![]() ![]() Engaging with programs provided by the state rather than seeking autonomy from it, and developing morally ambivalent strategies to build connections with holders of diversified forms of power would be the main salient features of this new political society. According to Charles Keyes (2014: 182), Isan villagers have become “cosmopolitan peasants”, while for Andrew Walker (2012: 9), a new political society has emerged in contemporary rural Thailand, as part of a gradual process in which surplus extraction through taxation has given way to state’s subsidization. In comparison with the urban middle class, their relative poverty would be becoming much worse, because of uneven economic development and of low productivity in the rural economy.ĤThese specialists of Thai rural society also argue that the imbalance of the households’ economy in favor of off-farm activities-for many of them carried out in large urban centers-goes hand in hand with a greater openness of the peasantry to the global world and a higher degree of involvement in national policy. They would have become “middle-income peasants”, even though they confront a new form of economic disparity. In his book entitled Thailand’s Political Peasants, Andrew Walker contends that for a large part of them peasants would be no longer poor. ![]() On the basis of national statistics, these authors argue that subsistence cultivation has become a modest component of the rural households’ economy, and non-agricultural incomes are now more significant than farming for a great many rural households. ![]() According to them, Thai peasantry has experienced dramatic change during the last three decade and small farmers have in the 2010s a more diversified economy than in the 1980s. I then decided to conduct a new socioeconomic survey of Ban Amphawan and Ban Han in order to use them as a reality check of the past and present condition of the Thai peasantry, on the ground of a solid and unique corpus of data covering more than forty years.ģThe research was aimed to substantiate or to qualify some general assumptions by specialists of Thai rural society (Suphannachart & Warr 2011 Walker 2012 Keyes 2014). In 2013-2014 however, my involvement in a research program on Southeast Asian civil societies and the statement that northeastern peasants were increasingly asserting their rights to participate in the reshaping of national polity made me question the changes that the farmers of this region were experiencing in the early 21 st century. Ban Amphawan was a suburban village, while Ban Han was located in a remote area, then poorly linked to the district town of Phu Wieng and more than one hour’s drive from Khon Kaen.ĢAlthough I returned periodically to the villages for short visits in the 1990s and 2000s, my centers of interests were at that time rather directed towards the Thailand’s Chinese minority and issues on ethnicity. They also represented two levels of integration into the market economy due to their uneven distance and transport connection to Khon Kaen city. Second, they were sampling the two main types of farming systems to be met among Thai lowland rice-growers, namely irrigated versus rainfall agriculture. First, a previous socioeconomic survey of these villages had been carried out in 1969-1970 by Jacques Amyot, Friedrich Fuhs and the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute (CUSRI 1976), thus offering a precious basis for a diachronic comparison. The two communities, Ban Amphawan and Ban Han, were chosen taking into account two main considerations. 1Between 19 researchers from CeDRASEMI/CNRS and the University of Mahidol (Bangkok), including myself, had jointly carried out a detailed socioeconomic study of two rural villages of Khon Kaen, in the heart of the Northeast (Isan), the largest region of the kingdom which is also the main stronghold of the Thailand’s small peasantry (Formoso ed. ![]()
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