‘Cosmopolitan’ villagers and populist democracy in Thailand

Keyes, Charles F. 2012. “’Cosmopolitan’ Villagers and Populist Democracy in Thailand,” in special issue of South East Asia Research, ed. by Eli Elinoff, South East Asia Research, 20.3: 343–360.

South East Asia Research, 20, 3, pp 343–360 doi: 10.5367/sear.2012.0109

‘Cosmopolitan’ villagers and populistdemocracy in Thailand

Charles Keyes1

Abstract: It is the contention of this paper that, because North Eastern villag-ers or their urban-dwelling close relatives from North East Thailand havebecome workers in a global system of labour, they have come to understandtheir place within Thailand as what the author terms ‘cosmopolitan villagers’rather than as traditional rice farmers. Even as this transformation has takenplace, representations of ‘rural’ North East Thailand that urban Thai encoun-ter in TV programmes, films, fiction and the media have remained predicatedon the assumptions that ‘villagers’ still live lives that are primarily agrarianand that they have inadequate or misguided understandings of the larger world.It is this disjunction between the ‘rural’ that cosmopolitan North Easternersactually identify with and the ‘rural’ that Thai urban middle-class people im-agine to exist that helps explain why consensus on Thai politics broke down.The actual villagers constitute the base of support for populist movements thatin contemporary Thailand have mobilized to make their voices heard not onlythrough demonstrations, but also more significantly through electoral politics.

Keywords: cosmopolitan villagers; populist democracy; Thai politics; NorthEastern Thai

Author details: Charles Keyes is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Interna-tional Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, USA. E-mail:[email protected].

On 12 March 2010, tens of thousands of people wearing red shirts began stream-ing into Bangkok primarily from North Eastern Thailand, but also from northernThailand. They came to demand that the Thai government headed by Prime Min-ister Abhisit Vejjajiva and his Democrat Party should dissolve parliament and seta date for a new election. A few days later, on 19 March, another event took placea long way from Bangkok in an agricultural area in southern Israel. There, a workerrecruited from Thailand was killed by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip. Although

1 This paper was first presented at a conference on ‘Revisiting Agrarian Transformations in South-east Asia’, Chiang Mai, Thailand, in May 2010. Other versions were presented at CopenhagenUniversity and Thammasat University. I am grateful for the feedback that followed these earlierpresentations and want particularly to thank Jane Keyes for her reflections and editorial assist-ance on several drafts of this paper, and Bill Klausner, not only for his comments on the paper,but also for our long-term discussions about rural North Eastern Thailand that began when, as agraduate student, I first read reports of his pioneering fieldwork in the mid-1950s in a village inUbon (see Klausner, 1956, 1972, 2000). I am, nonetheless, responsible for all interpretationspresented in this paper. A Thai version of the paper presented at Thammasat has been publishedas ‘Cak “chaoban” su “chaoban phurusüklokkwang”: Khwãmplianplãeng không “chonabot” Isan’,Fa diaokan [Same Sky], Bangkok, 2010. The theme of this paper is elaborated on in a forthcom-ing book, tentatively entitled From Peasant to Cosmopolitan Villagers: The Roots of NortheasternThai Populism, to be published by Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai.

344 South East Asia Research

this story was given only limited attention in the Thai press, The Nation, a ThaiEnglish-language paper, reported that the Thai who had died was one of 30,000Thai working in Israel.2 Although these two events – demonstrations on the streetsof Bangkok and the death of a Thai migrant worker in Israel – may seem totallyunconnected, they are on the contrary, I will argue in this paper, inextricably con-nected.

The Thai workers in Israel as well as the hundreds of thousands who have workedin other countries outside Thailand, like the protestors in Bangkok, are overwhelm-ingly from North Eastern Thailand. That literally millions of people born in ruralcommunities in North Eastern Thailand in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries joined the global labour force working not only in Bangkok, but inthe Gulf States, Libya, Israel, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and even in Europe andNorth America, makes such people very different from the images that many,perhaps most, middle-class Bangkokians hold of them. It is my contention thatbecause North Eastern villagers or their urban-dwelling close relatives from NorthEastern Thailand have become workers in a global system of labour, they havecome to understand their place within Thailand as what I term cosmopolitan vil-lagers rather than as traditional rice farmers.3

The ‘misrecognition’ in 2010 of who the ‘villagers’ that constituted the major-ity of the Red Shirt protestors were, had tragic consequences.4 On 19 May 2010,beginning at about 4 am, Thai military forces began to position themselves aroundthe Ratchaprasong/Lumpini/Silom area of central Bangkok where the Red Shirtshad been rallying since 3 April, having moved there from the governmental centreof the city where the protests had begun. As the troops tightened the noose, theleaders of the protestors – who now numbered about 3,000 – decided to surrenderin order to limit the loss of lives they realized would happen. Many of the womenand children at the protest site had taken refuge in nearby Wat Pathumwanaram, aBuddhist temple-monastery long linked through its resident monks to North East-ern Thailand. Six people, including a nurse, were shot at the wat. With these deaths,the total number of those killed in the conflict between 10 April and 19 May wasofficially pegged at 91. Of these, 11 were soldiers and the others were civilians.5

The total number injured was at least 1,800, by far the majority of them civilians,and most associated with the Red Shirts.

After the military moved to end the protest rally, a number of hard-core follow-ers of the Red Shirts, some clearly following advance planning, set fire to several

2 ‘Thai killed in Palestinian rocket attack’, The Nation, 19 March 2010, website: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/home/2010/03/19/national/Thai-killed-in-Palestinian-rocket-attack-30125044.html(last accessed April 2010).

3 On Thai workers outside of Thailand, see Supang Chantavanich, Germershausen and Beesey(2000); and Tsay (2001). Some colleagues have questioned my use of ‘cosmopolitan’ for ruralpeople, even for those who have spent many months or years abroad. Contrary to Hannerz (1990,p 22) who has said that ‘most ordinary labour migrants do not become cosmopolitans’, I think wemust recognize that such migrants do develop a distinctive perspective that is also cosmopolitanin character. I am particularly indebted to Natalie Quizon whose dissertation about Filipina work-ers in Hong Kong contains an insightful chapter on the ‘cosmopolitan-ness’ of these workers(Quizon, 2011). Compare the term ‘rural cosmopolitans’ used by Katz (2004) in her study ofchildren in a village in the Sudan and children of migrants from this village living in New YorkCity.

4 I have adopted the concept of ‘misrecognition’ from Bourdieu (1977, see especially pp 169–170).5 The number of military casualties (11) comes from an official Thai government website: http://

www.thaiembdc.org/Ann_Doc/Thailandupdate8_10.pdf.

‘Cosmopolitan’ villagers and populist democracy in Thailand 345

buildings in the central business district, with the greatest destruction being in theCentral World Plaza of Bangkok, the second largest shopping mall in South EastAsia. Moreover, some Red Shirts mobilized followers upcountry to attack andburn provincial office buildings in Udorn, Khon Kaen, Mukdahan and Ubon inNorth Eastern Thailand. The toll of dead and injured and the destruction of build-ings made this the worst civil violence in Thailand’s history.

The dramatic climax of the confrontation between Red Shirt demonstrators andgovernment forces was not the end of the story. On the contrary, it is but the latestepisode in a much longer saga about the transformation of semi-traditional peas-ant villagers into modern cosmopolitan ‘villagers’. Even as this transformation ofrural North Easterners has taken place, representations of ‘rural’ Thailand andespecially of ‘rural’ North Eastern Thailand that urban Thai encounter in TV pro-grammes, films, fiction and the media have remained predicated on the assumptionthat North Easterners still live lives that are primarily agrarian.

In this paper I will draw on longitudinal research carried out in the early 1960s,early 1980s and the early part of this century by my wife Jane and myself with theassistance in recent years of several Thai students (now colleagues) in the villagewe first came to know as Ban Nông Tün, located in the central North Easternprovince of Mahasarakham.6 Although this community was subsequently dividedby government edict into three administrative villages [muban], I continue to re-fer to all three collectively by the original name, since one Buddhisttemple-monastery [wat] remains the religio-cultural centre of all three muban.Based on this research, I trace how villagers have, since the early 1960s when ourfirst research was carried out, reoriented their economic life away from self-sub-sistence to producing cash crops for the market and then to dependence on earningsin urban Thailand and overseas. Although there are some significant variationsamong villages in North Eastern Thailand, what is discussed here about Ban NôngTün is applicable to much of ‘rural’ North Eastern Thailand.

The North Eastern village as a self-sufficient agricultural community

In 1948, Phya (Phraya) Anuman Rajadhon (also known by his pen name SathianKoset) published ‘Life of the Thai Farmer’ [Chiwit chao na], one of the earliestaccounts I have found of rural life in North Eastern Thailand.7 Phya Anuman(born in 1888) was the son of a Chinese migrant to Thailand and, thus, had much

6 This paper draws on field notes made while engaged in research in Ban Nông Tün and on house-hold and socioeconomic surveys carried out in 1963–64, 1980, 1983 and 2005, as well as notesmade on visits to the village in between these periods of focused research. Jane Keyes has alwaysbeen my co-researcher and I am also indebted to Paitoon Mikusol, Bussarawan Teerawichitchainanand especially to Suriya Smukupt who assisted at several phases during our work. The real nameof the village is used here, following the wishes of villagers themselves.

7 I know from my own research in the National Archives in Bangkok that there were also officialreports from earlier times. Phya Anuman’s ‘Life of the Thai Farmer’ is, nonetheless, to my knowl-edge, the first published account. Phya (or Phraya) was a title conferred by a Thai king on adistinguished non-royal person. ‘Life of the Thai Farmer’ was first published in Thai as a funeraryvolume for Mrs Phiw Chaitnanthana. It was republished in Thai in 1965 in a collection of PhyaAnuman’s essays (Sathian Koset, 1965). William Gedney, a distinguished linguist specializing inThai and related languages, published an English translation in 1955 (Anuman Rajadhon, 1955)and included this translation in a subsequent collection of translations of Phya Anuman’s writings(Anuman Rajadhon, 1961).


in common with the Sino-Thai who subsequently became the dominant elementin the Bangkok middle class (as well as a substantial portion of the economicupper class). His account of village life in the North Eastern province of Korat,based on the notes of a monk from that province (Anuman Rajadhon, 1961, p 3),hence offers a perspective of an urban Sino-Thai who himself lacked any roots inthe Thai countryside. It was, nonetheless, an account that foreshadowed anthro-pological research that attempts to present a world ‘from the native point of view’(Geertz, 1975).

I had read ‘Life of the Thai Farmer’ before embarking in 1962 on my firstethnographic research in North Eastern Thailand.8 Re-reading it in 2010, I wasstruck by the continuity in the image of the rural North East he presents and im-ages still held by Bangkok middle-class people today:

‘Life in the city [naimüang] and life in the country [nôkmüang] offer sharpcontrasts. One is close to nature; the other is remote from nature. One is thesource of food and health; the other is a place where people gather to share theirfood; and disease germs. To say only this much makes it appear that in the citythere is only evil [khonleo], not to be compared with the country. Actually ifone were to speak of the good points, the city has many advantages over thecountry, because the center of progress [khwam caroen] is the city. If this progressspreads to the country in appropriate proportions, one can say that the nation,both city and country, achieves prosperity. If the city is selfish to too great adegree – seeking to accumulate wealth and provide entertainment and comfortfor itself, becoming remote from nature and never glancing toward the country– the progress of the city will be like a light that flares up only for a moment andthen goes out for lack of fuel, that is to say, food.’ (Anuman Rajadhon, 1961, p7; Thai words from Anuman Rajadhon, 1965, pp 129–130)

To summarize, people living in the outer areas [nôkmüang] – that is, the ‘rural’areas – make their living from agriculture and, while their work is essential for thepeople of the city [naimüang] and their proximity to nature has its benefits, thecountry people [khon bannôk] lack ‘progress’ [khwamcaroen].

In the early 1960s when my wife Jane and I began our research, Ban Nông Tünwas a rather remote, quiet rural community whose agriculture-based economywas nearly self-sufficient. Phya Anuman’s account of traditional patterns of ruralsociety and economy in the North East was very helpful.9 The primary social unitof the village was a household, which usually consisted of a husband and wife andtheir unmarried children, but which, following local custom, could also include ason-in-law, since men settled after marriage with their wives. Like all rural com-munities in North Eastern Thailand at the time, Ban Nông Tün was a village ofchildren and young people. In our first household census in 1963, we found thatthere were 119 households with a total of 700 people, or an average of 5.9 peopleper household. Like rural people throughout the North East at this time, Ban NôngTün villagers had experienced a significant increase in birth rates over the previ-ous decades. For the decade prior to 1920, the rate of population growth for the

8 I also discussed the essay in person with Phya Anuman, whom I had the privilege of meeting andgetting to know during my first time in Thailand (see Keyes, 1973).

9 For details on the village in the early 1960s, see my dissertation (Keyes, 1967a).


whole of North Eastern Thailand was approximately 2.0% per annum; it rose to2.7% per year for the period of the 1920s, and increased again to 3.3% for thedecade between 1930 and 1940; the rate declined to 2.9% and then rose again to3.1% in the 1950s and 3.4% in the 1960s.10

Villagers lived a life structured primarily by relations between kinsmen withwhom they cooperated in producing the basic necessities of life and between fel-low villagers with whom they joined in addressing moral and religious concerns.In 1963–64, villagers in Ban Nông Tün were engaged in producing primarily fortheir own consumption. Glutinous rice, the staple throughout North Eastern andnorthern Thailand, was cultivated using labour-intensive methods. Ploughing andharrowing of fields was done using water buffaloes.

Rice seed was first planted in seed beds and then the stalks were pulled up toplant in the fields. Supplementary foods included some garden crops, bambooshoots and other plants and insects collected from the forest. The most importantprotein in the diet came from fish that were either caught by men or raised inponds.

Women were not only co-workers in agriculture, but they assumed responsibil-ity for converting raw food, especially rice, into cooked food for consumption. Atthe time, most village women converted rice paddy through use of a mortar andpestle. Women steamed glutinous rice in the morning for consumption during theday and then prepared new rice again at night.

The village was not only self-sufficient in foodstuffs, but almost all clothingand utensils were also produced by villagers. Women produced clothing wovenfrom silk obtained from worms they raised and cotton grown in village fields.Men, in addition to their work in the fields and in fishing (and very limited hunt-ing), produced utensils out of bamboo and rattan. Men were also responsible forbuilding and repairing houses. Village houses were made out of wood from treescut in the forest, woven bamboo and leaves. However, in the early 1960s we ob-served that most villagers purchased metal tools wrought by local blacksmiths,and many purchased corrugated iron roofing for most permanent houses.

In short, the economic characteristics of Ban Nông Tün, like those of most Isanvillages in the 1960s, exemplified what would later be termed by some followingKing Bhumipol a ‘sufficiency economy’ [sethakit phôphiang].11 These character-istics were closely interwoven with the religious characteristics of the village.

The village was a ‘moral community’ united by common worship of villagespirits at the ‘navel of the village’ [büban] and ancestral spirits [phi puta] whoresided in their own forest grove on the edge of the village. Offerings were madeannually at these shrines.

More importantly, villagers were united in their support of the local wat, or

10 Population figures used for calculating these percentages have been taken, in part, from Lefferts(1974, p 62).

11 King Bhumipol first proposed his ‘sufficiency economy’ philosophy in his birthday speech ofDecember 1997. An English translation of the King’s speech can be found online at http://kanchanapisek.or.th/speeches/1997/1204.en.html. The king’s philosophy has antecedents in whathad previously been known as ‘Buddhist economics’. This term was the title of a paper by theeconomist E.F. Schumacher, first published in 1966 and subsequently republished in an influen-tial book entitled Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher (1973, p 58) argued that there was a form of‘Buddhist economics’ that contrasted with the ‘materialist economics’ of the post-Christian andCommunist West.


Buddhist temple-monastery. Almost every village male was ordained as a monkat the age of 20 for at least three months and often for two phansa [Buddhist‘lents’]. Many boys also spent time as novices at the wat. The monks and noviceswere central to the observance of an annual cycle of rituals. The ritual cycle,together with the agricultural cycle, gave meaning to most villagers for most oftheir lives from their birth, through their adolescence, courtship and marriage andconcluding with their ageing and deaths.

In sum, Ban Nông Tün in the early 1960s still retained most characteristicsassociated with the traditional peasantry in Thailand. However, the world of villagershad already begun to change.

Towards cosmopolitanism

Even by the early 1960s, villagers had or were experiencing other influences ontheir lives that emanated from the Thai nation-state or the world markets thatwere beginning to reshape their village world. There had long been a tradition ofyoung men leaving their families in North Eastern villages in the quest for expe-rience and status not based on a livelihood centred on rice agriculture (see Kirsch,1966). By joining the Buddhist sangha, males embarked on a venture that entailedgaining knowledge of a world religion. Although most temporary monks remainedin their local temple-monasteries for a relatively short time (one to two years), afew pursued religious study beyond the village. A few men from Ban Nông Tünhad spent time in temple-monasteries as far away as Bangkok. One village manwhom we knew well during our first time in Ban Nông Tün who had been particu-larly successful in his acquisition of knowledge of the Pali language and Buddhistscriptures and had achieved the clerical status of Phra Maha was highly respectedby other villagers. Even when he left the monkhood and became a teacher, he wasstill sought out by other villagers for advice not only about religion, but alsoabout the larger world. Another villager we had known as a boy had, after beingordained, gone to a renowned temple-monastery in another North Eastern prov-ince. Because he impressed his clerical superiors not only by his knowledge ofBuddhism, but also by his exemplary practice, he had been chosen to join a mis-sion temple-monastery in distant Seattle.12

Although I have not found exact figures, most observers of Buddhism in Thai-land would agree that the vast majority of ‘permanent’ monks (that is, thera, ormonks who have spent at least 10 years in the sangha) are from the North East.13

Monks, novices and temple boys who have come from the North East populate amajority of the temple-monasteries in the Greater Bangkok Metropolitan Region.The urban-based monks, who are held in high regard, have contributed to broad-ening the horizons of those from North Eastern villages. While it was shocking tosome in Bangkok that significant numbers of monks were at the demonstrationsby Red Shirts in Bangkok in March–April 2010, their presence was indicative of

12 When I went to this temple-monastery to trace this man, I found he had left the monkhood,married and settled elsewhere in the USA.

13 The only study of North Eastern monks in Bangkok is that by Klausner (1973). In a personalcommunication in May 2010, he told me that Wat Pathumwanaram where some of the Red Shirtfollowers took refuge was a wat in which most of the monks and novices are from the North East.


how the moral universe of North Eastern villagers has been expanded to includevillagers who are in the capital city.14

Before the end of the nineteenth century, the temple-monastery provided basiceducation for village males, making it possible for men to access and transmit theteachings of the Buddha. In the 1890s, King Chulalongkorn instituted the firstgovernment-sponsored education system, one which initially made use of Bud-dhist monks as teachers, but which made it possible for girls as well as boys tostudy (Tambiah, 1968). In the 1930s, the government, under a new parliamentarysystem, instituted compulsory primary schooling throughout the country.

Ban Nông Tün, like most villages in North Eastern Thailand, has had a govern-ment school since the mid-1930s, and by the late 1940s almost every villager, liketheir counterparts throughout the region, had completed four years of compulsoryprimary education. Compulsory education ‘proposes’ a world defined by the Thaination-state to those raised in villages, including those whose cultural traditions –like the Thai-Lao of North Eastern Thailand – are quite different from those ofCentral Thailand and especially from those of Bangkok (Keyes, 1991). Throughfundamental education, villagers gain some competence in Standard Thai lan-guage and some knowledge of national history. They also gain basic competencein arithmetic, a skill essential to participating in the market economy. Such basicliteracy and numeracy acquired during the four years of mandatory education wasonce swiftly forgotten by adult villagers, especially women, once they assumedroles as agriculturalists, members of village households and participants in vil-lage rituals.

When villagers began to participate more in the market economy, and espe-cially as they began to seek non-farm work, however, they began to place a highervalue on formal education. In 1977, the government raised the requirement forcompulsory education from four to six years. In 1980 when I carried out anothersurvey in Ban Nông Tün, I found that nearly 100% of all villagers over the age of30 had completed the then required six years. What was perhaps more significantwas that by the 1980s an increasing number of children were going on to highersecondary schooling and even beyond. In a survey carried out in 2005, 57% ofvillagers in the 20–29 age group had completed nine or more years of schooling.Since some members of this age group who had been born in the village were nolonger registered in village households, the total percentage of young people bornin the village and at that time in their 20s who had studied beyond the compulsorysix years was almost certainly higher. What is also noteworthy is that in 2005, 48young people (25 males and 23 females) were then studying in vocational schoolsor universities/colleges.

Although many villagers recognize they lack sufficient education to competefor the most prestigious positions, an increasing number are able to participatesuccessfully in a technologically based economy. The increase in educational attain-ment has spurred even more migration away from rural communities.

The practice of temporary migration away from villages, as mentioned above,

14 See ‘Thai government concerned with monks’ presence at Bangkok rallies’, 31 March 2010,website: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/southeastasia/view/1047125/1/.html (lastaccessed 1 June 2010); Zoe Daniel (2010), ‘Monks wish Red Shirts good luck’, ABC [AustralianBroadcasting Corporation] News, 1 May, website: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/01/2887734.htm?section=justin (last accessed 18 June 2010).


has been long-standing in North Eastern Thailand. In addition to leaving theirfamilies to become members of the Buddhist sangha, many young men have alsolong followed a pattern whereby they spend some time away from their villagesto work in non-agricultural jobs for a period of time. Kirsch, who carried outresearch in a village in what is today Mukdahan province in the North East at thesame time Jane and I were carrying out our first research in Mahasarakham, char-acterized this ‘pattern of “going around” [pai thiao] [as one] in which young men,individually or in small groups, leave their home villages often going to urbanareas or to the Central region to obtain wage labour of some sort, or occasionallyto engage in intermittent, wandering trade’ (Kirsch, 1966, p 375).

Prior to the Second World War, many men from the North East took locallyproduced cattle or water buffaloes to sell in more distant places. One old man inBan Nông Tün had decided in the 1930s to stay near Bangkok to work for severalyears for Indian migrants in helping look after their cattle. Several other old BanNông Tün men recalled having been cattle traders in Central Thailand, and otherreports noted that some traders from the Korat Plateau had travelled to the TonléSap region in Cambodia.

As the Thai economy started to expand significantly after the Second WorldWar, more and more village men began to travel to Bangkok and surroundingareas to find work. Such migration was greatly facilitated by the new road systemconstructed in the 1950s and 60s.15 In a survey carried out in 1963, I found thatabout 30% of men over the age of 20 had spent some months or even years work-ing in jobs in Bangkok. The old village man who had worked in Bangkok in the1930s commented to me on the change by noting that ‘When I was a young man,it took me two months to get to Bangkok; now a man can go in a day’.

While most who engaged in migrant work in the 1960s remitted or saved littlemoney, some became the first entrepreneurs of the village. One young man earnedenough from working for six years in a Chinese noodle factory in Bangkok toopen the first shop and the first rice mill in Ban Nông Tün. He exemplified apattern that in subsequent years would be emulated by many other men as well asmany of the women born in the village.

By a decade later, more and more villagers, including young women as well asyoung men, were leaving their villages for extended periods, or even permanently,to find work in Bangkok or elsewhere. They were ‘pushed’ by a ‘rural crisis’(Morrison, 1979–1980) that had emerged in the North East, a crisis that had sev-eral salient characteristics.

One important reason for the crisis was the rapid growth of the rural populationthat made even sustainable agriculture difficult for many families. On the basis ofcensus figures, the population of the North East grew at an average rate of 3.4%per year during the 1960s, the highest growth rate experienced at any time before(or since) that decade. By the late 1960s, some birth control programmes hadbeen instituted in the region, but I found no evidence of their impact in Ban NôngTün on visits there in the late 1960s; however, this had changed by the early1970s.16

15 On this road building and its impact on rural communities, see Moore et al (1980).16 A good account of early efforts by the Planned Parenthood Association of Thailand to introduce

family planning in the North East by using môlam, a traditional North Eastern Thai musical,appeared in the Bangkok Post in 1973 (Ross, 1973).


In 1972 when I next spent some time in the village, I discovered that birthcontrol practices had achieved considerable popularity, and eight years later in anew survey, I found that in 82 out of 127 households there was at least one womanpractising birth control, or someone (usually a woman, but sometimes a man)who had been sterilized. That some form of birth control had been adopted by64.5% of the households in the village is remarkable, particularly when it is rec-ognized that many of those households in which birth control practices have notbeen instituted are ones in which a young couple has not yet had as many childrenas they desire to have. I also found that younger couples whom I talked to haddetermined to have no more than four children, and many would prefer to haveonly two. By 2005, only a few women under the age of 40 had had more than twochildren. Whereas in 1963 children under the age of nine accounted for 35% ofthe village population, by 1980 the percentage had dropped to less than 25%, andby 2005 it had declined even further, to 13%.

Although the adoption of birth control throughout the North East did not lead toa significant reduction in population pressures until the 1990s, it had a more im-mediate effect on the role of women. Young women soon recognized that theycould postpone starting a family for a number of years after reaching maturity.Although most village women have eventually married and had children, an in-creasing number have in their young adulthood followed their brothers in seekingtemporary employment away from the village.

A second reason behind the ‘rural crisis’ in North Eastern Thailand in the 1970sand 1980s was a consequence of the severe constraints on expansion of commer-cial agriculture and the sale of local products. In the 1960s, several new cashcrops – most significantly kenaf and cassava – were introduced in the North East,and many villagers continued to produce some rice and animals for sale. How-ever, because of poor soils, limited and variable water supplies from either rain orirrigation, and the distance from major markets, few North Eastern villagers wereable to gain significant increases in cash income from agriculture. I found in BanNông Tün that the percentage of households gaining cash income from the sale ofcash crops actually declined from 91% in 1963 to 63% in 1980, and sale of live-stock declined from 58% to 47%. Some villagers were able to gain some cashincome from the sale of products of home enterprises – most notably cloth andrattan and bamboo basketry (41% in 1980 as compared with 56% in 1963), butthe amount was quite modest.

The declining significance of agriculture for the Thai economy and the growingimportance of the industrial and service sectors based primarily in Bangkok andsurrounding areas led to an increasing disparity between the rural economy ofNorth Eastern Thailand and the economy of Bangkok (see Feeny, 2003). Giventhis, the ‘pull’ of opportunities for non-farm work in Bangkok and elsewhere be-came very strong. From the 1950s on, the Thai economy grew rapidly and fromthe mid-1980s until 1997, Thailand had one of the highest growth rates in itseconomy of any in the world. Even the economic crisis that began in Thailand in1997 proved to be but a temporary hiatus in the growth of the Thai economy and,by the end of the twentieth century, it was once again growing at a high rate.

The rapid expansion of the Thai economy generated a dramatic increase in jobs,especially in Bangkok, first for construction and transportation workers and formaids and nursemaids in the expanding number of affluent urban households, and


then for factory workers and workers in the much enlarged commercial servicesector. Whereas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when theeconomy had experienced a comparable expansion, migrants from China had fillednewly created jobs, in the economic expansion after the Second World War, mi-grants from North Eastern Thailand filled most of these.17

By the 1970s, men and a few women from rural North Eastern Thailand hadalso begun to be recruited for work outside Thailand. Throughout the 1970s and80s, these opportunities were located primarily in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Emir-ates and other Gulf States. The first Gulf War and subsequent upheavals in theMiddle East led to a sharp reduction in job opportunities in that region. However,even greater numbers of jobs became available in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent,Singapore and Japan (see Tsay, 2001). Work overseas became increasingly attrac-tive to North Easterners, especially men, as low-paid unskilled jobs in Thailandwere more likely to be filled by legal and illegal migrants from Burma and, to alesser extent, other surrounding countries.

By the 1980s, nearly every male from Ban Nông Tün had spent some timeworking away from the village, and an increasing number had found work outsideThailand. Job opportunities in Taiwan became particularly attractive to youngmen (between the ages of 18 and 45) from Ban Nông Tün. In 2005, 26 men fromthe village were on 2–3-year contracts to work in Taiwan. Another 34 men hadalready worked there. In addition to Taiwan, a number of Ban Nông Tün men hadworked in the Gulf States, Singapore and Israel, and several women had workedin Japan and Israel.

Also by the 1980s, an increasing number of young village women began toseek temporary employment in the Greater Bangkok Metropolitan area. Whereasin 1963 only 5% of women in Ban Nông Tün in the 20–29 age group had workedin Bangkok or elsewhere away from the village, by 2005, 40% of women in thisage group were currently working in Bangkok or elsewhere, and most still livingin the village had spent some time in urban work. As Mary Beth Mills has shownin her study of young women factory workers from another village inMahasarakham, these women were attracted not only by the possibility of addingto their family’s income, but by the chance to emulate urban women in ‘becomingmodern’ [than samai] (Mills, 1999).

The experience of working in the Greater Bangkok Metropolitan Area and/oroverseas significantly expanded the world in which Ban Nông Tün villagers livedand worked. The horizon of villagers was also expanded by their access to newmedia. In the early 1960s, most North Eastern villages supported their own folkopera troupes that performed for temple fairs, and almost every young man learnedto play the khaen, a polyphonic reed instrument that is especially associated withNorth Eastern Thai and Lao culture, with which he serenaded his girlfriends. Al-though the khaen and associated môlam [folk opera] have remained significantfor North Easterners, villagers have increasingly found their entertainment in themass media. By the early 1960s, villagers were starting to purchase radios. Two

17 Skinner (1957, p 305), in his history of the Chinese in Thailand, noted that as people of Chinesedescent underwent ‘general upward mobility’ from the 1930s on, and as immigration from Chinawas slowed and then halted during the Second World War and after, Thai citizens began to re-place Chinese ‘in callings of lowest status’. These Thai were overwhelmingly from the NorthEast.


decades later, electricity was brought to Ban Nông Tün as part of a nationwiderural electrification project, enabling villagers to buy TV sets for the first time.Within a few years, nearly every household in Ban Nông Tün had a TV and by2005 when we conducted our most recent survey, there were more TV sets thanhouseholds. In addition to watching regular television programming, most house-holds also had VCRs on which (mainly young people) watched videos.

By the mid-1980s, a few households were able to get landline telephones con-nected, and once mobile phones began to become available in the 1990s, telephoneuse really grew in importance. Since nearly every household has some memberworking away from home, cell phones have become an essential means of keepingfamily members connected. In 2005, when we interviewed the owner of the main shopin the village, we found that her revenues came not primarily from sale of food snacks,over-the-counter medicines or school supplies, but from the sale of phone cards.

By the early twenty-first century, a few young villagers in Ban Nông Tün hadbegun to use personal computers, and in 2005 a group of villagers who wereworking in Bangkok bought a number of computers and donated these to the localvillage school. Government money made it possible for the school to get theseconnected to the Internet. Most young villagers could also access the Internet atInternet cafes in the nearby town of Mahasarakham or at sites in Bangkok orwherever else they worked.

Persistence of the ‘village’

By the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, most people born in villages inNorth Eastern Thailand, like those in Ban Nông Tün, were dependent more oncash income from work outside the village or from local enterprises such as shops,rice mills, vehicle repair shops, cafes and food stands that had been started withcapital from work outside villages than they were on the sale of agricultural prod-ucts. As a consequence of work experience in Bangkok, elsewhere in Thailand orabroad and access to much information through new media, those born in villagesin North Eastern Thailand have come to see themselves as belonging to muchlarger worlds than those defined by the perimeters of their home communities,although most continue to identify as villagers and even as agriculturalists.

Maureen Hickey, in her recently completed dissertation on Bangkok taxi driv-ers (Hickey, 2010), has recorded a conversation with a long-time driver who wasborn – like many Bangkok taxi drivers – in a village in Roi-et province in theNorth East. He told her that although he made his living as a taxi driver, he did notidentify as a taxi driver. Instead, he said, ‘I am a villager [chao baan]. I am afarmer [chao naa].’ (Hickey, 2010, p 170) Such identities are embraced by manyof those born in villages in North Eastern Thailand who have migrated to work inBangkok or even in as distant a place as Israel where the Thai worker mentionedat the outset of this paper was killed.18

18 I cannot confirm from any source I have consulted that this worker was in fact originally from NorthEastern Thailand, but it is highly likely that he was, since most Thai citizens working in Israel arefrom the North East. The significance of North Easterners employed abroad once again made theheadlines in most Thai newspapers when in February–March 2011 the upheaval in Libya revealedthat there were nearly 24,000 Thai working in Libya (The Nation, 24 February 2011). All reportsabout these workers identified them as being primarily from Nakhon Ratchasima and Udon Thaniprovinces in North Eastern Thailand (see, for example, Bangkok Post, 9 March 2011 and my op-edpiece, ‘Returnees have little to look forward to’, Bangkok Post, 25 March 2011).


Such migrants remain ‘farmers’ because they often return home to assist withfarming either for short periods or for longer when they ‘retire’ from off-farmwork. Some migrants who are kinsmen or are from the same village reside to-gether or near one another in Bangkok. In 2006 in Bangkok, I had a conversationwith a taxi driver from the North East who told me that he was one of four sib-lings, two women and two men (including himself). The two men and husband ofone of the women were in a taxi cooperative, and they and their families hadapartments close together. The remaining woman and her family maintained afarm where they produced – with some periodic assistance from the other siblings– enough rice to supply all four families.

As I found in the survey carried out in Ban Nông Tün in 2005, no family pro-duced rice to sell; rather, family members consumed all that was produced. Thismode of what I call ‘social insurance’ agriculture entailed much less labour thantraditional rice farming. Instead of using water buffaloes for harrowing and plough-ing fields, small hand-operated Japanese-made tractors or, in some cases, largerrented tractors were being used. Fields were now seeded by the broadcast methodrather than by the more labour-demanding transplanting method traditionally used.Most families also hired from one or another village owner equipment for har-vesting, rather than doing this by hand. The money needed to carry out these newmodes of rice production came primarily from earnings of family members whoworked outside the village.

While those who are born in Ban Nông Tün may spend much of their livesaway from the village, most – like other North Easterners – continue to retain asense of membership in a moral community that is manifest in the village. Thewat [temple-monastery] in Ban Nông Tün today, like those in hundreds, prob-ably thousands of wats in villages throughout the region, contains entirely newstructures, in contrast to those existing in the early 1960s. Almost all the newstructures have been financed through merit-making rituals organized by thoseworking away from the village.19 Some men still return to the village to be or-dained at the wat, while more become lay followers after they retire. Womenwho remain living in the village are the main providers for the members of thesangha.

The strong bonds that remain between migrant workers and their families intheir home villages have made North Easterners, wherever they live, ‘cosmopoli-tan villagers’. I was struck in watching videos of the demonstrations by Red Shirts(most of whom came from North Eastern Thailand) in Bangkok in March–April2010, at least until the violence that began on 10 April, by how similar the gather-ings were to temple fairs. The music being played at these demonstrations wasprimarily the ‘country-Western’ [lukthung] style of music with roots in traditionalmôlam. The demonstrations brought the North Eastern village first to the admin-istrative and then to the economic centres of Bangkok.

The rural cosmopolitan nature of North Easterners is clearly not understood or,if it is, appreciated by those in Bangkok, who still assume that ‘rural’ people have

19 Among the major contributors to the new ordination hall in Ban Nông Tün were the Chineseowners of a factory in Bangkok where many villagers worked. Upcountry Thailand, as I haverecently observed in northern Thailand as well, is not only viewed as a world of peasants, but alsoas a place where the Buddhist tradition is stronger than in Bangkok. Urban people often seek togain religious merit by making large offerings to upcountry wats.


(or should have) the same characteristics of subsistence-based agriculture thatPhya Anuman described half a century ago. Images generated from this assump-tion have been incorporated into many movies, TV programmes and newspaperarticles ever since. Unlike Phya Anuman, these more recent depictions lack hissensitivity to the ‘native point of view’ – that is, to understanding the reality of theNorth Eastern ‘village’ as actually experienced in practice by those who live in it.

In late 2009, Dr Chirmsak Pinthong, a former senator and professor in the Fac-ulty of Economics at Thammasat University, published in the Thai newspaperNaeo Na an influential op-ed piece entitled ‘Rao kamlang yu nai yuk “songkhramklang müang”!’ [We are living in an era of civil war].20 General Prem Tinsulanond,a former commander-in-chief of the army, an unelected prime minister in the 1980s,the head of the King’s Privy Council and the eminence grise of the royalist rightwing in Thailand, strongly recommended that his followers read this piece. Henceit could well be taken as the manifesto of the opposition to the Red Shirt move-ment. Chirmsak characterizes the (mainly North Eastern) followers as the‘ill-informed poor’ [khonyakcon rü khon thi khao mai thüng khômun khaosanphiangphô]. He thus echoes assertions made by other right-wing leaders that therural supporters of Thaksin are ‘stupid’ [khon ngo].

These ‘stupid’ peasants became in very large numbers the followers of the wellorganized movement formally known as the United Front for Democracy againstDictatorship, or UDD, but more popularly as the ‘Red Shirts’ because such shirtsbecame their primary symbol. Although the prevailing interpretation of the move-ment among spokesmen for the middle class and establishment in Bangkok wasthat the movement had been organized and funded primarily to enable formerPrime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to return to power, the North Easterners liv-ing both in the region and in Bangkok have much more sophisticated understandingsof why they became supporters. Thomas Fuller, a reporter for the New York Times,travelled to the North East to interview some supporters of the Red Shirts and, inan article published on 19 April 2010, he wrote: ‘Supporters of the red shirts inthe northeast, while acknowledging that Mr. Thaksin remained a key inspirationfor the movement, said it had taken on larger goals. “This is not for Thaksin, thisis for democracy,” said Chaisawat Weangwong, a 42-year old rice farmer..…Mr.Chaisawat offered a basic definition of democracy: “The majority chooses thewinner”.’ (Fuller, 2010)

The ‘village’ that Red Shirts had set up in the heart of Bangkok’s commercialdistrict came to an end on 19 May 2010 when army units finally moved to carryout the order of the government to clear the district, and Red Shirt leaders askedtheir followers to go home and then surrendered. In the aftermath of the worstviolence Bangkok has ever seen, the North Easterners who had come to Bangkokor had commuted from their homes in the city retreated back to their ‘villages’and middle-class Bangkokians resumed their ‘normal’ lives, which were mostconspicuous in the resumption of traffic jams and busy shopping malls. It is not

20 Website: http://www.naewna.com/news.asp?ID=193202 (last accessed 4 January 2010. The Webblog, ‘Political Prisoners in Thailand’, dated 3 January 2010 (http://thaipoliticalprisoners.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/new-chirmsak-on-civil-war/) characterizes Chirmsak as ‘an important intellectualcritic of Thaksin and the red shirt movement’; and another Web blog, ‘Bangkok Pundit’ (http://us.asiancorrespondent.com/bangkok-pundit-blog, 3 January 2010), characterizes him as a fer-vent supporter of the PAD (Peoples Alliance for Democracy), aka the Yellow Shirts.


possible to deny, however, as Phya Anuman recognized so long ago, that the citystill depends on the village; and that ‘village’ today is populated by ‘cosmopoli-tans’ who are far from being ‘stupid peasants’.

Rural people make their voices heard

After military and police forces took over the Ratchaprasong intersection areaof central Bangkok on 19 May 2010, there were many who thought that the RedShirt movement could never recover.21 However, what had not been fully appre-ciated was that the Red Shirts (at least most of them) were not seeking to takeover the government by deploying greater violence than state forces could mo-bilize. In other words, despite some of the rhetoric and symbolism (includingthat of the ‘red’ shirts), the demonstrators in Bangkok in 2010, as in 2009, didnot seek the violent revolutionary overthrow of the Thai political system. Theirprimary demand throughout their demonstration had been for a new and freeelection: that is, they sought the right to have a legitimate voice in a parliamen-tary democracy of the type first envisaged in the overthrow of the absolutemonarchy in 1932, but which had been thwarted many times by those (mainly inthe military) who preferred a ‘guided democracy’ at best and authoritarian dic-tatorship at worst.

Although many observers were highly doubtful of an election being held in thewake of the 2010 events, Prime Minister Abhisit, clearly after having consultednot only with leaders of his Democrat Party, but also with key members of themilitary and monarchical elite, dissolved parliament in May 2011 and called forelections to be held on 3 July. While Abhisit and his allies may have thought thatbecause the country had returned to presumed normality, the Democrats wouldenjoy increased support in the election,22 the establishment proved, however, tohave misjudged how the populace upcountry, and especially in the rural NorthEast and North viewed the post-Ratchaprasong situation.

The Pheu Thai Party, the successor to the Thai Rak Thai Party that Thaksin hadfounded, not only inherited the legacy of its predecessor’s successful populistpolicies, but also had a telegenic leader to lead it into the election. Since Thaksinwas in exile owing to his conviction for improper use of government power in aland deal involving his former wife, his younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra pickedup the mantle of leadership. Although Yingluck had previously devoted herself tobusiness rather than politics, her name recognition, her being the first womanever to aspire to being prime minister, her espousal of the same populist policiesas her brother, and her very well managed campaign led to Pheu Thai winning aclear majority of seats in parliament. This was only the second time in Thai his-tory that a party had won such a majority, the previous occasion being Thai RakThai’s victory in 2005. The voices of the ‘rural’ electorate have been stronglyexpressed, but Thai politicians of whatever type once they come into power oftenbecome self-serving rather than servants of the people who have elected them.The ‘people’, meaning especially the ‘cosmopolitan’ villagers of North Eastern

21 Claudio Sopranzetti (2012) has written a vivid first-hand account of the Red Shirt demonstrationin April–May 2010 and its violent climax.

22 Shawn Crispin has written about the presumed ‘accommodations’ that were a prelude to Abhisitbeing allowed by the military and elite to hold elections. See Crispin (2011a, 2011b).


Figure 1. The 2011 election results.Source: The map of the election results reproduced here was prepared by Dr Chris Baker andposted on New Mandala, an online blog devoted to South East Asian issues (see http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2011/07/04/regional-voting/, last accessed 20 September2011). Reproduced by permission of Dr Chris Baker.


Thailand, are not ‘stupid’ when it comes to viewing the party they supported, anymore than they were with regard to the political forces that represent the middleclass and elite.

The results of the election, including as graphically shown on maps (see Figure1), demonstrate that the support for Pheu Thai was overwhelming in both NorthEastern and Northern Thailand, as well as in the suburbs of Bangkok, the latterarea being heavily populated by working class people with roots in rural NorthEastern Thailand. In the immediate post-election period, the military and otherswho had strongly opposed Thaksin allowed Pheu Thai not only to form a govern-ment, but also to begin to lead the country. The competing approaches to politicalauthority represented by Pheu Thai and its Red Shirt allies on one side and themilitary with monarchical support will not disappear simply because Pheu Thaiwon a majority of seats in parliament. The 2011 election, like all elections since2001, radically belies the assumption that Thailand should be ruled by those whoseauthority comes from control of force, even if backed by the charisma of the king,and has been successfully challenged by those who base their authority on thewill of the people as expressed through voting. The majority of the ‘people’ whosevoices have been strongly expressed through the election as well as in the RedShirt demonstrations are overwhelmingly those with roots in rural North EasternThailand who have become ‘cosmopolitan villagers’.

I am very much aware that the Red Shirts also have deep roots in rural NorthernThailand, but the ‘rural’ there is different from the ‘rural’ of the North East. AndrewWalker (2012) has shown that in the north the politicized villagers who have sup-ported the Red Shirts are more likely to be what he terms ‘middle-class peasants’whose economic base remains agriculture (albeit commercial agriculture) ratherthan work outside the rural area, and especially work abroad, as is the case forrural North Easterners. As the population of the rural North East is considerablylarger than that of the rural North and especially as most of the rural migrants toBangkok are from the North East, I still feel my conclusion is valid. There is,nonetheless, a strong connection between the Red Shirt movements in the Northand North East and, I suggest, between these and the conflict in southern Thai-land.23 All are challenging the Bangkok-centred elite view of Thailand as a unifiednation under the King.

In the early twenty-first century, the Thailand that was first shaped by the inte-gration policies of King Chulalongkorn in the late nineteenth century is in theprocess of being transformed into a pluralist polity in which diverse interests areaccommodated through a democratic system that is a constitutional system inwhich legitimacy is predicated not only on the decisions of those who govern, butalso on the voices of the governed (see Kalyvas, 2005). The Red Shirt protests of2009–10 and the election of 2011 have contributed to the shaping of this accom-modation through the large-scale mobilization of ‘rural’ North Easterners to pressfor parliamentary rather than guided democracy.

23 Anusorn Unno’s (2010) dissertation, ‘We love “Mr. King”: exceptional sovereignty, submissivesubjectivity, and mediated agency in Islamic Southern Thailand’, lays out well how Malay-speakingand Muslim villagers in the province of Narathiwat situate themselves with reference to the ‘com-peting sovereignties’ of the Thai Buddhist nation-state, the old yet still relevant principality ofPatani, and transnational Islam.


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‘Cosmopolitan’ villagers and populist democracy in Thailand

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