ABSTRACT
Chilone’s transformation from a cane-ball street game to the national sport of Myanmar was a process that parallels the histories of other leisure activities, rituals and pastimes found across Asia. Within the context of Southeast Asia’s encounter with European colonialism, the local reinterpretation of cultural forms through new aesthetic and functional models was part of a broader story of colonial modernity and its dissemination in the region. Treating “sport” as a category of modernity and empire, this study examines how the identification and reconfiguring of chinlone by students, social activists, nationalists and nation-builders into a sport in the twentieth century reveals both an attempt to embrace and transcend the civilisational standards introduced by the British Empire in Burma.
