Ritual Governance, Cultural Negotiation, and Community Archives: Southern Chinese Lion Dance in Bangkok’s Teochew Institutional Ecology

Southern Chinese lion dance (nanshi) in Bangkok moves between temple ritual, community representation, school training, public festival display, and judged competition. This article foregrounds the diasporic and minority position of Teochew lion dance in Thailand. It examines codification as cultural negotiation, asking how a temple-linked Chinese ritual practice is made legible to Thai educational, civic, and sporting publics while remaining tied to community ritual authority and lineage memory. The study draws on public documentary traces from the 2000s–2020s and field-based evidence centred on Bangkok. Sources include temple and association commemorative publications, municipal school records, Thai cultural and competition reporting, heritage registers, transnational rule texts, interviews, observations, and community archival/display materials. The article first shows how huiguan, temples, and schools stabilize calendars, resources, and authority; second, how competition rules translate embodied repertoires into auditable norms of time, team composition, safety, difficulty, and scoring; and third, how trophies, certificates, lion heads, photographs, videos, and anniversary volumes turn evaluated performances into community archives of continuity, merit, and public legitimacy. The Bangkok case shows a diasporic minority practice being reshaped through the combined work of ritual governance, competitive codification, and community archiving within a Teochew-centred institutional ecology.