Performing Water, Negotiating Identity: Cultural Politics of Loy Krathong in Thailand and Malaysia

This article examines how Loy Krathong in Thailand and Malaysia produces contrasting meanings of water ritual as a site for identity negotiation and cultural power. In Thailand, the festival has been institutionalised as a national soft-power spectacle and tourism brand, while in Malaysia it persists as a quieter community ritual among Siamese minorities, largely absent from formal heritage discourse. The study addresses how the same ritual form caneither reinforce dominant national narratives or sustain marginalised minority identities at the edges of the nation-state. The article aims to compare these trajectories to demonstrate how water ritual functions as a performative medium through which presence, history, and identity are negotiated within asymmetrical power relations. Methodologically, it adopts an interpretive qualitative approach combining critical document analysis with mini-ethnographic observations in selected sites in Thailand and Malaysia. Data are drawn from government and tourism reports, media texts, visual materials, and field observations of festival practices, including affective expressions, gestures, and everyday conversations. The analysis is guided by theoretical frameworks including liminality, cultural hegemony, hidden transcripts, and cultural identity to trace how meanings such as purification, pride, marginalisation, and belonging are constructed and contested. Findings indicate that in Thailand, the ritual is reframed as an “immortalised heritage” emphasising aesthetics, unity, and commodification. In contrast, in Malaysia it remains a community-led practice preserving spiritual depth and diasporic memory under conditions of symbolic invisibility. The article argues for a more critical, decentralised heritage framework that recognises less visible, community-based traditions beyond state-centred narratives.

Keywords: Loy Krathong, Malaysia, Thailand, Water, Culture, Asean