Dr. Marlane Guelden. Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Hawai’i.

Independent researcher. Email: marlaneguelden3@gmail.com

Nora “Soft Power”:

The Cultural Appropriation and Commodification
of Ancestral Beliefs in Southern Thailand

Dr. Marlane Guelden

I was at a local coffee shop in Songkhla, Thailand with a museum owner discussing an upcoming
display of an inherited spiritual tradition named Nora, when the owner asked me, “When did
Nora become all women?” “What?,” I asked incredulously. “Well all the dancers are women,” he
said. “But that’s only the dance, not Nora,” I protested. But his remark got me thinking and
digging. Soon I found out. It was true, most Thai people thought of the Nora ethnic group as only
a dance.

The problem is exemplified by the official finding of UNESCO, which recognized Nora as an
“intangible cultural heritage of humanity” in 2021. Its website first states, “Nora is a lively and
acrobatic form of dance theatre and improvisational singing from southern Thailand.” That
narrow understanding greatly diminishes the significance of this tradition to people who proudly
say, “I am Nora.” They proclaim, Nora is in their blood, in their DNA.

On reflection, as an anthropologist who had studied the eroding influence of government money
and power over this ethnic group for 17 years, I should have seen it coming.

Theory
This paper employs two theories that blend together and are often present in societies that
promote heritage tourism: cultural appropriation and commodification. Cultural appropriation
occurs when an element of a culture is adopted by another group (Brunk & Young, 2012). This
process is especially problematic when a dominant culture takes an element from a marginalized
culture, which is a characteristic of colonialism. Cultural appropriation is particularly harmful
when the element is taken without its original meaning or context and exploited for financial,
social or political gain.

Commodification occurs when something that everyone in the ethnic group feels they own, like
art or knowledge, is made into a product that is bought and sold. A feature, such as a cuisine or
costume, is objectified, made into an object that can be traded in the marketplace. People then
purchase or “consume” these packaged cultural products, often as part of tourist merchandizing
(Cole, 2007).

Under the forces of nation building and capitalism, the Nora rituals and religious beliefs over
time have experienced cultural appropriation and commodification. Today these forces are
coming together through a politicized marketing tool labeled “soft power,” which seeks to attract
foreign tourists. Modeled after the successful Korean Wave, the Thai Ministry of Culture is
promoting festivals, food, fashion, film and other cultural aspects to create a good international

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image and boost the economy through tourism (Kavi Chongkittavorn, 2023). One newspaper
columnist satirized it as “a soft sales job.” This monetizing of heritage has led to sanitizing some
spiritual aspects of the Nora tradition in order to popularize it, without respect for its
foundational ancestor-based religious practices.

I argue in this paper that the manipulation and separation out of significant integral elements of
Nora culture threaten to devalue the Nora identity in this already marginalized community. As
such, this undermines the possibility of preserving and protecting this unique cultural and
ancestral tradition as well as its practitioners. Paradoxically, recent attempts to popularize this
tradition by focusing on a few colorful elements -- dance and costume -- may have the effect
over time of rendering the tradition devoid of any meaning whatsoever.

Background
Nora is an ethnic group tied together by kinship, belief, ritual and tradition dating from at least
the 13th century CE and possibly from the 7th century CE in southern Thailand. About 6,000
people in 14 provinces have Nora identity, and they have produced about 300 dancing and
singing troupes. They were originally poor farmers, who did rituals during slow agricultural
periods and walked throughout the South and into Malaysia carrying simple musical instruments
to perform in villages and temples. This kinship group has other identities; they are largely
ethnically Thai and Theravada Buddhists.

According to several Thai academics, traders and Brahmin priests from southern India or Sri
Lanka brought the Nora beliefs to the Indonesian archipelago (Chaiwut and Pittaya, 1983). It
then traveled to the Malay peninsula and southern Thailand in the 7th to 13th centuries CE under
the Srivijaya Empire. Its first location was in Sathingphra in present day Songkhla Province on
the east side Songkhla Lake, and later, residents moved to Khao Chaison District in present day
Phatthalung Province on the west side of the lake. This spiritual tradition exists only in southern
Thailand and northern Malaysia with most Nora people living near Songkhla Lake in Nakhon Si
Thammarat, Phatthalung, Songkhla and Trang provinces.

Nora religion is a hybrid of Hindu-Brahmanism, animism and Theravada Buddhism with the
latter becoming significantly more pervasive over time reflecting Thailand’s main religion.

Nora Divides into Ritual and Performance

The Nora belief system has survived against all odds because it connects the living with the
dead, who play a vital role in guiding their offspring. Possession is an essential and sacred
element of the ceremony as ancestors must take over a descendant’s body to receive offerings,
dance and speak. The ancestors dance, cry, express anger and give advice – all in an effort to
keep families united and on the right path. Nora is all about community, gathering families
together from around the country, even the world, once a year to respect their common
forbearers. While ancestors can give great rewards, they can also severely punish, even causing
death, according to numerous Nora people interviewed.

Over the decades, Nora split into two very distinctive genres: ancient Nora (nora booraan) for
rituals and possession and modern Nora (nora than samai) or business Nora for paid public
entertainment. Some academics speculate that the dance first began to detach from its spiritual

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base when Nora troupes performed for royalty and government officials in the South and
Bangkok in the 18th and 19th centuries CE. Others suggest the split came with development of a
capitalist economy after World War II (Pittaya, 2003).

The dance nearly died out in the 1950s and again in the 1980s due to changes in agricultural
society caused by industrialization and to competition from modern forms of entertainment, like
music concerts. Nora Teum of Trang is widely credited with saving the performance in the 1950s
by donning a Western suit, adding popular country singing, called Luuk Thung, and putting on
short contemporary dramas (Varaporn, 2006). Pursuing the same path in the 1990s, another
modern Nora performer, Ekachai Srivichai, offered a popular lounge act featuring country
singing and slapstick comedy with raunchy jokes and a smattering of Nora dancing on the side
(Benjawan, 1999). Both transformed the ritual dance into commercial theater and saved the
livelihoods of many struggling Nora performers.

After declining again at the beginning of this century, the performance had another comeback
due to royal and government financial support, universities establishing courses on it, Nora
women teaching dancing in public and private schools and a Thai heritage movement that
fostered nostalgia for the past.

Especially after the UNESCO listing recognized the cultural significance of Nora in December
2021, the dance and costume made a big splash in social media but was divorced from any
religious meaning. In a related event, a Nora master in Songkhla was given a life-time honor of
being named a Thai National Artist in April 2022. He subsequently traveled to Venice to perform
and danced on a gondola for curious Westerners. Afterward, a special seminar on his Venice trip
was held in Songkhla, and the organizers repeatedly praised Nora as “soft power” and expressed
excitement about selling many aspects of Thai culture.

Today Nora groups – sometimes as many as 100 costumed children and teens -- are hired to
dance at sports events and store openings, to greet politicians at the Hat Yai airport and to
entertain Malaysian tourists at the southern border. Nora beads are made into handbags and lamp
shades by creative young entrepreneurs while the nails, crown and tail are combined with other
costumes for trendy fashion shows in Bangkok.

The Government Acquires the Birthplace of Nora

From the US, I traveled to Pattani in 2000 to study southern spirit mediums and their relevance
in modern Thai society for a doctoral degree in anthropology. A university student told me her
family was in the Nora kinship group and asked if I had ever heard of Nora spirit mediums. I had
not. A year later, I attend the annual Nora Teachers Hall Ceremony (nora rong khruu) at Wat
Thakhae in Phatthalung Province because locals claimed it was the “birthplace of Nora.” Khun
Si Sattha, the Phatthalung prince who is acknowledged as the founder of Nora, reputedly was
buried by a Bodhi tree in this small Buddhist temple. So the ceremony is held there yearly,
although the abbot and monks do not take part since Nora has entertaining aspects and is not
directly related to Buddhism.

The Teachers Hall Ceremony at Wat Thakhae went through three transitions. First, Nora Plaek
Chanaban, a locally respected traditional Great Nora, managed it beginning about 1970 until his

3
death in 2001. Next, a committee comprised of locals and low-level bureaucrats took over under
Nora Somphong Chanaban, a highly successful “business Nora” man, who owned a large troupe
of dancers, which performed at major southern festivals. Previously, the ceremony was a semi-
private community event supported through nominal donations and raw rice. Under Nora
Somphong, the ceremony started receiving public funds and thus became involved with the
government both formally and informally. The change in funding meant that the government had
the power to order specific Nora rituals that related to the national agenda.

Finally in 2011, power shifted to the provincial and national governments and their politicians
when the Ministry of Culture allocated a whopping 4 million baht to this ceremony to fast track
development of Nora for tourism purposes. An officer from the Thailand Tourism and Sports
Department said that the government would consider its money as an investment, “The
government thinks about how much money it can get from this ceremony…” Growth was on the
agenda. An official from the subdistrict office told me that the event must get bigger, “We have
to find a way to enlarge the ceremony. We will develop more and more.” (Interview quotations
are from my two books, Guelden, 2018 and Guelden, 2018, Vol. 2.)

Eating up the lion’s share of the new funding, an enormous modern “entertainment” stage was
erected at the front of the temple for political speechmaking and trendy shows, geared to attract
disaffected youth. That big stage dwarfed the small bamboo “ceremonial” Nora hall at the back
of the temple, and it drew people away from the rituals to see the fireworks and mega-shows.
Looking back on the changes in 2017, one Nora descendant lamented, “Now the Nora hall is
occupied by the Ministry of Culture. It is not ours anymore.” With intense publicity and
outreach, the ceremony grew from 300 to 4,000 people.

The Government’s Vision

The modern stage exemplified the cultural appropriation of Nora. It was literally used as a bully
pulpit for officials, like from the Phatthalung Provincial Cultural Office and governor’s office, to
describe their vision for the Nora community through long speeches broadcast on loudspeakers.
The officials’ vision had three main features: first, the Nora ceremony would become a major
tourist attraction that would bring income to the whole province. One representative from the
Provincial Cultural Office said that it would become “…famous now around the country and
overseas, so it can be guaranteed that many foreigners come to join in the ceremony every year.”
Nora would grow as big as the popular Phuket Vegetarian Festival and get listed on the Tourism
Authority of Thailand calendar, predicted a former Minister of Culture in a speech.

Second, Nora would become a “cultural product of the community” that could be bought and
sold, according to a Phatthalung district officer. Nora images would be put on rice, keychains
and dolls and increase their value. The mysterious, supernatural aspects of Nora would make it
even more marketable, according to one government officer. Making the point that Nora
souvenirs could become popular local products, the government set up booths in the temple
grounds selling OTOP (One Tambon One Product) crafts one year, as part of a program to
promote village entrepreneurs. But this idea of using Nora figures to sell goods was appalling to
some Nora descendants. One grandson of Nora Plaek said he worried that his grandfather’s
picture would be put on a package of dessert and used in a “bad way.” Such commodification

4
directly challenges the historically sustaining life blood of Nora, which is connecting the living
with their dead ancestors.

Third, the local would become global, that is, this indigenous tradition was envisioned to be
bigger than the Thakhae area, bigger than Phatthalung Province. It might well be transported
anywhere for commercial purposes. Nora could be used to promote the Southeast Asian region
as a tourist destination through the ASEAN economic trade zone, according to ceremony
literature. At the time, the province was working to get Nora registered as a UNESCO world
heritage product, demonstrating its significance for the whole country and the world. And if
Phatthalung did not act fast to claim that Nora was born there, a neighboring province would
steal the glory, warned the former Minister of Culture.

The Good and The Bad

Cultural appropriation and commodification have been described by academics as having either a
positive or negative impact on local cultures, although there is probably a mixture of both. On
the positive side, it can preserve traditions and prevent them from disappearing. Communities
can feel proud of being recognized as having a valued identity by the dominant society. The new
generation can creatively use traditions to make a living because their products and performances
are in demand.

But negatively, commodification can harm identity and debase an ethnic culture. It can make
cultures less authentic and more like the dominant culture, causing people to fear losing their
traditional values (Cole, 2007). When the local becomes global, it can degrade the original
culture when it is marketed to the world. According to one literature review of research on this
topic, the results tend to be negative, “In literature, however, the dominant opinion is that
commodification reduces the authenticity of cultures…” (Burcin Kirlar Can, et al, 2017).

Now for some good points. Pittaya Busararat, former director of the Institute for Southern Thai
Studies in Songkhla, wrote a definitive master’s thesis on the Nora ceremony at Wat Thakhae in
1992. When I interviewed him in 2014, he said that the new found fame was a good thing. First,
he argued that culture has to change to be relevant to society. Second, the large number of
attendees at Wat Thakhae made it inevitable that the government would get involved. Politicians
would do so to get votes. And finally, the new public attention kept the Nora community from
being marginalized and made it feel proud. He said, “(Nora people) will know that what they are
doing now is worthwhile for society, for the country, and for the world that has this
communication [art] because here is the source of local wisdom and culture that is important and
unique.”

The positive perspective, which mostly argues that Nora would die without government help, is
the dominant one presented by government sources and the media. And undoubtedly, some of
Pittaya’s points are valid considering the complex effects of this government intervention over
time. But my longitudinal study, which focused on interviewing Nora people, found mostly the
opposite, that this community had been harmed by government involvement and was struggling
to maintain its unique identity in the face of strong outside economic and political pressure.

Nora Voices

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Here is what Nora people at Wat Thakhae told me that brought me to apply the theories of
cultural appropriation and commodification.

Nora people had three big concerns. First, Nora had become a business. The committee and
government officials who took over the Teachers Hall Ceremony beginning in 2001 were
constantly asking people for money over loudspeakers. They also sold religious things like
offerings, pictures and amulets. And for a fee, they offered rituals to pay off vows by having
people dance in Nora and hunter costumes. Prior to this, people freely gave small donations, like
a few coins or raw rice, based on what they could afford. One Nora woman said, “But now, they
charge for many things, such as doing the ceremony and selling things, so it seems like a
business. It is not like before.” Another woman said forcefully, “Do you understand? It is like a
business. Everything is money.”

Second, the Nora rituals degenerated. With large crowds wanting to pay off vows, the rituals
turned into a factory assembly line with people in costumes organized into lines of 10, waiting to
dance for just one to two minutes. Descendants worried that their ancestors had not received their
dance offerings under this rapid mechanical system. One man said, “You do not even know
whether the vow fulfilling you did will work or not?” This was a serious matter since ancestors
were notorious for being vengeful if descendants did not hold up their end of a spiritual contract
by giving what was promised.

Third, the overall sacredness of the ceremony declined, according to Nora descendants. Before it
felt traditional, holy and ancient, but now it no longer seemed authentic. The government’s focus
was on attracting tourists and young people and growing larger, which contrasted with the
community’s desire to simply communicate and respect ancestors. Nora Plaek’s grandson from
Malaysia said, “I won’t go to Wat Thakhae. If you want to know the truth, at Wat Thakhae they
don’t do the real ceremony, unlike Nora Plaek did in the past. I have been possessed, so I
know…Nora Plaek did it by merit and faith (bun sattha). They do it for benefits. I tell the truth.”

Spirit Possession Downplayed in Tourist Festivals

Nora’s origin legend tells the story of a Phatthalung princess who probably was a spirit medium.
She saw the Nora dance positions and musical instruments in a god inspired dream and then
danced them obsessively angering her father the king. Later she was miraculously impregnated
by the Hindu god Shiva and gave birth to the god’s reincarnation, Khun Si Sattha, honored as the
Nora founder. But now, the role of spirit mediums has been removed from some Nora
ceremonies as unsuitable for tourism campaigns and national consumption.

Nora is not the first southern ethnic group based on spirit possession that has been altered by
government re-branding. The Phuket Vegetarian Festival is an ethnic Chinese Taoist celebration
that features spirit mediums who undergo extreme self-piercings. In other Southeast Asian
countries like Malaysia, it is called the Nine Emperor Gods Festival. Instead, the Tourist
Authority of Thailand has decided to sidestep the violent aspects and market it as a food festival.
According to sociologist Erik Cohen, “Possession festivals in Thailand feature bizarre,
outlandish and often frenzied conduct by entranced individuals; this whets tourists’ appetite for
the ‘exotic’ or ‘wild,’ but creates a problem for the official promotion of such festivals, since it

6
impairs upon the image of Thailand as a ‘civilized’ modern country, aspired by the authorities”
(Cohen, 2009).

Similarly, Songkhla City had an annual festival to honor the animist Red Mountain grandfather
spirit residing in a mountain where Songkhla Lake empties into the Gulf of Thailand. Still today,
fishing boats set off firecrackers to ask for protection from this spirit when they pass it going out
to sea. When I lived to Songkhla in 2002, I read an advertisement from Songkhla City in which
the event was called a celebration of the Lord Great Grandfather of the Red Mountain (jao phaw
puu thuat hua khao daeng). At this ethnic Chinese ceremony, I photographed spirit mediums
possessed by the Red Mountain spirit, Green Mountain spirit and Tiger spirit and watched them
heal people. But by 2005, the event’s name had been changed to the Seafood Fair and Red
Mountain Great Grandfather. By 2018, the Tourist Authority of Thailand and Songkhla City had
dropped the reference to this spirit altogether and were promoting, “Thai gastronomy and food
tourism” (“Songkhla Seafood”, 2018).

For Nora, spirit possession was also deemphasized, but in this case, it is replaced by dance,
rather than food.

The Government Violates Beliefs Pursuing its Own Agenda

While government officials and Nora leaders worked together to pull off a larger, more
complicated ceremony every year at Wat Thakhae, their different goals regularly clashed as
officials focused on money to develop the ceremony and attract more people. Although officials
promised not to intrude on sensitive religious beliefs, they did so regularly. Here are several key
instances where government actions to promote Nora were in conflict with spiritual traditions.

First, the ceremony committee built a permanent Nora Hall (rong nora) with a metal frame in
2006 to save money on annually constructing a bamboo-and-thatch hall. But the metal hall
violated all sorts of traditional rules and customs about the construction of the hall, which must
be made from natural materials tied together with vines and torn down after each ceremony,
partly to get rid of ghosts. In angry protest, a possessed spirit medium climbed on the metal hall,
tore at the roof and yelled at the Great Nora master for the violation, shocking the audience and
angering the committee. Four years later after another committee “improvement,” a woman died
in the hall, considered by many Nora people to be punishment from the ancestors. One medium
said, “There are many obstacles [in the ceremony] because they are not doing it correctly. Don’t
use the modern way. Did you see the improvements in raising up the hall? And then someone
died. This is the first year that they used soil to raise it up. You saw that a normal human wanted
to possess, so why did she become a corpse?”

That mistake was made all over again in 2011, but this time the error was more financially costly
and publicly divisive. A big chunk of the Ministry of Culture budget was spent on building a
large wooden building on a concrete foundation that would help the growing audience see the
rituals better. Among other problems, the floor had no patch of ground for the Earth Goddess,
Mae Torranee, to reside in. The ground was needed so that Nora people could place down mats
and dance on her back as dictated by a Nora poem.

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When a new young Nora master, Nora Bern (Kriangdej Khamnarong), took over in 2015, he got
in an epic fight with the committee shortly before the ceremony and demanded that a traditional
bamboo hall be built -- or else. Against the odds, he won and was lauded for returning to the
ancient traditions of Nora Plaek and rejecting the government’s modern development style. He
also did another unusual thing. He held hours and hours of ritual prayers to ancestors in a packed
hall late into the night, long after all the government officials and tourists had gone home. It was
what the Nora community needed.

In a second incident, a life-size model of a crocodile was altered to make money. In the final
Nora ritual, a group of Great Noras sing poetry, brandish spears and rush out to kill this crocodile
in what is considered a dangerous act. Before this, a ritual had been held to give life to the
crocodile so when it is stabbed, it is believe that a real crocodile dies at sea. However, the
ceremony committee in 2011 saw an opportunity to turn it into a cash cow. The committee put a
sign in front of the model telling the public that giving money to the crocodile would “Get rid of
bad things (sadaw khraw), remove suffering.” By 2016, nearly 50,000 baht was donated in small
bills placed in its mouth. Calling it a hoax and violation of Nora beliefs, the son of Nora Plaek
said, “They told a lie. They want money!”

Third, the governor of Phatthalung Province underwent an imitation initiation to be crowned

(phithii khrawp seut) as a Great Nora at the Teachers Hall Ceremony in 2014. Although a golden
headdress was lowered onto his head in the Nora hall, everyone acknowledged that this was not a
real initiation but a political move to closely tie the governor and his funding to the ceremony.
But his stated good intention to show respect to the Nora tradition backfired badly as Nora
people complained that he broke all the sacred rules. For instance, the governor was from the
Northeast and not in the Nora lineage. Wearing a purple batik shirt rather than a Nora costume,
he performed the ceremony on the wrong day and did not dance in three temples and three
villages afterward as required. The Nora initiation is a once-in-a-lifetime rite of passage for men
modeled after a Buddhist monk’s ordination. It gives the initiate the right to perform the highest
rituals and be called a Great Nora (nora yai). The governor’s fake initiation revealed a deep lack
of understanding and respect for the Nora tradition.

But the most compelling example of these violations has to do with the swan-women. The swan
ritual was appropriated, taken out of its context and meaning, and then commodified into a
product, namely a video that could be aired by government tourist organizations.

The Rebellious Swans: Taming Wild Women

The annual ceremony at Wat Thakhae ends with two much anticipated short action plays, the
ritual to lasso the swans (phithii khlawng hong) and the ritual to stab the crocodile (phithii thaeng
khe). The swan story comes from the Phra Suthon-Nang Manora Legend when a hunter catches a
mythical swan-woman (ginnarii) named Manora while she is swimming in a pond with her six
sisters. This is more than a play. According to Nora expert Udom Nuthong, the legend is so well
integrated into the Nora belief system that Great Noras pray to these seven swan-women as
ancestors during the invocation at Nora Teachers Hall Ceremonies (Udom, 1999).

Typically five women, usually in their 20s, and two men played swans at Wat Thakhae. Many of
the women were relatives of Nora Plaek and had performed this dance-ritual since childhood.

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This tight-knit group became increasingly aggressive in resisting the hunters from 2001 to 2011.
Some swans jumped on the hunter’s back and even punched him as if fighting for their lives.
Afterward, they would pass out briefly when the spirits left their bodies. Interviewed after the
play, several of the women said they were possessed by the swan-women, who thought they
were being physically assaulted.

Some officials considered their antics improper for what had become a major tourist festival
representing Phatthalung Province. In an interview, Nora Bern said an official from the
Phatthalung College of Dramatic Arts had criticized the swans for excessive fighting, arguing
that because they were possessed and unconscious, they did not dance well and did not control
the “swan’s art.” The official complained that the dance-ritual had become a kind of sacred
magic rather than art, and consequently the artistic side of Nora was disappearing.

Apparently partly based on this critique, Nora Somphong, who ran the ceremony, decided to
replace the swan-women in 2012 to improve the appearance of the performance, according to
Nora Bern. Nora Somphong brought in well-known, outside paid professional Nora dancers.
They were mostly older men from other areas who could control their minds and refuse
possession. According to one man involved in the play, the impetus to make the change was a
video of the ritual made for the new funding source, the Ministry of Culture, in which the swans
looked possessed and did not dance beautifully. “Normally swan-women have their own
ancestors. When we did the ‘lassoing the swans’ ritual, the ancestors possessed them, which
disturbed our ritual, so doing the ritual would be difficult,” he said.

Expelling the swan-women shocked many in the Nora Chanaban lineage and caused deep
resentment among relatives. The swans argued that the play was not entertainment but actually a
ritual requiring females — not males, since the seven sisters in the tale were female. They also
had to be from a certain Nora lineage and be possessed by Nora ancestral spirits. Possession by
its nature is chaotic; it is not meant to be a beautiful dance, they said. Out of resistance, the
swans started calling themselves the old swans or Former Swans.

Every year before the swan ritual, Great Noras sang poems in the hall about the hunter catching
the swans at the pond. Upon hearing this poem in 2012, spirits possessed the Former Swans who
tried to run into the roped-off performance area but were physically restrained by relatives. Then
the spirits screamed out in agony because they were excluded, according to a descendant. This
violent protest — largely unnoticed by the audience — occurred every year. But the swans were
not invited back.

These incidents at the Wat Thakhae ceremony illustrate the difficulty of protecting cultural
traditions while pursuing commercial purposes. When the interests of this already marginalized
community are not protected, the validity and meaning of the Nora practices are called into
question, jeopardizing the shared goal of expanded cultural understanding.

Conclusion
This paper argues that, for economic and political benefit, the dominant culture has packaged an
exotic piece of Nora tradition without acknowledging its religious meaning or historical context.
The Nora ancestral lineage, as a minority ethnic community in southern Thailand, is founded on

9
beliefs in a visceral connection between descendants and deceased ancestors, who provide
guidance, protection and benefits but also can punish. The Nora dance originated from ancestors
possessing their offspring and dancing through their bodies. But over time, that ritual dance was
separated out and transformed into a kind of theater and entertainment. Today, through the
processes of cultural appropriation and commodification, the colorful costumed dance is being
marketed as a cultural product to attract tourists, open shopping centers and greet politicians. As
a result, the preservation and protection of the Nora culture is threatened, and the identity of this
ancestor-based community is being undermined.

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