Dancing Ambiguity: Nora and the Politics of Cultural Nationalisation in Southern Thailand

ABSTRACT This paper examines Nora, a traditional dance‐drama from southern Thailand, through its designation as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (2021) and the Thai government's recognition of its performers as National Artists (2018, 2021). It situates these actions within Thailand's cultural nationalisation. Drawing on ethnographic research among Nora performers, I argue that these recognitions reproduce and legitimise a hierarchy that privileges national arts over local ones, revealing ambiguity —at once a mechanism of governance and political strategy—as central to relations between state institutions and local artists. This ambiguity is evident in how the Thai state remains vague about Nora's origins and unresponsive to criticism over the selection process. It leaves performers little choice but to participate in evaluative systems whose criteria they cannot fully contest, enabling the state to retain interpretive authority while allowing peripheral performers to foreground their Buddhist–Muslim identity, secure recognition and revisit traumatic memories in the Deep South.