Sport and physical culture resided at the junction of several different currents in party rhetoric on culture Most obviously these fields were embraced for their potential to improve the people is 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 there were two more profound connections first socialist culture privileged physical attributes especially labor as well as condemning laziness extravagance and other negative attributes This theme connected the abstractness of socialist rhetoric words to the body emphasizing the body is centrality in the ideology of socialist Laos Second the Lao socialist worldview of positivest transformation the cosmology of socialist Laos--was bound up in a physical idiom Like an inept human body society awaited physical amelioration through building improving and strengthening