Sport and Body Cultures in East and Southeast Asia

Despite a widely held, and not entirely erroneous, view that the cultures of East and Southeast Asia commonly favour the mind over the body or, at least mental activity rather than physical endeavour, this collection of essays sheds light on the wide range of diverse ways in which sport and body cultures feature in that part of the world. Contributors to the collection work in many different countries but are united in their shared interest in increasing our understanding of the social role of sport and body cultures which is manifest in their work. The countries that are discussed are Indonesia, the People's Republic of China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and the former Netherlands New Guinea. Themes considered in these chapters are the implications of hosting sport events, the focus on sport and the body by a group of Buddhist monastics, belly dancing in the lives of women in Taiwan, the sociopolitical role of the scouting movement in a colonial setting, and issues relating to the functioning of sport clubs. The chapters were originally published in Asia Pacific Journal of Sport and Social Science.

Friederike Trotier is a Research Assistant at the Department of Comparative Development and Cultural Studies at Passau University, Germany. In her PhD thesis, she analysis the role of sporting events in the changing Indonesian history and the local agency after Indonesia's decentralization process with the example of Palembang as sports city. Alan Bairner is Professor of Sport and Social Theory at Loughborough University, UK. He is co-editor of The Politics of the Olympics: a survey (2010) and the Routledge Handbook of Sport and Politics (2017). He is the founding editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Sport and Social Science.

1. Sport and body cultures in east and south-east Asia Friederike Trotier and Alan Bairner 2. Changing an image through sports events: Palembang's success story Friederike Trotier 3. Extravagance and its decline: China's triple East Asian Games since the 2000s Marcus P. Chu 4. Belly dancing as exercise: image-building of a foreign dance in Taiwan Yuchi Chang, Po-Hsiu Lin and Tsuneo Sogawa 5. The Buddhist Basketball Association: sport practice and the cultivation of the body among Tai Lue monastics Roger Casas 6. Civilizing the Devil's Own Country. The Scouting movement in Netherlands New Guinea as a tool for social, cultural and political change, 1950-1962 Jelle Zondag 7. Sports clubs and organizations in changing times: the case of Singapore Wai Cheong Eugene Chew, Ho Jin Chung and Jung Woo Lee 8. An exploratory examination of risk-management practices in South Korean community sport clubs Sungwon Kim, Todd L. Seidler, Daniel P. Connaughton and John O. Spengler