Franco-Lao cultural hybridity at play

The Saxo Institute is pleased to announce a guest lecture by Simon Creak from the Australian National University. The titel of the lecture is 'Franco-Lao cultural hybridity at play: How writing the traditional game of tikhi made modern Laos'. 

Simon Creak is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University. He is writing his dissertation on the history of sport and physical culture in twentieth-century Laos, and is particularly interested in how these genres have been employed as mechanisms for buttressing colonial, postcolonial, nationalist, and revolutionary ideologies.

Abstract

This paper argues that tikhi -- a game in Laos that resembles English field hockey -- was shaped as a ‘Lao tradition' in the first half of the twentieth century by the modernising impulse to produce a coherent and distinct Lao history and culture. Normally played as part of religious festivals, the game attracted the attention of a succession of travel writers and scholars, both French and Lao, who understood the game in terms of Lao tradition and ritual. This recalls literature in sports studies that distinguishes traditional games from modern sports, but I challenge such binaries by showing how the writing of tikhi was as much about modernity as it was tradition. Moreover, as a collaborative Franco-Lao project, writing about tikhi undercut conventional distinctions between coloniser/colonised and colonial/indigenous cultural forms.