| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Andrew D. Morris. Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China. Foreword by Joseph S. Alter. (Asia: Local Studies/Global Times, number 10.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 368. $49.95.

Until recently, sports were not considered an appropriate set of processes through which societies in Asia could be examined, and academic studies such as this by Andrew D. Morris were limited in number. Joseph Alter, in his early work on wrestling in South Asia, argued that this was partly explained by the conceptions of those societies preferred by Western scholars. A sort of Orientalism existed whereby organized sports, fierce competition, intense physicality, and corporal play were considered unlikely or atypical in cultures thought to be rigidly defined and controlled by the strictures of caste, tradition, class, or gender. Morris's book is the latest in a range of studies that have sought to address this. As its title suggests, the book covers the period 1912 to 1949, and it sets as its objective the task of tracing "the many national, racial, sexual, social and political threads of discourse that came to interrogate and define the realm of physical culture in Republican China" (p. 15). The author explains that "physical culture" is in fact a limited translation of the Chinese term tiyu, which can mean "body cultivation" or "physical education." Morris states that the period after 1912 represented a "decisive break" from previous modes of tiyu. The changes wrought in China's conceptions of tiyu in these years were to make "possible the organizational and philosophical directions of the Chinese Communist Party's later 'red' physical culture" (p. 15).

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