ABSTRACT
The promulgation of the 2003 United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was heralded as marking a historical turning point in terms of how cultural heritage is defined and managed. The widespread adoption and implementation of UNESCO's heritage instruments has spawned a multitude of academic critiques of these conventions as Eurocentric tools of standardization and rationalization. International heritage conventions are never adopted by member states purely out of principle. Rather, as M. Askew and R. Bendix et al. have argued, international heritage instruments are always translated and deployed by state agencies within the frame of an existing heritage regime. Thailand's official heritage regime was re-consolidated with the formation of the Ministry of Culture in 2002, which included the Fine Arts Department, the National Culture Commission and several smaller cultural organizations and agencies.
