“Myanmar is telling Asia ‘we are coming back!’ This is the time. Watch out! We are coming back. After the SEA Games, we will host ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]. Big things are happening in our country.” “Kyaw,” an amiable rig coordinator in his early thirties, was relaxing on the ground drinking beer with his wife, passing the time prior to Myanmar's opening men's football match of the 2013 Southeast Asian or SEA Games. Fifteen days later—after a glorious opening ceremony, a slew of gold medals, and a celebratory closing ceremony—his assessment seemed prescient. The government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, boasted: “With the honor of hosting the Games that returned to the country after a 44-year long wait, Myanmar successfully hosted the biggest regional sporting event.”Footnote 1 Thailand's Nation concurred: “The country failed to overhaul Thailand as overall winners, but its symbolic triumph as host was far more important.”Footnote 2 “Myanmar has basked in its host status and a rare moment in the international limelight after years in isolation under military rule,” declared Agence France-Presse in a widely syndicated article. “Some local and international observers thought Myanmar could not host the SEA Games. They were wrong,” boasted triumphant presidential spokesman U Ye Htut.Footnote 3
More than a sporting event, Myanmar's SEA Games—it's biggest sporting event since hosting the South East Asia Peninsular Games of 1969—was tied to the restoration of the nation's image in Southeast Asia at a moment of profound transformation. According to this narrative, the games represented an archetypical “coming out ceremony,” celebrating that Myanmar had “won acceptance and trust among its counterparts.”Footnote 4 By successfully hosting the SEA Games, Myanmar would symbolically resume its place as a respectable member of the regional community of nations after decades of isolation and ignominy. More than that, according to more ambitious predictions, Myanmar might even better its regional rivals by showcasing a superior modernity to that of previous games. This feat was to be the first of two performances, the “dress rehearsal” for the country's assumption of the ASEAN chair in 2014.
This narrative of national restoration and regional reemergence provides a simple and compelling lens through which to consider Myanmar's Southeast Asian Games of 2013. It reflects the productive capacity of major sporting events, like other forms of ceremonial politics, to animate notions of national achievement, unity, and modernity, even when reality is far messier than these performances would suggest.Footnote 5 As Kyaw's enthusiasm illustrated, the narrative was particularly compelling in Myanmar because it resonated beyond officialdom, publically unifying the population and the military-dominated state. Nevertheless, if this narrative serves as a useful introduction to the Myanmar games, it also overlooks key features of the event that tell a more interesting story. These include the narrative structure of national conquest that, in recent years, has been a recurring presence at SEA Games; the range of different meanings ascribed to the games, even among different organizers; and the nuanced production of regional community reflected by Myanmar's return as host.
As U Ye Htut's Facebook post encapsulated, the exultation of the games came only after a period of doubt and even anxiousness. Organizers encountered a catalogue of controversies in the years and months prior to the games—the perception of waste, crony capitalism, the role of China, the selection of obscure sports, doubts over the selection of Naypyitaw as the main host city, and so on. These issues and high-profile problems during the event revealed the fangs of Myanmar's modernity, and the grimmer and more profound reality that, for all the talk of change, the nation's transformation and reemergence would be long and difficult.Footnote 6 It was this sense of imminent disaster that made the final denouement so striking and surprising.
Immediately familiar from larger sporting mega-events, including the Asian Games, Olympics, and football World Cup, the narrative of national conquest also paralleled the structural rhythm of previous SEA Games—notably the two events immediately preceding Myanmar 2013 in Laos in 2009 and Indonesia in 2011. Given this consistency, enhanced in the SEA Games by consistently low expectations born of local capacity constraints, the rhythm of each games and the suspension of disbelief that permits it to repeat itself every two years, and still to surprise, are as significant as the particular vagaries of each SEA Games. The local dramas that inevitably characterize each SEA Games conceal these common features.
The repeating narrative and rhythm of the SEA Games constitute powerful cultural forces in their own right. They distill the complexities of a huge, complex, and phenomenally expensive cultural event involving thousands of participants, tens of thousands of spectators, and millions of followers on television and social media into a story that is unified, consumable, and quite often intoxicating. The emotiveness of such stories generates excitement as well as cynicism among the public, helps to mobilize state and commercial resources, and provides a degree of cover for dubious deals between government and business. This rhythm, in which the host country is challenged but ultimately prevails, reflects popular sporting mythology of overcoming the odds, anthropomorphizing the event—and through it the host nation—into an athlete who must triumph over adversity to “pull it off.” In terms of the “scripts,” which for Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz characterize large-scale “media events,” this “underdog” narrative elevates the SEA Games from “contest” to “conquest,” with the host nation in the lead role as conqueror.Footnote 7
Less obviously, the repeated narrative of national conquest at each SEA Games highlights the ways in which the event generates notions of regional community in Southeast Asia. As the script of national conquest suggests, the regional community brought into relief by the SEA Games not only recognizes but celebrates the identities of its constituent parts, the member nations, especially that of the host nation. This character—and the raucous nationalism of international sport more generally—suggests the regional community promoted by the SEA Games lacks the “deep, horizontal comradeship” that defines the imagined communities of participating nations.Footnote 8 Nevertheless the rules and norms of the SEA Games promote repetition, predictability, and reciprocity that order these national identities within a sealed regional system, from which emerges a regional mode of identification.Footnote 9 By hosting the games after its long hiatus and submitting to these rules and norms, Myanmar was resuming its rights and responsibilities as a member of this region. The same was true of Myanmar's resumption of the ASEAN chair in 2014; but unlike the formal, diplomatic politics of ASEAN, the SEA Games substantialized this symbolic restoration through a large-scale “mega-event” designed to attract maximum attention in Myanmar and the region.Footnote 10
The cultural form of the SEA Games is especially suited to the expression of regional community, for it provides a structure in which this theme may coexist with that of national conquest. Mirroring the Olympic Games, on which all multisport events are based, the uniqueness of the SEA Games in regional affairs lies in its “peculiar potency as a means of mediating between national and international [i.e., regional] identities.”Footnote 11 This coexistence is rarely incident free, and the Myanmar games were no exception. Yet the tensions that emerged between the two forms of identification and the dramas they ignited could be viewed as key features of Southeast Asia's “regional public culture”: the totality of national self-images, images of “other” countries, ideas of Southeast Asia as a “region” or community, and the transnational institutions that oversee it.Footnote 12 To understand how the SEA Games have emerged from and shaped this regional public culture, we must start with the early development of the South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games in the 1950s.
History and Background of the SEA Games
Founded by the Olympic Committee of Thailand (OCT) in 1958, the SEAP Games were a product of the soft-power dynamics of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. As well as aiming to improve sporting standards in Thailand and other participating countries—Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya, Singapore, and South Vietnam—the Thai founders emphasized the objectives of regional friendship and cooperation. These aims were shaped by a conditional form of “Thai-centric, anti-communist regionalism in mainland Southeast Asia.”Footnote 13 At a time when the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China were offering increased support to Southeast Asian sporting authorities, the OCT founded the biennial games to foster friendship and cooperation between the region's anti-communist countries and nonaligned Burma and Cambodia. Communist North Vietnam, the region's only communist country, was not involved despite also being situated on the “golden peninsula” that gave the games their more common Thai name, Kila Laem Thong (the Golden Peninsula Games). The OCT's use of the term laem thong (golden peninsula)—a vernacular translation of Suvarnabhumi (golden land), a prosperous land mentioned in Hindu texts that Thai scholars claimed to have been located in what was now Thailand—reflected the Thai-centric regionalism behind the establishment of the SEAP Games.Footnote 14
In spite of this Thai-centrism, two distinctive features of the SEAP Games would prove important in molding norms of regularity, repetition, and reciprocity. First, the event would be conducted in the odd-numbered years between the Asian and Olympic Games, to provide practice for these larger events. As a result, the SEAP Games were to be conducted biennially, twice as often as those larger events. Second, rather than being subject to a bidding process, the task of hosting was to be rotated in alphabetical order between the member countries. This principle meant all countries would take their turn of experiencing the glory (and financial costs) of hosting. Although in practice this rule was applied flexibly—for example, the three Indochinese countries never hosted the SEAP Games at all—sharing the rights and responsibilities of hosting among all participants that are able to host remains a key feature of the event today.
Burma hosted the SEAP Games twice in that form of the event: first in 1961, under the civilian government of U Nu, and again in 1969, under the military regime of General Ne Win. Like other leaders in decolonizing Southeast Asia, both leaders promoted sport as a means of postcolonial nation building and embraced the SEAP Games for the public prestige hosting might confer.Footnote 15 Although Burma topped the medal table on both occasions, this strategy backfired in 1969 when students used the games as a pretext for riots against the junta, transgressing the image of national unity that is central to the success of such events.Footnote 16 This incident may have explained the failure of Burma/Myanmar to host the event in the four decades after 1969, the long hiatus that made the 2013 SEA Games so meaningful.
The withdrawal of the Indochinese countries in 1975 led to expansion to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei two years later. With the exception of Brunei (then a British protectorate) and Burma, the duly renamed Southeast Asian (SEA) Games mirrored the membership of ASEAN, established in 1967, and consigned the peninsular notion of the region to history. In advance of joining ASEAN in the 1990s, Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea) rejoined the SEA Games between 1983 and 1987, while Laos and unified Vietnam followed in 1989, after the Pol Pot regime was barred.Footnote 17 The Kingdom of Cambodia returned in 1995, and newly independent Timor Leste joined in 2003, bringing to eleven the number of participating countries.
The scale of the SEAP/SEA Games expanded dramatically throughout this period. The number of athletes climbed from around 500 in 1959 to 3,000 in 1989 and over 6,000 in Myanmar last year; the number of organizers, officials, volunteers, and spectators grew in similar degrees. The number and variety of sports also increased, especially with the addition of “local sports”—those that were not included in the Asian Games or the Olympics—a distinct and highly contested feature of the event, including in Myanmar. Budgets also skyrocketed as organizers attempted to emulate the stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies of far wealthier nations: the past two games in Indonesia and Myanmar were said to have cost between US$300 million and US$400 million.Footnote 18 Unlike the Asian Games and Olympics, little of this expense was recouped through broadcasting rights or ticket sales. Instead, the SEA Games are usually funded by host governments; commercial sponsorships; and, recently in Myanmar and Laos, foreign donors.Footnote 19 In these ways, the SEA Games have emerged as a distinctively Southeast Asian version of the mega-events that define the global age.
National Narratives and Denouement
According to the original goal of enhancing the performance of Thailand and its neighbors in the Asian Games and Olympics, the SEA Games are nested in a scalar hierarchy of international and domestic sporting events. In practice, however, this purpose has long been balanced against the more immediate quest for national glory. Likewise the growth of the SEA Games has primarily been directed at performing a superior mode of modernity within a sealed regional system delineated by membership of the SEA Games Federation (SEAGF).Footnote 20 As in other mega-events in Asia and around the world, national leaders are attracted by the prestige of hosting a spectacular, large-scale event and performing well on the medals table.Footnote 21 Depending on the size and wealth of the host country, they seek to outdo previous hosts in terms of scale, grandeur, stadiums, and organization, or more modestly to “join the club” of host countries. The closed regional system in which this contest occurs is reinforced by hosts’ selection of obscure sports they expect to win, the ritualistic rancor that accompanies these decisions, and a distinct lack of interest in the event outside the region.
In the past fifteen years, the principle of rotating hosting rights among participating nations has boosted the competitive modernity of the SEA Games. Brunei, Vietnam, and Laos celebrated their first-ever games in 1999, 2003, and 2009, respectively, while in 2011 and 2013 Indonesia and Myanmar hosted their first games in twenty-four and forty-four years.Footnote 22 With a pragmatic outlook, SEAGF officials admit that the event's success depends on all countries having the opportunity to host and to perform well when doing so. These officials also accept the inevitability of host nations boosting their medal tally through strategic selection of sports, despite the predictable protests that follow.Footnote 23 In these ways, the ethos of national conquest is nurtured alongside the recognition that this success must be shared throughout the region. The synergy of sport and politics is elevated even further in those countries, including Myanmar, where nominally nongovernmental National Olympic Committees are state agencies. However, as the preceding SEA Games in Laos and Indonesia showed, inscribing the games with national narratives constitutes only the opening act of these events.
Laos 2009
The narrative of the 25th SEA Games in postsocialist Laos bore many of the hallmarks of China's first Olympics a year before.Footnote 24 The Lao People's Revolutionary Party regime promoted Vientiane 2009, the country's first games as host, as a coming-out ceremony par excellence that would showcase the country's development under its tutelage since coming to power in 1975. As the high-profile organizing committee chairman and deputy prime minister, Somsavat Lengsavad, boasted: “The SEA Games is an important way of showing the development of Laos over the last thirty-four years.”Footnote 25 Hosting the SEA Games would “showcase the fine tradition of the country to our friends,” promote tourism, attract foreign investment, and “put Laos on the map.”Footnote 26 As a small country, Laos was not aiming to best previous hosts, merely to join them in hosting this paean to modernity. “The SEA Games in Laos is a magnificent example of what sports can do and Laos has joined the giants in this respect,” a government spokesman told the Bangkok Post.Footnote 27
This narrative was challenged within and outside Laos. Most controversially, Chinese developers were granted a concession to develop 1,640 hectares of prime real estate in inner Vientiane in return for a US$100 million stadium complex on the city's outskirts. The site of the concession, known as the That Luang marsh, was located nearby the That Luang stupa, the country's most important Buddhist monument and national symbol. With little official information available, rumors circulated that the development was intended to be an exclusive “Chinatown” for 50,000 Chinese residents. Efforts by Somsavat to quell anti-Chinese xenophobia and fears of inadequate compensation failed, and the stadium deal came to epitomize the downside of “development” in Laos, including its perceived threat to national sovereignty. Based on the perception that his Chinese heritage made him unduly favorable to Chinese interests, Web critics accused Somsavat of treason (khai sat), literally “selling the nation” in the Lao language. The plan was scrapped before the games, though it was later reintroduced in modified form.
Foreign critics meanwhile focused on the small size of Laos's SEA Games. Despite the new stadium complex and many smaller developments funded by other regional benefactors, limited facilities meant only twenty-five sports were scheduled for Laos, compared with forty-three two years earlier in Thailand. In addition, while Olympic sports such as gymnastics and basketball were omitted, obscure events such as fin swimming (in which swimmers use a single, dolphin-like flipper) were included. Organizers claimed there were “25 events for the 25th SEA Games in Laos” and, as discussed, all host countries include eccentric events they expect to win. But regional rivals were unimpressed. Malaysia's sports minister derided the Lao event as a “community games,” and the Bernama press agency claimed the event was losing its “glamour.” Organizers pleaded that Laos was “a poor country with limited facilities,” but this undermined the core claim that the SEA Games embodied development in Laos.
Indonesia 2011
Two years later in Indonesia, the story was one of national reemergence. Together with chairing ASEAN in 2011, organizers sought to use the country's first SEA Games as host since 1997 to flag its position as regional leader after the upheavals of the Asian financial crisis and democratic transition in the late 1990s.Footnote 28 Again, historical context was crucial in this narrative. After joining the SEA Games in 1977, Indonesia had finished atop the medals table at almost every games until 1997 (except twice, when Thailand hosted and won). But in the six games since last hosting in 1997, Indonesia had failed to repeat this feat. According to national leaders and officials, hosting would help Indonesia to seize back a sporting ranking commensurate with its size and self-image as the region's leader.
The decision to designate Palembang in South Sumatra Province as the major host city (with Jakarta co-host) produced a second narrative relating to local politics.Footnote 29 Palembang's transformation since 1998 had been closely tied to major sporting events, beginning with its hosting of the 2004 National Games. For local leaders, that event increased investment and tourism and left an infrastructural legacy, including the Jakabaring Sports Complex and a new airport, which lifted the river-port city and South Sumatra up the national pecking order. Once considered “the most grubby city in Indonesia,” Palembang had won the country's cleanest city award four times since then, a source of considerable pride. With the SEA Games, Governor Alex Noerdin aimed to continue Palembang's transformation in Indonesian life by recreating the renamed Jakabaring Sports City as “the largest sports city in the world.”
Optimistic to begin with, these modernist visions for the SEA Games unraveled with a corrosive corruption scandal involving President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Democratic Party. At the center of the controversy was the party treasurer, Muhammad Nazaruddin, who was accused of accepting US$3 million in bribes for the construction of the athletes’ village in Palembang. Absconding the day before a travel ban was to come into effect, Nazaruddin spent seventy-five days on the run, hurling counter-accusations via social media at the Corruption Eradication Commission and senior Democratic Party figures, before being tracked down and arrested in faraway Colombia. The result was political soap opera of the highest order. Rather that celebrating the country's return to form, the saga highlighted the patronage and corruption that greases the fragmentary, neoliberal politics of post-1998 Indonesia, especially the way these factors coalesce in ubiquitous, large-scale “projects.”Footnote 30 Added to this were more routine problems, including the failure to complete venues in time due to delayed transfers of government funds.
Degrees of Denouement
Despite the troubled lead-up to both events, the Lao and Indonesian hosts ran largely successful SEA Games—meaning they enjoyed widespread popular support, generated considerable civic and national pride, and were not unduly derailed by organizational problems. The reversal was particularly profound in Laos, where local fans embraced the narrative of stepping into the region proudly and exuberantly. Notwithstanding widespread media coverage of two fatalities in a stampede prior to the men's football final in Jakarta, the population of Palembang embraced the SEA Games with a similar if more localized enthusiasm. In both events, the outpouring of popular sentiment occurred in spite of organizational problems and cheating controversies that figure in media coverage of every SEA Games.
The reasons for these dramatic reversals were ethnographic. Whereas pre-games controversies concerned abstract political, economic, and organizational issues, the actual SEA Games came alive with a visceral mix of sporting success, ceremonial politics, and public participation.Footnote 31 In Laos the home team finished seventh on the medals table with thirty-three gold, easily surpassing its pre-games target of twenty-five (again for the 25th SEA Games) and smashing its previous best of five in 2007. As the country discovered a patriotic voice, Lao su su, or “Laos fight fight,” became the anthem of the games at stadia, in restaurants and shop houses, and in homes around the country. In this euphoric environment, Chinese interference was simply forgotten or reconstrued as a facilitating force for national glory, reflecting a pragmatic view of outside influences that characterizes Lao history. Two years later, Indonesia won a phenomenal haul of 182 gold medals, and returned triumphantly to its cherished position atop the medals table. If the association with corruption remained, Palembang locals were happy to disregard this as a Jakarta issue, and to link sporting success to the city's continued transformation in Indonesian public life.
Victories on the field combined with the awesome spectacles—for their relative contexts—of the opening and closing ceremonies, which presented epic storylines, spectacular special effects, and complex choreography using technology associated with larger and/or wealthier countries. The Palembang opening ceremony, I was proudly informed, used the same “digital carpet” (i.e., giant, field-covering TV screen) as the Sydney Olympics. The 2009 and 2011 events generated an inclusive, ethnographic moment unprecedented in the experience of most fans, particularly the young. Given the massive investment in these events by host governments, such “spontaneous” expressions of popular joy should not have been surprising; what made them appear so were the dire predictions of failure in the lead-up to each event. A similar rhythm of promise, anxiousness, and exultation characterized the Myanmar games.
The Narrative and Rhythm of Myanmar's SEA Games
Promise
Myanmar was anointed host of the 2013 SEA Games four years earlier at a SEAGF Council meeting in Laos. Although the military regime had approved a new constitution in 2008, fresh elections were a year away and few observers were taking seriously the regime's seven-point plan for transitioning to “discipline-flourishing democracy.” By late November 2011, however, when the SEA Games flag was passed from Indonesia to Myanmar in Palembang, a cautious air of optimism had taken hold. After the elections of late 2010, the new “civilianized” government had released Daw Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest, loosened press restrictions, passed amnesties covering political prisoners, and issued a law permitting workers to strike. More recently, the National League for Democracy had rejoined the political process and the country had been rewarded with the ASEAN chair of 2014, having previously relinquished it in 2006.Footnote 32 If these changes were the result of a drawn-out process, the impression of rapid transition sparked talk of Myanmar—as more people were now willing to call the country—suddenly reentering regional and international affairs.
From the time Myanmar assumed its mantle as next host of the SEA Games, the event was interpreted through this prism of national restoration and regional reemergence. This narrative combined key elements of the previous two SEA Games in Laos and especially Indonesia, given the importance its leaders placed on winning back respect that had been relinquished in the past. More than anything else, the significance of Myanmar hosting the games was encapsulated in the motif of “44 years”—the period since Burma hosted the SEAP Games of 1969. This number was reproduced on t-shirts, recited by politicians and sporting officials, reiterated at the opening and closing ceremonies, reinforced in media reports, and recounted by fans discussing their own interest in the SEA Games.
Yet the importance placed on the “44 years” motif differed among various figures, including government and sporting officials. According to U Khin Maung Lwin, joint secretary-general of the Myanmar Olympic Council (MOC) and a long-serving member of the SEAGF Council, the significance of regaining the games after so long was related to the culture of the SEA Games movement rather than domestic politics. After such a long period, the SEAGF Council “just wanted to give us a chance, our turn to host the SEA Games,” according to the principle of rotating hosting rights among all members. While U Khin Maung Lwin appreciated that “situations and circumstances” had forced the long wait, the MOC was “honored and much appreciative” to again be hosting the SEA Games “after a 44-year gap,” for it restored the country's place as a full participant in the SEAGF.Footnote 33
This explanation illuminates the institutional norms of the SEA Games. SEAGF Council members—almost always male and of advanced age—have typically worked with one another for decades. Despite frequent disagreements, they proudly profess to be lifelong friends and see themselves as the core of the “SEA Games family”—a term they use among themselves and in public. They meet several times a year and invoke tradition in references to the games’ “founding fathers” or “elders” and cherished norms, such as the rotation of hosting duties. With the support of fellow SEAGF member countries to host whenever it was “ready,” the MOC's task was to garner government support. This was achieved in 2009 when the military government promised new stadium complexes in the capital Naypyitaw and elsewhere.Footnote 34
These subtleties were lost in the triumphalist boasts of the Myanmar government and media that hosting the games would express the outside world's restored “trust and acceptance” after its political reforms. Like U Khin Maung Lwin's explanation, such confidence framed the games in terms of Myanmar resuming its place in the region, but in broad nationalist terms rather than according to particular norms of the SEA Games. U Nyan Tun, state vice-president and patron of the Myanmar SEA Games Organizing Committee (MYASOC), declared: “Successful holding of the games is polishing the image of the State and it is a great opportunity to shape the new nation that regains a deserved position in the international community.” U Nyan Tun urged the population to embrace “the Games as a modernization drive of the State, uplifting the opening-up policy, social civility and living standard of the people [sic].”Footnote 35 On other occasions, this confidence veered in the direction of explicit competition. Upon taking the SEAGF flag in 2011, the Myanmar delegation announced, memorably if undiplomatically, that it would do a better job of hosting the games two years later than Indonesia had just done.
Such assertions of national superiority through sport are a natural extension of state policy in Myanmar, which like other countries in Southeast Asia and elsewhere promotes sport as a means of facilitating development and nation building.Footnote 36 The modernizing myths of hosting the SEA Games related to the ethos of planning, infrastructure, and orderliness. The modern sports stadium, through its size, engineering, and arrangement of human bodies, is an “archetype of modernity.”Footnote 37 For the Myanmar games, two sparkling new sports complexes were built in Naypyitaw: the Wunna Theikdi Sports Complex and the almost identical Zeyar Thiri Sports Complex, just forty minutes’ drive away. Designed by a Chinese firm and built by a Myanmar conglomerate, the complexes—incorporating 30,000-seat Olympic stadiums, multipurpose indoor stadiums, and architecturally striking aquatics centers—were clearly superior to facilities at the two preceding games, and probably most before those. In addition, a third Olympic stadium was constructed in Mandalay for women's football events. The massive cost of this infrastructure was justified in terms of the legacy that would result, notwithstanding the poor record of previous hosts realizing such predictions.Footnote 38
If these themes mirror global patterns among hosts of major sporting events, the symbolism of building new stadiums and other infrastructure was especially great in Myanmar's new national capital of Naypyitaw. The city is itself a paean to high-modernism, with designated “zones” for hotels, ministries, leisure, and so forth; vast boulevards spanning the enormous distances between these sites; little traffic; and few visible signs of life to upset the pervasive sense of order. Markets, housing developments, and other concentrations of humanity are largely removed from sight.Footnote 39 This landscape of order, presentation, and control could not contrast any more with the dynamism, disorder, traffic, and bustle of the rundown former capital of Yangon, which remains the main commercial center. On a practical level, it was this order—especially on the roads—that for organizers made Naypyitaw the logical choice as host city.Footnote 40
Even more important than practical concerns, the games represented a means of “completing” the city with grand sporting facilities—a must for any self-consciously modernizing nation—and inaugurating it with an influx of people and media to take these images further afield. These goals resulted in the reversal of the usual pattern at SEA Games: whereas people and culture, such as street vendors and tuk tuk drivers or cyclo-riders, are typically removed from public areas to present an image of order and cleanliness, here organizers aimed to introduce culture to an orderly but desolate landscape. This inauguration of the city symbolically crowned the move of the capital from Yangon to Naypyitaw, which itself could be “seen as marking the inception of [the] new political order.”Footnote 41 In this sense, as in many others, the SEA Games were tied to the themes of national restoration and regional reemergence.
National self-presentation also had cultural dimensions. According to U Yan Naing Oo, director-general of the Department of Fine Arts and principal choreographer of the opening and closing ceremonies, these ceremonies would “show our Myanmar culture” to the region.Footnote 42 This statement encapsulates the packaging and commodification of national cultures in the SEA Games and other sporting festivals, as exemplified by the highly choreographed cultural displays of the opening and closing ceremonies. Besides predictable displays of national culture, tradition, and ethnic diversity, a prominent motif of the Myanmar games was the national game of chinlone, a traditional rattan-ball game that was included as a cultural performance in the closing ceremony (see figure 1), as well as, controversially, in the sporting program. Such cultural expressions are easily criticized as essentialist, even invented, but they make sense to visitors from countries with similarly essentialist notions of “national culture.” Although such presentations are hardly limited to regional events like the SEA Games, such “showing” of national culture provides a means of presenting the national self to other countries in the region, and thus getting to know them.
Myanmar's national game, chinlone, performed during the closing ceremony. Photo by Simon Creak.
While there was naturally skepticism towards official claims, the official narratives of national restoration and regional reemergence resonated with many people I spoke with in Yangon and Naypyitaw. Most of these people tied the games to Myanmar's return to form, on the sporting field and more generally. Some framed restoration in comparative terms. “Kyaw,” the ecstatic fan quoted at the start of this essay, readily quantified Myanmar's developmental delay at “forty to sixty years behind Thailand”; symbolically, the games would help his country “catch up.” Kyaw and others also connected the games to chairing ASEAN in 2014. “Everything is changing now in Myanmar,” a taxi driver told me, as he pointed out the new flyover we were driving over. Another taxi driver suggested that the SEA Games showed that the new government, of which the military was just one part, now cared about “the people.” Others made the link between sport and national progress more literally, linking the games to Burma's glory years as a regional sporting power in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Enthusiastic older fans cited their youthful passion for sport at that time, thus connecting their life histories to the history of the nation. This was not the first time the population had linked sport to a narrative of restoration in recent years, but as the largest sporting event in the country's history, the SEA Games resonated especially strongly in this respect.Footnote 43
Anxiousness
As in the lead-up to previous games, this optimism was tempered by anxiousness over Myanmar's capacity to host and questions over the perceived benefits of the games. A major concern, not surprisingly, was with the high costs involved. MYASOC apparently had an “open cheque” to ensure that the games would run smoothly.Footnote 44 A year before the games, it was reported that approximately 340 billion kyat or US$400 million of games spending had been approved by parliament.Footnote 45 While these details were not publicized, the fact that the games, like the new capital and host city of Naypyitaw itself, required enormous resources was obvious. This raised the issue of national priorities, with many people complaining that the SEA Games would be good for the government and business but not for “the people,” whose needs were far more basic.
Myanmar's recently unshackled media probed the association between sport and cronyism. Well before the SEA Games, several owners of Myanmar's fast-expanding business conglomerates had emerged as sponsors of clubs in the professional Myanmar National Football League (MNL), established in 2009, apparently by order of then-ruler Senior General U Than Shwe.Footnote 46 Some cronies—as these businessmen are ubiquitously known—also headed the national federations of sports to be played at the SEA Games. U Zaw Zaw, head of the Max Myanmar Group of Companies and chairman of the Myanmar Football Federation, was contracted to build the three sporting complexes in Naypyitaw and Mandalay, which afterwards were to serve as home grounds for MNL teams.Footnote 47 Similarly, U Moe Myint, CEO of Myint & Associates and president of the Myanmar Yachting Federation, was charged with developing a sailing complex on disputed land at Ngwe Saung Beach, on the basis that he could afterwards develop a resort there.Footnote 48
The prominent role of Chinese assistance was also controversial. Chinese support, first discussed between President Hu Jintao and President U Thein Sein in 2011, was negotiated in the areas of equipment, technical assistance, the opening and closing ceremonies, and coaching and training (including twenty-eight Chinese coaches working in Myanmar and 176 athletes visiting China for training). Earlier, Chinese architects and engineers had designed the stadium complexes in Naypyitaw and Mandalay. While significant assistance came from other countries—notably Thailand and Japan—an activist interlocutor reported suspicions that a secret agreement had been drafted to allow the suspended Myitsone hydroelectric dam project, funded by a Chinese state-owned enterprise, to go ahead. True or not, such concerns spoke to broader antipathies, reminiscent of those in Laos four years earlier, over the influence of China in contemporary Myanmar.Footnote 49
Finally and most seriously, critics questioned Myanmar's readiness to host an event as large as the SEA Games. Not only did the country lack such basic requirements such as hotel accommodation, Internet facilities, ATMs, mobile phone networks, public transportation, and even reliable sources of power, the decision to make Naypyitaw the major host meant many facilities besides the stadiums—including dozens of new hotels—needed to be built from scratch. Many did not make the deadline, and those that did were rushed. For many Yangon residents I spoke with, hosting the games in the vast, unpeopled spaces of the new capital proved the triumph of politics over reason. The stadiums would be empty, foreign visitors would be bored, and Yangon's treasured Internet bandwidth would be given over to the host city. These criticisms built upon existing attitudes towards Naypyitaw—literally “royal abode” or “royal city of the sun”Footnote 50—as an elite extravagance. Moreover, having the games in Naypyitaw ironically hid the event from view—two weeks before the opening ceremony, “SEA Games awareness campaigns” were announced to counter the perceived lack of interest among young people.Footnote 51 Another interlocutor, an artist, argued that the country was “not ready” for such an expression of national unity given ongoing ethnic insurgencies, which also raised security concerns. Such views peaked in October, when a series of bomb blasts in Yangon killed two people and injured three others. In various ways, these concerns threatened the images of national unity and modernity that underpinned the main narrative of the games.
Outside Myanmar the main challenge to regional goodwill came from time-honored bickering over the selection of sports. Despite rules allowing host countries to select up to eight non-Olympic/Asian Games sports, rivals were especially irked at the inclusion of chinlone, which for technical reasons was included as a medal sport when new sports must normally be trialed as a demonstration sport.Footnote 52 This choice reopened old debates in the SEA Games movement over the purpose of the games: was it to lift standards for the Asian and Olympic Games, promote traditional sports from the region, or simply to win as many medals as possible?Footnote 53The Nation (Bangkok) urged Myanmar “to remember [the] Games is an ASEAN event,” while the Philippines even threatened to withdraw from the SEAGF.Footnote 54
Exultation
In the event, none of these concerns or controversies could prevent Myanmar's Southeast Asian Games from exploding in a great and, in recent times, unprecedented celebration of national conquest—for national leaders, organizers, and the general public alike. Although the established rhythm of the SEA Games and similar events predicted this result, it was not expected. As in Laos and Indonesia, this reversal occurred due to the vast and expensive preparations, on the one hand, and the seemingly spontaneous—if entirely predictable—outpouring of popular patriotism, on the other. Preparation and spontaneity, each insufficient on its own, combined to produce the symbolic transformations that give mega-events gravity and gravitas.
Even before the games started, the SEA Games transformed urban spaces in the host cities. In Yangon, a sprawling city with cluttered and rundown landscapes, enormous SEA Games billboards and plentiful flags and banners along main roads focused passersby on the event. At least for some people I spoke with, the colorful and commercial landscape provided a refreshing sign of change. A taxi driver cited above, who moments before had complained that government and business would be the only beneficiaries of the SEA Games, changed his tune as we drove around the large Hanthawaddy Roundabout, which had been decorated with manicured garden beds and SEA Games flags and surrounded by gigantic SEA Games billboards. “See, the SEA Games will show what we can do,” he said, suggesting the landscape made him feel a part of the national citizenry produced through this event.Footnote 55
The transformation—or completion—of the major host city of Naypyitaw was even more striking. Traveling to the city from Yangon, the first hints of these efforts were hundreds of workers repainting road markings and trimming grass along the Yangon-Mandalay Expressway. After the turn-off to Naypyitaw, the neatly trimmed median strips gave way to banks of SEA Games-themed billboards (see figure 2). The wide, empty roads on the way into the city were decorated with literally thousands of SEA Games banners hung from light poles, while the city's large roundabouts featured the SEA Games’ ubiquitous—and very popular—mascots, owls named Shwe Yoe and Ma Moe (see figure 3). During the games, fans would stop their cars and take photos with these owls, linking the landscape and citizens of the SEA Games. An even more important addition was people—the athletes, officials, journalists, spectators, and other visitors who peopled this strange environment as it had never been peopled before. While visiting journalists complained about the lack of civic life, locals had never seen the city so busy. Occasionally there was even minor traffic congestion, though not enough to slow the motorcades of shiny black Audis and Lexuses that swished VIP guests through the city.
Banks of SEA Games sponsors’ billboards lined the main roads leading into Naypyitaw. Photo by Simon Creak.
SEA Games mascots Shwe Yoe and Ma Moe. Photo by Simon Creak.
On the northwestern outskirts of the city stood the recently completed Wunna Theikdi sports complex, its vast main entrance bereft of people except for a few security guards to check VIP vehicles before entering. The majority of visitors entered from more distant gates. The structuring of space that at all games goes with the ordering of participants—VVIPs, VIPs, other officials, athletes, team officials, foreign spectators, local spectators, volunteers, etc., each with a pass denoting different levels of access—was especially pronounced in Naypyitaw. A long walk or short bus ride (once the transportation system started working properly) from the main Olympic stadium and surrounding venues stood the impressive three-venue indoor stadium and aquatic complex, at the northern end of the site. The vast empty space between venues, I was told, would later be a sports university campus.
If the newly completed urban environment of Naypyitaw was rather unusual for a host city, more familiar was the fever-pitched exuberance of the opening ceremony. While multisport events are naturally dispersed in character, the opening and closing ceremonies produce fleeting but symbolically profound moments of focus and unity. The evening began with a festive feel as thousands of splendidly costumed and heavily made-up schoolchildren milled around the outside of the stadium, laughing, flirting, and posing for pictures with one another as they passed the time (see figure 4), discarded sponsor samples strewn everywhere. Inside the stadium, order prevailed as spectators took their allocated seats. Myanmar pop stars excited the crowd with a concert of inspiring SEA Games anthems, strutting their stuff on a massive, blue, futuristic stage spanning the entire far side of the stadium. Enormous LED displays formed the backdrop, while large LED scoreboards streamed the television feed.
A group of performers poses prior to the opening ceremony. Photo by Simon Creak.
With the crowd enthralled, the ceremonial performances began. As the lights were dimmed and we were asked to stand, President U Thein Sein and his wife entered the stadium, illuminated by spotlights that focused attention and elicited applause. Then followed the scripted opening rituals of the games—raising the flags, the athletes’ march and assembly, announcing the games open, lighting the flame, reading the athletes’ oath, and so on. Key moments, such as Myanmar's entrance into the stadium, produced Geertzian “outbreaks of symbolic energy,” culminating in the lighting of the flame and extravagant fireworks, which the crowd clamored to capture on their cameras and phones (see figure 5).Footnote 56
More outbreaks of symbolic energy followed with ostentatious “cultural displays.” According to this well-established cultural form, these tributes to Myanmar history and culture featured thousands of richly costumed performers, elaborate sets and props, and an entrancing light and sound display. The gigantic LED screens of the main stage and “digital carpet” filled the stadium with brilliant national imagery, while a dramatic soundtrack reverberated through enormous speaker stacks. While the stories and the themes were familiar to the audience, the performance technologies were, like the event itself, exceptional in the sense that they represented a symbolic interruption to the normal order of things—“structure” in Victor Turner's terms.Footnote 57 Gasping in wonderment, spectators clamored to record the occasion—and their part in it—on their phones and cameras.
Thrilled spectators snap photos of the opening ceremony. Photo by Simon Creak.
Clearly the two most popular performances were the first and last, “The Heritage of Glorious Bagan” (Myanmar title: amyotha amwe-anhit mahapagan) and “Eternal Beauty of Our Union” (twe chin to ta-ne myamapyi), which respectively celebrated the history of Bagan as the “landmark” of Myanmar civilization and unity among “national races” (taingyinthar). I later learned from principal choreographer U Yan Naing Oo, a former soldier and now director-general of the Department of Fine Arts, that these two performances were his favorites, too, suggesting these national myths resonated equally with officials and the crowd, despite the country's ongoing ethnic conflicts.Footnote 58 This performance of unity—both on the stadium field and in the responses to it—betrayed the transformative potential of these performances, their ability not only to suspend social reality but also to produce an image of how society ought to be. Such performances, as Dayan and Katz write, constitute “previews, foretastes of the perhaps possible. . . . Activating latent aspirations, they offer a peek into utopia.”Footnote 59
Thrilled spectators at the stadium and at home agreed that Myanmar had not only surpassed expectations, but also bettered previous SEA Games opening ceremonies. On the SEA Games Facebook page, fans from other countries happily concurred. A few days later, the MOC's undemonstrative U Khin Maung Lwin smiled while boasting gently, “Everybody [meaning his SEAGF colleagues from around the region] just told me it [was] wonderful, the spectacle of the opening ceremony. They came to me and extended their congratulations—and said that ‘it's not the Southeast Asian Games’ level, it's Olympic level!’”Footnote 60 Such sentiments captured the competitive modernity—and ethos of conquest—that resides at the heart of the SEA Games.
With the scene set, the patriotic exuberance of the opening ceremony flowed into the athletic contests themselves. Despite Myanmar finishing second on the medals table behind the irrepressible Thailand, its athletes won an impressive eighty-six gold, sixty-two silver, and eighty-five bronze medals. Even for demanding officials, who had aimed for nothing less than topping the medal count, the slew of medals justified hosting the games.Footnote 61 At the venues, enthusiasm was maintained by the excitement of sports fans (see figure 6). The indoor stadiums thundered with raucous chants of “Myanmar, hey! Myanmar, hey!” as local fans got behind their athletes. This chant was not new, but it probably had never been chanted as much or as loudly as it was during the SEA Games. Rousing renditions of the national anthem—sung en masse with the awarding of each gold medal—punctuated the sporting events, and seemed to be played on an endless loop on evening roundups on state television.
The Myanmar crowd cheers at a boxing bout. Photo by Simon Creak.
Dressed in sponsors’ t-shirts and caps, large groups of schoolchildren, which the Ministry of Education brought to the games from Naypyitaw, Yangon, and elsewhere, were among the most vociferous spectators. If the mass importation of schoolchildren seemed somehow to be “cheating,” their presence and gusto highlighted the event's pedagogical effect in reinforcing messages of patriotism and regionalism. School sojourns to the SEA Games constituted national pedagogical pilgrimages, like those that students undertake to museums and other sites of national memory. The crowds also included actual pilgrims, whose tour operators included the SEA Games on existing itineraries of religious and national sites across central Myanmar. In addition, many Naypyitaw locals attended the games, including organized groups of civil servants and independent spectators. Entry was free except for the opening and closing ceremonies and men's football matches (although there were early problems issuing the audience cards required for security purposes). With the influx of people, traffic, and other activity associated with the SEA Games, Naypyitaw started to resemble a more normal city, albeit one in which SEA Games banners hung from every lamppost.
If the raucous patriotism of the games left little oxygen for regional themes, these were also present. Formally the opening ceremonies included rituals of regionalism that the SEA Games have borrowed and adapted from the Olympic Games. The athletes’ parade, assembly, and oath-giving ceremony expressed “cooperative unity, though a unity of ordered segmentation,” in which the region was arranged, en miniature, on the stadium field, while retaining the separate identities of constituent nations.Footnote 62 Likewise, essentialized images of the region's national cultures were brought to life in the cultural performances, which, like the Myanmar displays, represented national cultures through feminine images of traditional dress. More generally, lines of national flags provided the most ubiquitous images of the region. Indeed, the true icon of SEA Games regionalism is not so much the official flag—featuring a rosette of interlocking rings, each representing a participating nation—as the flags of the eleven competing nations. Dutifully arranged in alphabetical order with the host country at the center, these rows of flags encapsulated the central place of the nation in the SEA Games region, including the privileged place of the host nation. Besides the flags, participants and spectators were also marked as nationals by the tracksuits, uniforms, and national garb they wore, and the three-letter country codes (e.g., MYA for Myanmar) printed on the official passes of everyone present.
Through this saturation of signs, the SEA Games reinforced the basic ASEAN geography that has found a place in the school curricula of Myanmar and other ASEAN countries. Unlike some of the older spectators, who guessed the “sea” in “SEA Games” referred to the ocean, primary schoolchildren understood the basic geography of Southeast Asia and had no trouble reciting the names of the eleven competing nations. The same students threw their exuberant support behind Laos, Malaysia, and other teams when there was no Myanmar athlete to support, and relished in nonlinguistic repartee with supporters from other countries to overcome language barriers.
By contrast with spectators, the lives of athletes were highly regulated and most social interaction confined to the national team environment. For instance, the athletes’ village was comprised of “clusters,” housing just one country or sometimes two; at the restaurant at my hotel, athletes mostly stuck with their compatriots. Yet, in certain spaces such as the “social zone” of the athletes’ village, team lines were transgressed, especially by athletes speaking mutually intelligible languages (e.g., Thai and Lao, Indonesian and Malaysian) or athletes comfortable speaking English (e.g., from the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia). On other occasions, athletes surmounted language barriers with admirable creativity. In one case, a Lao athlete wanted slippers but was unable to ask the Myanmar liaison officer, so her Chinese-speaking teammate asked a Singaporean athlete in the same village cluster, who translated the request into English. Such fleeting interactions, characterized by repartee and laughter among competitors, reflected the mythical basis of the Olympic Games—unity among youth. More visible were the interactions between SEAGF and sporting federation officials, chatting quietly with regional colleagues in the comfortable and spacious VIP stands that were featured at every stadium.
Prepared Spontaneity
A vast amount of hard work and money had gone into ensuring the seemingly spontaneous success of the SEA Games. Most prominently, the Chinese government donated US$36 million for the opening and closing ceremonies, a contribution that sparked a wildfire of new debates on social media. While separate research is required to understand the full range of views expressed in those debates, this soft diplomacy appeared to have the intended effect of softening attitudes towards the Chinese, at least momentarily. In this sense, the spectacle and the prominent Chinese funding of it appeared to interrupt the normal flow of critical rhetoric towards the Chinese. This effect should not be overstated. Appearing to sense that it diminished Myanmar's accomplishment, both U Yan Ngain Oo, the choreographer, and U Khin Maung Lwin, the MOC official, played down the scale and importance of Chinese involvement. Likewise, official acknowledgment of Chinese support in the sports minister's closing ceremony speech was diluted with reference to Japanese and Thai support. This avoidance of the issue created considerable confusion over what help Chinese interests had provided.
In addition to the Chinese assistance, commercial arrangements were struck with broadcasting contractors accustomed to producing global sporting events, including the Olympics and international cricket. The U.S. production company Grass Valley partnered with MRTV, Myanmar's state television company, to produce the event for TV, hiring specialist cameramen and equipment from Singapore, Europe, and elsewhere.Footnote 63 With such expertise and equipment, there were good reasons why the polished Myanmar ceremony resembled global mega-events.
A less obvious but equally significant aspect of preparations was cooperation between different parts of the Myanmar state. Conducting a major multisport event requires input from across government, from transport and security to information technology and education. This coordination makes hosting large-scale events like these a considerable undertaking for any country, but particularly in those such as Myanmar where ministries and other agencies jealously guard their own turf. To surmount these issues, MYASOC was made up of an executive committee, headed by Vice President U Nyan Tun (chairman) and the sports minister, U Tint Hsan (secretary), and no fewer than fourteen subcommittees, the chairman and secretary of which were usually the relevant union minister and a senior bureaucrat from the most relevant ministry. In all, MYASOC included around a dozen ministers and deputy ministers, sharing the duties, spoils, and prestige that came with hosting.
The Limits of Unity
The success of the games in producing an image of unity did not equate with actual unity. For instance, the impressive opening ceremony did not end controversies over who was paying for and benefiting from the games. Notwithstanding the rapturous response to the ceremony, a poignant cartoon in Daily Eleven News depicted U Thein Sein as a king addressing a deferential minister. Hearing an echoing sound in the distance, “hey… hey… gwi… gwi… hey… gwi… hey… gwi…,” U Thein Sein asked his minister what it was. “Hey, hey is the hearty cheering sounds of Myanmar citizens condemned to abject poverty as we host the glorious SEA Games; [and … ] uh, gwi, gwi is the [grumbling] sound from their stomachs,” the minister giggled.Footnote 64Eleven’s Facebook page featured similar debates over the pros and cons of the games, which the opening ceremony had brought into relief.Footnote 65 Like the commentary that followed China's highly public involvement, public doubts about SEA Games expenditures suggest limited government control over the social issues brought into relief by the SEA Games. Further debates, particularly among ethnic minorities, concerned the unfair selection of majority Bama athletes rather than superior ethnic minority athletes. If true, of course, this only undermined efforts to top the medal table.
At the regional level, the irrepressible patriotism of the games raised the specter of disorder, challenging the regional objectives of the games and the civilizing ethos at their heart. Perhaps the best place to witness this disorder was on the SEA Games’ Facebook page, a fascinating virtual space where fans from competing countries came together to discuss the games in English, Myanmar, and other national vernaculars, particularly Indonesian and Thai. On one level, the result was a digital-age tribute to the founding vision of the games as a means of bringing together the peoples of Southeast Asia; a surprisingly large number of comments invoked the “ASEAN spirit.” On the other hand, many comments abused opposition teams, the referees, commenters’ own teams, and other commenters.
While such invective may be a reflection of the medium, a considerable number of comments were deeply offensive, even vilifying. Racist and misogynistic taunts were among insults aimed at the Indian referee who oversaw the Myanmar-Thailand women's football semifinal, which the host team lost 11-10 in an extraordinary penalty shootout. On other threads, comments as blunt and unimaginative as “fuck Thailand” or “fuck Indonesia” were ubiquitous. The games’ greatest image of disorder—followed by the greatest torrent of abuse on Facebook—came in a riot outside Yangon's Thuwanna stadium after the home team was eliminated from men's football. In these instances of invective and discord, the passions that sealed the success of the games threatened the orderliness of the event and the images of modernity and civility underlying it.
This dialectic also had precedents, of course. Four years earlier, after host team Laos unexpectedly made the football semifinals, the rush for tickets created dangerous scenes outside an ill-prepared suburban shop front as fans clamored for tickets. Of the sports events themselves, a middle-class friend of mine commented that the Lao games resembled a “village festival” (bun vat), meaning the event was disorderly and embarrassing. In Indonesia, disorder had more tragic consequences in the deaths of two fans at the football final. In each of these cases, the patriotic exuberance that delivered host organizers the success they craved simultaneously threatened the order they saw as a crucial element of this success, not to mention the underlying theme of regional bonhomie. Besides the private bun vat comment, these dramas received significant negative press coverage, for challenges to the modernist claims of the respective events were of more interest to international media than the event itself. Most significantly, however, the Myanmar games did not succumb to these dialectics of order and disorder, unity and jingoism. This was because the sports festival—and the regional public culture that it builds and is embedded within—provides a vessel for the containment of seemingly antagonistic images of national selves, national others, and the messy reality of regional relations as a whole.
Myanmar's SEA Games
Myanmar's SEA Games of 2013 were interpreted locally and in the region according to official and popular narratives of national restoration and regional reemergence. In 2009, after the new constitution of 2008 had been promulgated, the government took up the SEAGF's standing offer to host the games after a long hiatus of forty-four years. According to this narrative, organizers, officials, athletes, coaches, sponsors, and volunteers delivered a momentous and memorable SEA Games, which demonstrated the country's regaining of national respect and reintegration into the region. It would be facile to suggest this reading was incorrect; as an interpretation, it was simple and plausible, even compelling. However, viewing Myanmar's games in isolation overlooks important features of the SEA Games that transcend any single edition.
In particular, the drama of Myanmar's SEA Games was deepened by a rhythm of promise, anxiousness, and exultation that was fundamental to the ultimate impression of national conquest. This pattern, resulting in suspension of disbelief and suspenseful denouement, is an established feature of recent SEA Games, as the 2009 and 2011 games in Laos and Indonesia demonstrated. As in those games, the shift from anxiousness to exultation was brought about by specific technologies, practices, and emotions facilitated by extensive and expensive preparations that consumed much of the state for a period of years. Such investment not only reveals the competitive ASEAN modernity at the heart of the SEA Games, but operates in conjunction with norms of repetition, predictability, and reciprocity underpinning values of regional community. As in previous editions, the significance of the SEA Games in Myanmar was to provide a structure that not only accommodated nationalism and ideas of regional community, but substantialized these, warts and all, through grand participation and performance.
Acknowledgments
This article is part of an ongoing project on the history of the Southeast Asian Games, funded from 2011 to mid-2014 by Kyoto University's Hakubi Center of Advanced Research, and a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Kiban C no. 26503005). I am grateful to these institutions for their generous funding, to the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, my host institute at Kyoto University, and to Sai Aung Kyaw Lynn, Phyo Win Latt, and Thein Than Htay for their assistance and good humor. Maitri Aung-Thwin, Nick Cheesman, Nicholas Farrelly, Yoko Hayami, and three anonymous readers provided valuable suggestions to improve the article. Remaining errors are mine alone.
