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The Dialectics of Village and State in Modern Thailand1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Jeremy Kemp
Jeremy Kemp
Affiliation:
University of Kent
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Extract

In selecting the “village community” as focus for an analysis of the social organization of relations between agents of the state and its subjects I bridge two distinct and sometimes contradictory themes. The first is the manner in which social connections within the countryside and with the state are handled in practice. The second is the way the concepts of “community” and, more specifically, “village community” are used to represent and sometimes misrepresent both how these relations are formally structured and what actually happens. Evaluation of these concepts is thus an important and necessary part of any interpretation of rural society and culture. Perceptions of community underlie and affect not only academic analyses but the actions and attitudes of officialdom and those experts who are involved with the administration and development of the countryside. They are intrinsically connected with matters of policy and administration, and the village — as we now observe it — is a consequent outcome.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , September 1991 , pp. 312 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1991

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References

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27 Primary sources of revenue included the goods and services rendered by phrai or payments in lieu, the profits from royal trading monopolies and, increasingly important in the nineteenth century, profits from the sale of tax farms.

28 Or in the case of the help traditionally given in housebuilding, a more general obligation to return such aid if called upon to do so.

29 In other words, the kinds of relationships which are rather too broadly described as patron-client.

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37 As Sydel Silverman observes: “…his use of key notions such as ‘community’, ‘tradition’ and ‘way of life’ … have seemed so self evident and persuasive — that they now make up a basic vocabulary of the peasant literature, both in anthropology and outside of it”. Silverman, , “The Peasant Concept in Anthropology”, Journal of Peasant Studies 7 (1977): 56Google Scholar.

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41 Locale, size of settlement, local communications plus historical and ecological factors would all have played a part in determining the existence and strength of such connections. Even where found it should in no way be assumed that the social boundaries of such linkages coincided with those of some natural village community.

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