers’ Party CRIP (Centre Régional d’Instruction Physique), 15–16 culture: atmosphere in context of mass culture, 198; body cult/culture and, 9, 56, 72, 260n. 103; globalized sporting, 141–142; revolution in culture and thought, 167, 172, 224; visual culture and, 106–111, 107, 109, 112, 113–114, 114, 115. See also military culture/ training; national culture Decoux, Jean, 57–58, 62–64, 66, 75 Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), 97, 161–162, 165, 178, 197, 279n. 6 Department of Sport, Physical Education, and Artistic Education (DSPEAE), 179, 181–183, 203 Deuve, Jean, 93–94, 101, 117 development (socio-economic) and developmentalism: China and, 202, 235–236, 238; definitions of, 81, 129; foreign investment and, 235–236; government policies and, 232, 235, 267n. 60; history of, 153, 238; the LPDR and, 224–225, 226–227, 232–235, 240; 7th National SocioEconomic Development Plan (2011), 235; national sovereignty and, 238; negative consequences of, 237–238, 240; 2009 SEA Games and, 235; socialist rhetoric and, 191; Soviet Union as model of, 202, 203; sport and physical culture as reflection of, 128–129, 242, 246; sports policies and, 232–233; Thailand and, 152, 202, 236;

index See also charoen/chaloen; civilization; national progress; sivilai Dichter, David, 144, 148–149 discipline: overview of, 15; Buddhism in context of, 15; Lao Nhay renovation movement in context of, 54, 60–62, 69–70, 72–76; military masculinity and, 87, 100–101, 103, 110, 113–114, 114; regional sport and, 151–153; socialist physical culture in context of, 174, 177, 180–181, 187, 189, 190, 218 Doré, Amphay, 186–187 DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam), 97, 161–162, 165, 178, 197, 279n. 6 DSPEAE (Department of Sport, Physical Education, and Artistic Education), 179, 181–183, 203 Ducoroy, Maurice, 58–61, 63–64, 67, 69, 72 Dunning, Eric, 130 Durkheim, Émile, 40, 45 École Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO), 24, 30–31, 33, 36, 41–42, 48, 50 École Locale des Cadres de Jeunesse du Laos (ELCJL), 70–71, 73–74 École Locale des Cadres d’Éducation Physique du Laos (ELCEPL), 70–71, 81 École Nationale des Cadres de Jeunesse et d’Éducation Physique (ENCJEP), 94–96, 95, 97, 98, 99, 113, 116, 121–122 École Supérieure d’Éducation Physique d’Indochine (ESEPIC), 58–61, 63, 70, 72 Edelman, Robert, 198, 279n. 8 education, 174, 185. See also physical education Edwards, Penny, 25, 35 Elias, Norbert, 130 ethnicity, 7, 22, 24, 44, 45, 50, 53, 57, 66, 68, 70, 74, 178, 220, 243, 249n. 44, 271n. 53. See also Lao race; Mon-Khmer/ “Kha” race Evans, Grant, and topics: demobilization of socialism in Laos, 224; history and historiography of Laos and, 6–8; Kaysone, 187; “Kaysone cult,” 234;

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language in context of revolution, 280n. 31; “Leninist road to capitalism,” 235; nationalism, 3–4, 261n. 133; new socialist person, 169; popular participation and, 222, 283n. 95; power and political legitimacy, 119, 123; third revolution, 274n. 26; tikhi in context of modernity and tradition, 46–47; totalitarianism, 283n. 98 Fall, Barnard, 110 First Indochina War, 5, 85, 91, 93, 96, 121 Forces Terrestres d’Extrême Orient (FTEO), 91–92, 94 Forth, Christopher, 88 Foucault, Michel, 9, 170, 274n. 24 France and French colonialism: Bédier Cup scandal in context of, 2; character traits in context of organized sports and, 34; history and historiography of Laos in context of, 3–4; Lao national culture in context of, 5–7, 24–26, 28–30, 35; Lao race in context of, 26; national culture in context of, 5–7, 24–26, 28–30, 35, 38–41, 48–50, 253n. 14, 253n. 22; physical culture in context of, 13, 15–18; racist stereotypes and, 18, 24; sport in context of, 15–17; tikhi in context of, 25, 28–29, 38–41, 49–50 Free Lao (Lao Issara), 89–90, 92–94, 96, 140, 143, 187–188, 279n. 21 French Indochina: 15, 24, 30, 88; Associated States of Indochina, 92–93; body cult in, 72; communist networks in, 93, 143; École Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO) research on, 31, 41; French anthropology of, 35–36, 40; militarist symbols of Vichy Indochina, 98; physical culture in Vichy Indochina, 48, 52–53, 56–64, 72; physical education and military training in, 15–16, 35; position of Laos within, 4, 16, 244; 68; racial ideas and stereotypes in, 53, 77; visual culture in, 110–111, 112. See also France and French colonialism; Vietnam

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friendship: colonial sport in context of, 2; friendship competitions, 198, 201–202; groups and societies for promotion of, 30, 74; international socialist sport and, 162–163, 165, 180, 195, 196, 201–204; masculine ideals of, 87, 103, 108; symbols of, 125, 146, 146; regional themes of, 140; regional undermining of, 147; Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation (Laos and Vietnam, 1977), 201. See also mittaphap FTEO (Forces Terrestres d’Extrême Orient), 91–92, 94 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO): in 1963, 156–160; in 1966, 160–164, 272n. 81; Bandung Conference and, 143–144, 271n. 66; communism and, 157, 160–162, 164–165; history of, 141, 145; international reputation and, 206; Lao sport historiography and, 164–165; Laos revolutionary sport historiography and, 162–165; Meuang Lao (Laos) in context of, 161, 164, 166, 272n. 86; NLHS neutralism representation in, 160–163, 272n. 86; politics of, 156–160, 164; regional dynamics in context of, 141, 158–159, 272nn. 73–74; regional sports in context of, 158; RLG anticommunism representation in, 158, 161–162; socialist sport circles and, 159, 160–161, 165 Geertz, Clifford, 119–120, 132, 134–137, 228–229, 265n. 9 gender and sexuality: nationalism in context of, 10–11, 248n. 40; scholarship on, 11, 248n. 40, 249n. 41; SEA Games and, 233–234; spectator sport in context of socialism and, 208–209, 281n. 57; women as embodiment of culture and, 74–75, 82, 87, 105, 107, 186, 208–209, 278n. 94. See also the body/ embodiment; masculinity/ies; military masculinity; women

Geneva Agreements (1954), 20, 88, 92–93, 121, 144, 148 Goscha, Christopher, 5–6, 64, 247n. 2, 263n. 51 Gross, Jan, 171 Gunn, Geoffrey, 8, 256n. 5 Guttmann, Allen, 23, 46–49, 253n. 4, 267n. 80, 268n. 98, 271n. 48 HAGL (Hoang Anh Gia Lai), 227–228, 237–238 Hancock, Philip, 10 Hannerz, Ulf, 141–142 Hanoi, 53, 60, 93, 173. See also Vietnam Hansen, Anne, 35 Hargreaves, Jennifer, 12 health: the body/embodiment and, 18, 102–103, 244; general conditions of, 185; Lao Nhay renovation movement and, 60–61, 75–76; military masculinity and, 102–103; National Games of Laos and, 128; physical culture and, 10; physicality and, 14–15, 75–76; regional sport and, 152–153, 159; socialist physical culture in context of, 167–169, 171, 172, 175, 180–181, 183, 187–190, 192; spectator sport in context of socialism and, 220; tikhi and, 40; Vichy era physical culture and, 54, 56, 75–76, 78, 78–79, 80, 90 Hébertisme (“natural method”), 55, 58, 62, 72 Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), 227–228, 237–238 Hoberman, John, 220 Ho Chi Minh, 90, 93, 169 Hong, Fan, 141 Hong Hian Khu Kainyakam Pathet Lao, 70–71, 81 Hunt, Lynn, 169–170 IAAF (International Amateur Athletics Federation), 158, 272n. 74 ICP (Indochinese Communist Party), 93, 121, 143, 165, 201. See also Communist Party of Vietnam; Lao People’s Party;

index Lao People’s Revolutionary Party; Vietnamese Workers’ Party independence, 6–8, 20, 57, 84–87, 89, 121. See also nationhood Indochina. See French Indochina Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), 93, 121, 143, 165, 201. See also Communist Party of Vietnam; Lao People’s Party; Lao People’s Revolutionary Party; Vietnamese Workers’ Party Indonesia: Asian Games and, 145; GANEFO, 156–158, 160, 271n. 66; GANEFO and, 272n. 81; IOC and, 157; King’s Cup and, 154; masculinity/ ies, 249n. 44; neutralism and, 144; Olympic Games and, 282n. 65; regional sports and, 145–146, 154; SEA Games, 146, 203; SEAP Games, 146 International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF), 158, 272n. 74 International Olympic Committee (IOC): anticommunism and, 157, 278n. 1; Asian Games and, 141; funding from, 3; Nationalist China/Taiwan and, 156, 278n. 1; politics and, 157, 195–196, 278n. 1; PRC and, 196–197, 278n. 1; SEA Games and, 230; Soviet Union and, 278n. 1 Italy, 72, 260n. 102, 281n. 57 Ivarsson, Soren, and topics: Lao nationalism, 74, 261n. 133; Lao Nhay renovation movement, 66; nationalism in context of colonialism, 5–6, 248n. 16 Jackson, Peter, 265n. 11 James, C.L.R., 34–35 Japan: body cult/culture and, 72; foreign assistance from, 205, 227; France and, 41, 56, 64, 83, 89; GANEFO and, 158, 164, 272n. 81; international friendships in context of spectator sport and, 201 Jennings, Eric, 52, 256n. 4

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kai/kainya, as term of use, 13 kainyaborihan, 13–14 kainyakam, 12–14 kanphatthana/phatthana, 233, 267n. 60. See also development (socio-economic) and developmentalism Kasem Inthara, 245, 257n. 53 kato (sepak takraw), 13, 123, 151, 151n. 56, 176, 183, 271n. 41 Kaysone Phomvihane: ICP, 93; international friendships in context of spectator sport, 204–205; leadership cult of, 229–230, 234; new socialist person and critique, 172–177, 190; physicality, 185, 187, 188, 278n. 96 Kenez, Peter, 171 khabuankila or kankheuanvai kila (“sports movement”), 197 “Kha.” See Mon-Khmer/“Kha” kila/kainyakam, 12–15 Kilakon Siphonexay, 245 kila, 12–13, 233, 250n. 52. See also sport Kingdom of Laos, 20, 84, 90, 106, 124, 126, 136, 143, 160–162, 227 King’s Cup, 154–156 Kong Le, 87, 91, 100, 106, 122–123, 144 Kou Voravong, 122, 134 Kou Voravong Stadium, 131–132, 134, 136 labiap vinai/vinai, 15, 151. See also discipline Laenly Phoutthavong, 245 Lao boxing (muai lao), 13–14, 123–124, 187, 205, 206, 285n. 25 Lao country or Laos: Meuang Lao, 20, 68, 73, 82, 140, 161, 164, 166, 272n. 86; Pathet Lao, 73, 82, 161, 272n. 86 Lao Front for National Construction (Neo Lao Sang Sat), 178 Lao Issara (Free Lao), 89–90, 92–94, 96, 140, 143, 187–188, 279n. 21 Lao Nhay renovation movement: overview of, 20, 52; body cult/culture and, 72; the body/embodiment, 78, 78; Buddhism in context of, 36, 41; discipline in context of, 54, 60–62,

316

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index

Lao Nhay renovation movement (cont.) 69–70, 72–76; fascism in context of, 72, 260n. 102; Franco-Lao agency and, 76–77; Franco-Lao ideas and, 73–77; health and, 60–61, 75–76; Lao race in context of, 77–78, 78; military culture/training in context of, 70–72, 71, 87; “muscular Buddhism” and, 76; muscular Christianity in context of, 76; national culture in context of, 53, 66; national progress in context of, 78–81, 79, 80; nationalism and, 74, 82–83, 261n. 133; nation/race (sat) and, 74, 79, 79, 80, 82, 261n. 133; “Olympic salute” in context of, 72, 260n. 102; patriotism in context of, 67, 69–73, 71, 74, 82–83; physical education and, 72, 74–75; physicality and, 75–81, 78, 79, 80; in practice, 67–73, 259n. 88; racial prejudice and, 53; rituals in context of, 69; scholarship on, 36; Thai irredentism in context of, 64–65, 65, 258n. 68; tikhi in context of, 41; Vichy era in context of, 53, 256n. 5; women as embodiment of culture/customs and, 74–75, 82. See also Vichy era, and physical culture Lao Olympic Committee (LOC), 184, 210–216, 232, 277n. 86, 282n. 59 Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR): archives, 252n. 85; Lao sport and, 163–164; National Games, 216, 219; nationalism and, 3, 7; SEAP Games, 211–212; socialist physical culture in context of, 167, 210–212, 221, 223, 235, 275n. 46; socialist Vietnam relations with, 238; worker athletes and, 278n. 96 Lao People’s Liberation Army (LPLA), 93, 163 Lao People’s Party (LPP), 121 Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP): atmosphere during spectator sport and, 198; authoritarianism and, 222, 224; authoritarianism in context of SEA Games and, 226, 232, 234, 238–240, 287nn. 47–48; domestic

sports festivals and, 216, 217, 218; history of, 6, 87, 164–165, 167; LPRP Day and, 199, 279n. 21; socialist physical culture in context of, 185; sporting history in context of, 164 Lao race: anxieties concerning, 77; decline of, 30; ethnicity and, 45; French colonialism in context of, 24–26; Khmer in context of, 63, 77; Lao Nhay renovation movement in context of, 77–79, 79; Mon-Khmer/“Kha” in context of, 22, 42, 255n. 70; nation/ race (sat) and, 74, 79, 79, 82, 261n. 133; tikhi and, 25, 30–31, 50; Vietnamese in context of, 63. See also laziness (stereotype); Mon-Khmer/“Kha”; race; seu seu Laos: Annamese relations with, 1–2, 142, 247n. 4; disunity in postcolonial era, 121–122, 137–138; hierarchies and, 154, 216, 218, 218, 222, 271n. 53; history and historiography of, 3–8, 25, 247n. 5, 247n. 11, 253n. 14, 259n. 73; international educational exchanges for citizens and, 202; language conventions, xv; map, xvi; Marxist-Leninist world participation by, 173, 202, 215–216, 222; national identity and, 3–8, 32–33, 237, 248n. 16, 254n. 34, 286nn. 41–42; patriotism in context of, 65–67; physical culture during Vichy era and, 57, 63–64; propaganda use and, 171; racial prejudice and, 1, 3, 30, 35, 53, 286n. 41; revolutionary sport historiography and, 162–165; royalist historiography at sporting events and, 229, 234. See also national culture; nationalism; nationhood Laotienne Artistique et Sportive (LAS), 1, 16, 67, 84 LAS (Laotienne Artistique et Sportive), 1, 16, 67, 84 Lattre, Jean de, 92, 110 laziness (stereotype), 3, 18, 30, 53, 63, 77, 111, 177, 192, 241. See also Lao race; seu seu

index Lenin, Vladimir/Leninism: mass mobilization, 178; materialism, 7, 235; physical education, 168; propaganda, 274n. 24; socialist physical culture, 167–168; socialist world of, 173, 202, 215–216, 222 Lentz, Christian, 197 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 45 Lévy, Paul, and topics: biographical information, 36; embodiment of colonial social relations and tikhi, 38–40; Lao national culture and tikhi, 38–41, 46; Lao Nhay renovation movement, 36, 41; masculinity/ies and tikhi, 38–39, 47; modern sport and tikhi, 39–40; rituals and tikhi, 36–38, 40–45, 48 LOC (Lao Olympic Committee), 184, 210–216, 232, 277n. 86, 282n. 59 Lockhart, Bruce, 274n. 26 LPLA (Lao People’s Liberation Army), 93, 163 Luang Sukhum Naiyapradit (Sukhum), 144–145, 148, 269n. 19 Lucky Loser (fi lm). See Mak Te (Lucky Loser, dir. Adisorn Tresirikasem) MacAloon, John, 120, 132, 212, 218 MacLean, Ken, 274n. 15 Maguire, Joe, 141–142 Mak Te (Lucky Loser, dir. Adisorn Tresirikasem), 236, 286n. 37 Mala Sakonninyom, 207, 209 Malaysia/Malaya, 124, 144–145, 147–149, 150, 154–156, 158, 202, 226–227, 231, 234, 282n. 65 Mangan, James, 72 Mao Zedong, 168, 185, 189, 198 Marx, Karl, and Marxism: education, 185; labor productivity, 168, 185; materialism, 7, 168; Olympic internationalism and, 213; physical education, 168; socialist physical culture, 167–168; socialist world of, 173, 202, 215–216, 222 masculinity/ies: overview of, 11, 243; agency and, 106, 116–117; binary distinctions

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317

in military and, 87–88; colonialism and, 18, 35; discursive representations of, 101–106; embodiment of, 18, 30, 88, 112–116, 114, 115; empire and, 61–62; hegemonic masculinity (R. W. Connell), 11, 100; Kong Le as embodiment of, 100; in Lao Nhay movement, 81–82; masculine aesthetics and performance, 34, 50–51, 86, 89, 135, 218; military culture/training in context of, 11, 84–117; masculinization of Lao society, 85; militarization of, 99–100; modernity and, 88; muscular Christianity and, 34; nationalism and national arrival and, 11, 87, 107, 109; new socialist person and, 189; Phoumi Nosavan and, 100, 243; physical culture and training in context of, 12, 18, 89, 112–116; power in context of, 11, 87, 100; restoration of, 111; scholarship on, 11, 249n. 44, 250n. 47; ritual and power and, 50; Prince Souphanouvong and, 189, 218, 243; sport and power and, 2–3; sport and substantialization of, 12; tikhi (Lao hockey game) and, 34, 50–51, 241; traditional and modern dimensions of, 100, 136; Vichy France and, 54–56; Vichy Indochina and, 61–62; visual representations and, 85–87, 86, 106–116, 107, 109, 112, 114, 115; women and, 87–88, 107, 136. See also military masculinity, and the body/ embodiment Mauss, Marcel, 36, 40 Mayer, Robert, 286n. 97 McDaniel, Justin, 15 McDonald, Ian, 281n. 57 MESRA (Ministry of Education, Sport, and Religious Affairs), 177–179, 181, 198, 201, 203, 205–206, 211–212, 276n. 68 MESY (Ministry of Education, Sport, and Youth), 175–176 Meuang Lao (Lao country or Laos), 20, 68, 73, 82, 140, 161, 164, 166, 272n. 86

318

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index

military culture/training: binary distinctions in, 87–88; the body/ embodiment in context of, 9; decolonization era and, 88–99; Lao nationhood in context of, 92–93; masculinity in context of, 11, 99–100, 263n. 53; physical culture in context of, 3, 12, 15–16, 18; women and, 87. See also armed forces; military masculinity, and the body/ embodiment military masculinity, and the body/ embodiment: overview of, 85, 87; agency in context of, 116–117; binary distinctions in military and, 87–88; character traits in context of, 87, 99–106; discipline in context of, 113–114, 114; ENCJEP and, 94–96, 95, 97, 99, 113, 116, 121–122; health and, 102–103; modern Lao in context of, 88; National Games of Laos and, 135–136; “Olympic salute” in context of, 85; performance of nationhood in context of, 84–85, 86, 87, 89, 106, 117; physicality in context of, 20, 88, 112–116, 114, 115; police force and, 93–94, 117, 119, 231, 263n. 39; power in context of, 187; public life and society in context of, 93–99, 263n. 39; scouts and, 93–94, 117, 263n. 39; visual culture in context of, 106–111, 107, 109, 112, 113–114, 114, 115. See also military culture/training; nationhood Ministry of Education, 172, 251n. 60 Ministry of Education, Sport, and Religious Affairs (MESRA), 177–179, 181, 198, 201, 203, 205–206, 211–212, 276n. 68 Ministry of Education, Sport, and Youth (MESY), 175–176 mittaphap, 202, 233. See also friendship Mon-Khmer/“Kha,” 22, 42, 50, 100, 255n. 70. See also ethnicity; race Morgan, David, 88 Morin, Pierre, 25, 27, 253n. 12 Moscow Olympics in 1980: overview of, 278n. 1; boycotts of, 211, 214, 278n. 1,

283n. 83; international friendships and, 209–210, 213–215, 282n. 59; international reputation and, 209–212, 282nn. 64–65; success/ failure history and, 211. See also Olympic Games; Soviet Union muai lao (Lao boxing), 13–14, 123–124, 187, 205, 206, 285n. 25 Munslow, Alan, 171 “muscular Buddhism,” 15, 76, 251n. 64 muscular Christianity, 15, 76, 168 Myanmar (Burma), 130, 144–145, 147–149, 150, 152, 226, 228–229, 281n. 39, 282n. 65 nation/race (sat), 20, 74, 79, 79, 80, 82, 261n. 133. See also Lao race; race national culture: French colonialism in context of, 5–7, 24–26, 28–30, 35, 38–41, 48–50, 253n. 14, 253n. 22; Lao Nhay renovation movement in context of, 53, 66; Thailand in context of, 26, 30, 33, 41; tikhi in context of, 23–26, 25, 28–29, 30–33, 38–41, 45–46, 48–50, 253n. 14, 253n. 22; women as embodiment of, 74–75, 82, 87, 105, 107, 186, 208–209, 278n. 94. See also culture National Day celebration, 7, 199, 219, 222, 228, 233, 279n. 21, 283n. 95 national development. See development (socio-economic) and developmentalism National Games of Laos: of 1961, 20, 118, 123–130, 125, 267n. 66; of 1964, 118, 130–137, 267n. 66, 267n. 80, 268n. 81; of 2005, 233; anniversary of LPDR and, 216, 217, 218; decree, 123–124, 266n. 27; flag of, 125, 125; health improvements and, 128; masculinity/ ies in context of, 123, 135; military masculinity in context of, 135–136; modern sport in context of, 127–128; National Day celebration and, 219, 222, 283n. 95; national progress in context of, 8, 128–133, 129, 136, 233,

index 267n. 57, 267n. 60; national unity and, 124–127, 125, 130–131, 133–135, 266n. 41, 266n. 45; “Olympic salute” as symbol and, 135; parade as symbol and, 134–135; personal power and political legitimacy in context of, 118–119, 130; physical education and, 128, 267n. 53; physicality and, 128, 129; political leaders in context of, 133–135; popular participation and, 283n. 95; as rituals of modern power, 8, 132–133, 136; royal power and political legitimacy in context of, 123, 127, 133–134, 136–137, 243, 268n. 81; sports and, 123–124; sportsmanship and, 126–127, 136; success/failure history and, 127–128; symbolic outbreak of energy and, 135, 136; torch relay and, 126, 133, 136; women as athletes in, 123, 135. See also sport theatrics, and power national identity, 3–8, 32–33, 237, 248n. 16, 254n. 34, 286nn. 41–42 nationalism: overview of, 3–4, 4–7, 9; gender and sexuality in context of, 10–11, 248n. 40; physical culture in context of, 8–9, 12, 14, 19–20, 57, 252n. 84; physicality in context of, 4; ritual calendar and, 279n. 21; sport in context of, 12, 14, 18; women in context of, 10–11, 107. See also national identity Nationalist China (Taiwan), 156, 278n. 1 national progress: overview, 242; aesthetics of the body and, 78–79, 79, 109, 128, 129; health in context of, 79; independence and, 85; Lao terms for, 76, 128; material dimensions of, 129; National Games in context of, 8, 128–133, 129, 136, 138, 267n. 57, 267n. 60; national renovation (Lao Nhay movement) in context of, 74–76, 78, 79, 81; physical culture in context of, 76, 79, 89, 246–247; physical dimensions of, 79, 80, 88, 108, 128–129; SEA Games in context of, 233–234; SEAP/SEA Games and, 149,

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151; socialism and, 168, 176, 189–191, 223; sport in context of, 137–138, 268n. 99; sporting performance and, 127, 151–153, 206; sportsmanship in context of, 150–151; statistics and, 152; Thailand in context of, 153, 155–156; theatrics of power and, 120, 131, 137–139, 265n. 11; women’s sport and, 208. See also charoen/chaloen; civilization; development (socio-economic) and developmentalism; phattana/ kanphattana; sivilai National Sport and Physical Culture Committee, 14, 251n. 60 National Sports Committee (NSC), 162–164, 232–235, 239 national unity: aesthetics of, 114; disunity and, 121; Lao term for (ekkaphap), 266n. 41; Lao term for (samakkhi), 126–127; of Laos, 6, 89, 118, 121–122, 124, 126, 259n. 73; in LPDR, 180; monarchy and, 127; as theme of National Games of Laos, 118, 124–127, 130–131, 133–139; Phoumi Nosavan and, 138–139; press coverage and, 135; symbols and rituals representing, 125, 125–126, 133–135. See also samakkhi; solidarity nationhood: agency in context of, 116–117; armed forces and, 91–92, 91–94, 96–97, 104, 111, 262n. 21; Associated State of Laos and, 84–85, 88, 92; civil policing forces and, 91–92; FrancoLao Treaty in 1949 and, 88, 109; Geneva Agreements in 1954 and, 20, 88, 92–93, 121, 144, 148; history of, 89–90; independence and, 6–8, 20, 57, 84–85, 89, 121; Kingdom of Laos and, 20, 84, 90, 106, 124, 126, 136, 143, 160–162, 227; leadership and personalities in context of, 89–90, 229–230, 234; National Day celebration and, 7, 199, 219, 222, 228, 233, 279n. 21, 283n. 95; national progress in context of, 88; nationalism and, 3–4; performance of, 84–85, 86,

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nationhood: (cont.) 87, 89, 117; physical culture in context of, 89; ritual calendar events and, 199, 279n. 21; sociocultural consequences of, 90–91. See also military masculinity, and the body/ embodiment “natural method” (Hébertisme), 55, 58, 62, 72 Nazi Germany, 52, 56, 72, 97–98, 283n. 97. See also World War II Neo Lao Hak Sat (NLHS), 121, 140, 160–166, 172, 178, 206–207 Neo Lao Issara, 121–122 Neo Lao Sang Sat (Lao Front for National Construction), 178. See also Neo Lao Hak Sat (NLHS) new socialist person: rhetoric in context of, 169–172, 176, 274n. 15, 274n. 24, 275n. 49; third revolution and, 169, 171–174, 273n. 9, 274n. 26, 275n. 44, 275n. 46, 275n. 49 Nginn, Pierre Somchin, 13, 73–76, 82 Nhouy Abhay, 32–35, 38, 47, 50, 123, 254n. 34 NLHS (Neo Lao Hak Sat), 121, 140, 160–166, 172, 178, 206–207 North Vietnam, 20, 140, 148, 157–159, 162, 272n. 81 Nouhak Phoumsavanh, 93 NSC (National Sports Committee), 162–164, 232–235, 239 Olympic Council of Thailand (OCT), 144–145, 149 Olympic Games: Beijing Olympics in 2008 and, 226; as elite sport, 279n. 8; as “festival of human unity,” 2; history of, 34, 126; Lao participation in, 3, 209–216; London Games in 2012 and, 245; Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 and, 211, 216, 278n. 1, 283n. 83; Olympic internationalism and, 141, 212–213, 216; “Olympic salute” as symbol and, 56, 72, 85, 96–98, 135, 260n. 102; parade as symbol and, 134,

218–219; rings as symbol, 125, 219, 220, 266n. 38; as rituals of modern power, 69, 132, 136; Southeast Asia participation in, 211, 282n. 65; sportsmanship in context of, 2, 149, 245–246; sport theatrics in context of power and, 120, 132, 265n. 11; torch relay and, 60, 63, 96, 133, 267n. 80; unity and, 126; universality or invitation places and, 245, 287n. 54. See also Moscow Olympics in 1980 “Olympic salute,” 56, 72, 85, 96–98, 135, 260n. 102 Ong, Aihwa, 10–11 pan-Asianism, 141, 232, 236, 269n. 5 Pathet Lao (Lao country or Laos), 73, 82, 161, 272n. 86 Pathet Lao (resistance movement): coalitions and alliances in context of, 121–122; LPDR and, 87; National Games, 126, 133; new socialist person in context of, 169–171; revolutionary movement in context of, 161; RLG, civil war against, 93, 165; ritual calendar events and, 279n. 21 Pattana Kitiarsa, 250n. 47 Pavie, August, 24–25 Peletz, Michael, 10–11 People’s Republic of China (PRC): Beijing Olympics in 2008 and, 226; body cult/ culture and, 9; Communist Party of, 143; foreign assistance from, 202, 227–228, 237–238; GANEFO and, 156–157, 160–162, 272n. 81; history and historiography of Laos and, 3, 44, 89; international friendship in context of spectator sport and, 201–203; IOC and, 196–197, 278n. 1; Lao Nhay renovation movement and, 70; SEA Games funding and, 227–228, 236–238; socialist physical culture and, 168–169, 189; spectator sport in context of regime and, 198; sport and, 67, 138, 195, 278n. 1 Pétain, Philippe, 52, 54, 61

index Pétain Cup, 60, 63, 68, 142, 258n. 51 Phan Th iet, 53, 58–59, 63, 70, 72, 95, 113. See also Vietnam phatthana/kanphatthana, 233, 267n. 60. See also development (socio-economic) and developmentalism Pheng Sithat, 151, 159 Phetsarath Ratthanavongsa, Prince, 5, 35, 64, 89, 92, 121 Phibun Songkhram, Plaek, 64, 143 Philippines, 143, 145–146, 148, 158, 204, 226, 231, 281n. 39, 282n. 65 Phnom Penh, 60 Pholsena, Vatthana, 7–8, 169, 200–201, 279n. 6, 286n. 42, 287n. 52 Phoui Sananikone, 121–122, 124, 143 Phoumi Nosavan, and topics: biographical information, 121–122, 137–138, 263n. 50; ENCJEP, 96–97, 98; military masculinity, 20, 87, 100, 119, 138; National Games formation, 123–124, 138, 151, 153, 266n. 27; National Games in context of power and political legitimacy, 118–119, 123, 130–131, 134, 136–137, 151, 153, 224, 268n. 81; regional politics, 96–97, 119, 121–123, 137–138, 143, 263n. 51; royal power and political legitimacy in context of status, 123, 134, 137, 268n. 81; SEAP Games, 130, 151, 153; sport and national progress, 137–139; US patronage, 119, 122, 131 Phoumi Vongvichit, 179, 206 Phouvong Phimmasone, 39, 50 physical culture: overview of, 3, 8, 12, 245–246, 246–247; the body/ embodiment in context of, 9–10, 12, 250n. 51; gender equality in context of, 243; health and, 10; history and historiography in context of, 242–243; masculinity in context of, 12, 18; military culture/training in context of, 3; nationalism in context of, 8–9, 12–14, 19–20, 252n. 84; physical education in context of, 3,

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12, 15–18; scholarship on, 12, 250nn. 50–51; sport in context of, 12–15; state power in context of, 240–241; strategies of substantilization in context of, 8–9, 12, 19, 241–244, 242. See also socialist physical culture; sport; Vichy era, and physical culture physical education: Lao Nhay renovation movement and, 72, 74–75; MarxistLeninist ideology and, 168; National Games and, 128, 267n. 53; physical culture in context of, 3, 12, 15–18 physicality: overview of, 3, 8; the body/ embodiment in context of, 10, 15, 18, 248n. 35, 251n. 64; cosmology in context of, 3, 9–10; health in context of, 14–15, 75–76; nationalism in context of, 4; state power in context of, 240 physical practices, 3, 9, 13–14, 19–20, 23, 48, 193, 241–242, 287n. 50. See also physical culture; sport police force, 93–94, 117, 119, 231, 263n. 39 Police-Sports team, 1–2, 244 political legitimacy: National Games in context of power and, 118–119, 123, 130–131, 134, 136–137, 151, 153, 224, 268n. 81; personal power and, 130; power and, 119, 123; power in context of, 118–119, 123, 130–131, 134, 136–137, 151, 153, 224, 268n. 81; royal power and, 119–120, 124–125, 149, 270n. 40; royal power in context of, 123, 134, 137, 268n. 81; SEAP Games in context of, 124–125, 130, 149, 270n. 40; spectator sport in context of socialism and, 216, 218, 218, 222; sport theatrics in context of power and, 118–120, 137–139, 216, 218, 218, 222, 243, 265n. 11 politics: GANEFO and, 156–160, 164; IOC and, 157, 195–196, 278n. 1; Phoumi in context of regional, 96–97, 119, 121–123, 137–138, 143, 263n. 51; royal power in context of, 123, 127, 133–134, 136–137, 243, 268n. 81; SEA Games and, 204; SEAP Games and, 166, 204

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power: masculinity/ies in context of, 87, 100; political legitimacy in context of, 118–119, 123, 130–131, 134, 136–137, 151, 153, 224, 268n. 81; precolonial sources of, 87; rituals in context of modern sport and, 8, 69, 132–133, 136, 268n. 99; royalty in context of political legitimacy and, 123, 127, 133–134, 136–137, 268n. 81; sport and theatrics of power, 118–120, 137–139, 216, 218, 218, 222, 243, 265n. 11; women in context of, 50 Praphat Charusathien, 145–146, 149, 152 progress. See national progress race: nondiscrimination in context of, 1, 124, 215; physical education in Vichy France in context of, 54; physical education in Vichy Indochina in context of, 60, 62–63; Siamese (Thai) irredentism, 64, 147; sport in context of, 1–2, 24, 81, 242, 244. See also Lao race racial prejudice: Annamese and, 1–2, 247n. 4; Lao and, 1, 3, 30, 35, 53, 286n. 41; Vietnamese and, 237 Raffin, Anne, 52–53, 62, 256n. 4, 258n. 51, 261n. 141, 263n. 39 Raquez, Alfred, 24, 26–30, 29, 47 regional sport: overview of, 20, 141; anticommunism and, 143, 148; communism and, 140–141, 144, 148; discipline and, 151–153; globalized sporting culture in Laos and, 141–142; health and, 152–153, 159; hierarchies and, 153–154, 271n. 53; local-global binaries in context of, 141–144, 269n. 3; Meuang Lao in context of, 20, 140, 161, 164, 166, 272n. 86; nationalism and, 143; neutralism and, 141, 143–144, 271n. 66; pan-Asianism in context of, 141, 232, 269n. 5; regional dynamics and, 141–142, 158–160, 211, 269n. 3, 272nn. 73–74; socialist sport circles and, 165; success/failure history and, 151–152, 154–155; Thailand and

Laos emulation dynamic and, 142, 147–148, 152–153, 202, 237; Thailand and Laos rivalry and, 142–143, 154–156. See also Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO); South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games; sport research and methodology, 19, 252n. 85 Riordan, James, 167–168 rituals: calendar events and, 164, 199–200, 279n. 21; Cambodia and, 31; Lao Nhay renovation movement in context of, 69; modern sport in context of, 8, 69, 132–133, 136, 268n. 99; Thailand and, 31; tikhi and, 36–38, 40–45, 48 Rochet, Charles, 66 Royal Lao Government (RLG): decolonization era and, 89; GANEFO and, 159; history and historiography of Lao in context of, 6, 159, 160–161; international friendships in context of spectator sport and, 203; nationalism and, 7; Pathet Lao civil war and, 87, 121–122, 131; SEAP Games and, 211 Saigon, 53, 60. See also Vietnam Sakun Sananikone, 152–153 samakkhi, 126–127, 130, 135, 182, 266n. 41, 266n. 45. See also national unity; solidarity Sarit Thanarat, 122–125, 131, 137, 143, 148–149, 153, 249n. 44 sat (nation/race), 74, 79, 79, 80, 82, 261n. 133 Sauvaire, Pierre (Marquis de Barthélemy), 24–27, 33–34 Scott, James, 170, 222, 283n. 95 scouts, 93–94, 117, 263n. 39 SEA Games. See Southeast Asian Games SEAP Games. See Southeast Asia Peninsular Games SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), 143, 148, 204 Second Indochina War, 5, 238 sepak takraw (Lao: kato), 13, 123, 151, 151n. 56, 176, 183, 271n. 41

index seu seu, 77–78, 80, 99, 188, 241, 278n. 100. See also laziness (stereotype) Siam (Thailand). See Thailand (Siam) Singapore, 124, 145–147, 148–149, 150, 154, 226, 236, 266n. 37, 272n. 81, 281n. 39, 282n. 65 Sisavang Vatthana, King, 123–125 Sisavangvong, King, 89, 122 Siviangkhaek Konnivong, 283n. 101 sivilai, 74, 76, 80–81, 130, 233. See also charoen/chaloen; civilization; national progress socialist physical culture: overview of, 20, 167–168, 192; character traits and, 177–178; cosmology and, 20, 167, 185, 190–193; critiques of, 179–181, 183–185, 191–192, 277n. 86; culture and, 7, 174–175, 275n. 44; discipline in context of, 174, 177, 180–181, 187, 189, 190, 218; education in context of, 174; equipment and, 183; gender and sexuality in context of, 189; health and, 167–169, 171, 172, 175, 180–181, 183, 187–190, 192; health in context of, 187–190, 192; infrastructure and, 183–184; international educational exchanges for citizens versus, 202; khabuan in context of movement and, 175, 178; labor productivity and, 177, 184–190; Marxist-Leninist roots of, 167, 168, 173, 273n. 2; mass mobilization and, 178–180, 276n. 58; new socialist person as third revolution and, 169, 171–174, 273n. 9, 274n. 26, 275n. 44, 275n. 46, 275n. 49; new socialist person rhetoric and, 169–172, 176, 274n. 15, 274n. 24, 275n. 49; physical education and, 178, 181–186, 276n. 73; physicality and, 171, 177–178, 180–182, 185–187, 188; Soviet Union and, 14, 168, 273n. 2; sport and, 3, 176–177; Vietnam and, 14; women and, 186, 273n. 9, 278n. 94 solidarity: aesthetics of, 113, 114; Asian Games in context of, 162; GANEFO in context of, 156–160, 163, 166;

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between Indochinese territories, 2; international sport and, 162; Lao renovation (Lao Nhay) movement in context of, 61, 73, 77; Lao term for (samakkhi), 126–127; as discursive theme in LPDR, 180, 182, 201; National Games of Laos in context of, 126–127, 135, 219; military masculinity in context of, 87, 101, 103, 110; and monarchy, 127; public performance of, 135; SEAP Games in context of, 144–145, 166; international socialist sport in context of, 163–165, 202–203, 204, 213–215; among Southeast Asian nations, 143–144, 166, 232. See also national unity; samakkhi Somsavat Lengsavad, 226–227, 230, 235–236, 238 Sontag, Susan, 72 Souli Nanthavong, 211, 214–215 Souphanouvong, Prince: biographical information about, 89–90; domestic sports festivals and, 216, 218, 218; labor productivity and physicality, 187–189, 190; Lao sport, 163; nationhood, 92–93, 96, 121, 126; political legitimacy in context of sport theatrics and, 216, 218, 218, 243; royalist historiography at sporting events and, 229, 234 Souphavanh Phiathep, 206–207, 209, 278n. 100, 281n. 57 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games: overview and history of, 20, 21, 146, 204, 235, 246, 286n. 31; of 1959, 146; of 1965, 153; of 1975, 204; of 1989, 234; of 2009, 226–231, 229, 235–240; body cult/ culture and, 9; economic development and, 232; foreign assistance for, 227–228, 236–239; gender equality ideology and, 281n. 57; gender roles and, 233–234; health and, 233, 285n. 25; historical context for, 231–235; historical paradoxes and, 235–240; history and historiography of Laos and, 234; infrastructure and, 227, 231;

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Southeast Asian (SEA) Games (cont.) international reputation and, 226–227, 235–240; IOC and, 230; Lao sport, 232; leadership cult of Kaysone and, 229–230, 234; LPRP authoritarianism and, 226, 232, 234, 238–240, 287nn. 47–48; membership in, 204; national identity in context of, 237, 286nn. 41–42; national progress in context of, 233–234; national sovereignty issues and, 228, 236; nationalism and, 229–230; Olympic internationalism and, 230–231; Olympic symbols and, 230; politics and, 204; popular nationalism and, 227–231, 229, 235–240, 239, 284n. 5; postsocialist developmentalism and, 232–234; regional friendships and, 229–230, 239; sport theatrics in context of power and, 229–230; success/failure history and, 230–232, 234–236, 239, 244–245, 257n. 53; symbolic outbreak of energy and, 228–230; Th ailand and Laos emulation dynamic and, 153; Thailand and Laos rivalry and, 228, 236–237, 286n. 37, 286nn. 41–42; Vietnamese and Lao relationship and, 228, 237. See also South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games: overview and history of, 124, 144–145, 204, 266n. 37, 269nn. 19–20, 270nn. 25–26; anniversary of, 226; anticommunism and, 148; flag of, 125, 146, 146; foreign assistance and, 153; Lao sport in context of, 163–164; medals and, 149, 150, 151, 271n. 41, 271n. 48; as model for National Games of Laos, 124–125, 132, 153; modern sports and, 145; national progress in context of, 149, 150, 151–154, 271n. 41; Olympic symbolism and, 230, 266n. 38; personal power and political legitimacy in context of, 130; politics and, 166, 204; regional

dynamics in context of, 158–160, 211; royal power and political legitimacy in context of, 124–125, 149, 270n. 40; sportsmanship and, 149, 151; success/ failure history and, 149, 151–152; Thailand and Laos emulation dynamic and, 152–153; unity and, 125–126, 145–148, 146, 270n. 33. See also Southeast Asian (SEA) Games Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 143, 148, 204 South Vietnam, 124, 144–145, 147–148, 150, 154, 158, 161–162, 204, 282n. 65 Souvanna Phouma, 35, 121–122, 124, 126, 131, 144, 158–159, 161, 268n. 81 Soviet Union: atmosphere in context of mass culture in, 198; foreign assistance from, 202–203, 214–215, 238; GANEFO and, 157–158; international friendships in context of spectator sport and, 201–203, 205, 207, 209–210, 214–215, 281n. 49, 282n. 59; IOC and, 278n. 1; physical culture defined and, 168, 273n. 2; socialist physical culture and, 14, 168, 273n. 2; sport and, 196. See also Moscow Olympics in 1980 spectator sport, and socialism: overview of, 20–21, 195, 223–224; atmosphere in context of, 196, 198–201; character traits and, 206–207; concepts and, 195–197; demobilization in context of, 224; discipline in context of, 218–220, 221; domestic sports festivals and, 196, 199–200, 216, 217, 218-219-223, 279n. 21, 280n. 26; elite sport versus, 20–21, 198, 279n. 8; gender equality ideology and, 196, 207–209, 281n. 57; gender roles and, 208–209, 281n. 57; health in context of, 220; hierarchies and, 216, 218, 218, 222; international friendships and, 196, 201–205, 209–210, 213–215, 282n. 59; international reputation and, 196, 205–207, 209–212, 282nn. 64–65; khabuan in context of movement and, 197, 279n. 7; Lao sport in context of,

index 203, 206, 208, 210, 212–213, 215, 219, 223; linguistic mobilization in context of revolution and, 197, 202–203, 280n. 31, 283n. 101; literal mobilization in context of revolution, 197; LOC in context of, 184, 210–216, 232, 277n. 86, 282n. 59; mass mobilization and, 219–223, 220, 283n. 90, 283n. 101; material constraints and, 20–21, 210; military masculinity in context of, 20–21; mobilization in context of revolution and, 20–21, 196–197, 279n. 7; National Games in 1985, 196, 219–220, 221, 283n. 88; National Games in 1987, 196, 220, 221, 283n. 88; new socialist person in context of, 206–207, 220; Olympic internationalism and, 141, 212–213, 216; Olympic symbols and, 202, 219, 220; political legitimacy in context of sport theatrics and, 216, 218, 218, 222; popular participation and, 222; popular responses and, 200–201, 280n. 26; socialist state idea in context of, 197, 279n. 6; sportive expressionism and, 220–221; success/ failure history and, 196, 206–207, 209; symbolic mobilization in context of revolution and, 197, 202, 218–219, 220; totalitarianism in context of, 222, 283nn. 97–98; women athletes and, 196, 206–207, 209, 278n. 100, 281n. 57; worker athletes and, 208, 278n. 96, 281n. 55. See also Moscow Olympics in 1980 sport: overview of, 3, 8; Lao-Annamese relations and, 1–2, 247n. 4; masculinity in context of, 2–3; national progress in context of, 137–138, 268n. 99; nationalism in context of, 12, 14, 18; physical culture in context of, 12–15; premodern physical practices comparison with modern, 22–23, 28, 33, 49–50; ritual in context of modern, 8, 69, 132–133, 136, 268n. 99; scholarship on, 12; state power in context of, 240–241; strategies of

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325

substantialization in context of, 8–9, 12, 19, 241–244, 242; success/failure history and, 242, 244–246; tradition in context of modern, 138; women and, 206–209, 209, 243, 278n. 100, 281n. 57. See also physical culture; regional sport; spectator sport, and socialism sportive expressionism, 220–221 sportsmanship (namchai nakkila or sporting spirit): overview of, 1–3, 242; King’s Cup and, 153; National Games and, 126–127, 136; Olympic Games in context of, 149–151, 245–246; physical education and, 61; SEAP Games and, 149, 153; Thailand and Laos rivalry in context of, 142–143 sports movement (khabuankila or kankheuanvai kila), 197 Streckfuss, David, 253n. 8, 283n. 101 Stuart-Fox, Martin, 6–7, 24, 90, 119 success/failure history in sport: overview of, 242, 244–246, 287n. 52; Moscow Olympics in 1980 and, 211; National Games and, 127–128; regional sport and, 151–152, 154–155; SEA Games and, 230–232, 234–236, 239, 244–245, 257n. 53; SEAP Games and, 149, 151–152; spectator sport in context of socialism and, 196, 206–207, 209 Sukarno, 144, 156–158, 160, 249n. 44, 271n. 66 Sukhum Naiyapradit (Luang), 144–145, 148, 269n. 19 Taiwan (Nationalist China), 156, 278n. 1 Tambiah, Stanley, 119 Taykeo Luangkhot, 151–152 Tertrais, Hugh, 270n. 26 Thailand: Cambodian rivalry with, 286n. 37; Laos rivalry with, 142–143, 154–156, 228, 236–237, 286n. 37 Thailand (Siam): body cult/culture and, 72, 260n. 103; history and historiography of, 3, 4–5, 26–27, 32–33, 41, 64, 258n. 68; international friendships in

326

:

index

Thailand (Siam) (cont.) context of spectator sport and, 204–205; Laos emulation dynamic with, 142, 147–148, 152–153, 202; Laos national culture in context of, 26, 30, 33, 41; modernity discourse and, 80–81; nationalism and, 143; Olympic Games and, 282n. 65; physical education and, 12, 70; rituals and, 31; sports and, 12; Thai irredentism and, 64–65, 65, 258n. 68; tikhi and, 46. See also Sarit Thanarat; South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games theatrics of power, sport and: overview of, 118–120, 265n. 9, 265n. 11; national progress in context of, 120, 137–139, 265n. 11; Olympics and, 120, 132, 265n. 11; political legitimacy in context of, 118–119, 216, 218, 218; royal power and political legitimacy in context of, 119–120. See also National Games of Laos Th ipthiangchan, S., 163 Thongchai Winichakul, 80, 129, 236–237, 255n. 70 tikhi case study: overview of, 19, 22–24; anthropological theory and, 24, 36, 39–40, 43, 45, 48; cosmogony in context of, 28, 42–45, 255n. 70; EFEO and, 24, 30–31, 33, 36, 41–42, 48, 50; embodiment of colonial social relations and, 38–40; French colonial project in context of, 25, 28–29, 38–40, 49–50; gender in context of, 50–51; health and, 40; Lao national culture and, 23–26, 30–33, 38–41, 45–46, 48–50, 253n. 14, 253n. 22; Lao race and, 25, 30–31, 50; masculinity/ies and, 29, 29–30, 34–35, 38–39, 47, 50–51; modern sport and, 19, 23, 28, 39–41, 46–48; modern-traditional binary and, 23, 48–50; national game in context of, 24, 26–29; power in context of, 39–40, 49–51; premodern physical practices comparison with

modern sport and, 22–23, 28, 33, 49–50; rituals and, 13, 22–24, 27, 29–32, 36–38, 40–46, 48–49, 253n. 24; ritual-sport binary and, 48–50; traditional characteristics of, 13, 19, 23, 34, 252n. 1 Tips, Walter, 26–27 Tonkin, 15–16, 247n. 1 totalitarianism, 222, 224, 283nn. 97–98 Toye, Hugh, 119, 263n. 51 United Kingdom, 15, 34–35, 61, 126, 143; Olympic Games in 2012 and, 245 United States: anticommunism and, 92, 119, 121–122, 131, 143, 148–149; foreign assistance from, 120, 158; globalization in context of, 141; IOC and, 157, 213; Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 and, 211, 216, 278n. 1, 283n. 83; Moscow Olympics in 1980 boycott and, 214, 278n. 1; nationalism in context of, 6–7; neutralism and, 131; patronage of, 119, 122, 131, 138–139, 235; Vietnam War and, 5, 161 unity. See national unity Van Wuysthoff, Gérard, 27, 40–41 Verdery, Katherine, 170 Vertinsky, Patricia, 12 Vichy era, and physical culture: overview of, 20, 52–53, 64, 244–245, 256nn. 4–5, 258n. 67; Annamese and, 68, 70; Buddhism in context of, 52–53, 57; CGEGS and, 55; Confucianism and, 52–53, 57; discipline in context of, 87, 100–101, 103, 110, 113; fascism in context of, 52, 56, 72, 260n. 102; France and, 54–56, 59; health and, 54, 56, 75–76, 78, 78–79, 80, 90; in Indochina, 56–60; Lao race in context of, 62–63; masculinity/ies and, 54–56, 61–62, 81–82; muscular Christianity in context of, 54, 76; “Olympic salute” in context of, 56, 72, 260n. 102; Olympic torch relay and, 60, 63, 96, 133, 267n. 80; patriotism in context of

index imperialism and, 56–57, 65, 70, 72, 82–83; Pétain Cup and, 60, 63, 68, 142, 258n. 51; Pétainist festivals and, 55–56, 132; physical education and, 58–62, 72–73; sport in Indochina and, 60–61; sportsmanship and, 61; women and, 59–60, 62, 81–82. See also Lao Nhay renovation movement Vietminh, 90, 93–94, 96–97, 101, 108, 109, 238 Vietnam: communism and, 143; foreign assistance from, 202, 203–204, 238; Franco-Lao agency and, 77; GANEFO and, 272n. 81; history and historiography of Laos and, 3; international friendships in context of spectator sport and, 201–205, 215; Lao Nhay renovation movement and, 68–70, 259n. 88; Lao race in context of, 63; Lao relationship with people of, 228, 237; nationhood in Lao in context of, 91; Olympic Games and, 282n. 65; physical culture and sport during Vichy era and, 52–53, 57–59, 60, 63, 70, 72; physical education and, 95, 113; political influence of, 237; racial prejudice and, 237; SEA Games and, 226; socialist physical culture and, 168–169; sporting societies and, 67; VWP and, 93, 121, 165

:

327

Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), 93, 121, 165. See also Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV); Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) Vietnam War, 5, 161 vinai/labiap vinai, 15, 151. See also discipline Vongkot Chinda, 206 Vongsavang, Crown Prince, 133–134, 136 women: binary distinctions in military and, 87–88; the body/embodiment of, 53, 87, 208; as embodiment of culture, 74–75, 82, 87, 105, 107, 186, 208–209, 243, 278n. 94; health in context of birthrate and, 56; International Women’s Day and, 199, 207–208, 279n. 21; military culture/training in context of, 87–88; National Games and, 123; nationalism in context of, 10–11, 107; performance of nationhood and, 87; physical education during Vichy era in Lao and, 59–60, 62, 81–82; power and courage in context of, 50; social attributes of military masculinity in context of, 105–106; sports and, 206–209, 209, 243, 278n. 100, 281n. 57 World War II, 7, 85, 96, 143. See also Nazi Germany; Vichy era, and physical culture

About the Author Simon Creak is a lecturer in Southeast Asian history at the University of Melbourne and until mid-2014 was associate professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University. His work has appeared in numerous journals and books, including the Journal of Asian Studies, Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality (2013), and Sports across Asia: Politics, Cultures, and Identities (2012). Creak holds a PhD in history from the Australian National University.

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Production Notes for Creak / Embodied Nation Jacket design by Julie Matsuo-Chun Series interior design by Richard Hendel with display    type in Optima LT and text in Garamond Premier Pro Composition by Westchester Publishing Ser­vices Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc. Printed on 60 lb. House White Opaque, 466 ppi.

ASIAN HISTORY / SPORTS

“This superb, well-written book shows how nationalism became embodied through state promoted physical practices promoting discipline. For those interested primarily in Laos, it is a treasure trove, showing how sport emerged from play and ritualised play to become a central metaphor of Lao nationalism. For those whose main interest is in sport theory, Creak supplies a wonderful case study that can be emulated.” — GRANT EVANS, ÉCOLE FRANÇAISE D’EXTRÊME-ORIENT, LAOS

“Simon Creak’s outstanding and highly original study explores how colonial and pre-colonial conceptions of the body and sports contributed to the making of modern Laos and how physicality became a weapon in the cultural contests of the Cold War. This is a fascinating account of how colonial, national, and communist leaders used physical culture to embody quite literally their political projects throughout the twentieth century.” — CHRISTOPHER E. GOSCHA, UNIVERSITÉ DU QUÉBEC À MONTRÉAL

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