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Author: Jonathan Rigg Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824892372 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In the 1970s, Thailand was developing but poor and largely agrarian. By the 1980s it had become the fastest growing large economy in the world and, in the process, made the transformation from a low-income to a middle-income economy. Fast forward to 2010 and Thailand had climbed yet another rung in the development ladder to become, according to World Bank criteria, an upper middle-income economy. Throughout this period of economic and social transformation, contrary to historical experience and theoretical models, one thing has remained constant: the central role of Thai smallholder farming. This conundrum—the persistence of the smallholder in a time of extraordinary change—lies at the heart of this book. In More than Rural author Jonathan Rigg explores how people in the countryside have adapted to their changing world, the new opportunities available, and the consequences for rural life and living. The Thai government has successfully “developed” the countryside, but with unexpected results. New household forms have emerged, women have become mobile in a manner few expected, and relations between rural and urban have changed. Yet the smallholder has persisted, and Rigg’s attempts to understand why offer a fresh perspective on Thailand’s development. Setting aside the urban, industrial point of view that we so often privilege, Rigg asks different questions about Thailand’s development. What if, he wonders, the present changes are not simply way stations, transitions to the main act of urbanization? What if they represent a new form of rural livelihood? Rigg’s thoughtful, nuanced approach to agrarian change—viewing the countryside as more than agriculture, the rural as more than the countryside, and rural people as more than farmers—offers insights into Thailand’s wider transformations (class identities, intergenerational relations), its political impasse, and more. Based on over three-and-a-half decades of fieldwork in seventeen villages, across three regions, and encompassing more than one thousand households, and a deep knowledge of primary and published sources, More than Rural is a significant work with implications for contemporary development across Asia and the global South.
Author: Charles F. Keyes Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 9780824816964 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia has long been recognized as the best all-around introduction to the diverse cultural traditions found in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. First published in 1977, it continues to offer useful insights to students and travelers to the region. In five well-defined and succinct chapters, Professor Keyes, a leading specialist in the field, offers a jargon-free, copiously annotated synthesis of knowledge about the cultural history of tribal, Theravada Buddhist, and Vietnamese societies. He combines analysis of traditional cultural practices with examination of cultural conflict in the colonial and post-colonial periods. The book remains unique in providing a detailed examination of urban life as well as of life in rural communities.
Author: Simon Szreter Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199270570 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 424
Book Description
Throughout its history as a social science, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying social problems. As a result, demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from dynamic relationships and local contexts and processes. This volume questions these fixed categories in two ways. First, it examines the historical and political circumstances in which suchcategories had their provenance, and, second, it reassesses their uncritical applications over space and time in a diverse range of empirical case studies, encouraging throughout a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue involving anthropologists, demographers, historians, and sociologists.This volume seeks to examine the political complexities that lie at the heart of population studies by focusing on category formation, category use, and category critique. It shows that this takes the form of a dialectic between the needs for clarity of scientific and administrative analysis and the recalcitrant diversity of the social contexts and human processes that generate population change. The critical reflections of each chapter are enriched by meticulous ethnographic fieldwork andhistorical research drawn from every continent. This volume, therefore, exemplifies a new methodology for research in population studies, one that does not simply accept and re-use the established categories of population science but seeks critically and reflexively to explore, test, and re-evaluatetheir meanings in diverse contexts. It shows that for demography to realise its full potential it must urgently re-examine and contextualize the social categories used today in population research.
Author: Jonathan Rigg Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824877748 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
In the 1970s, Thailand was developing but poor and largely agrarian. By the 1980s it had become the fastest growing large economy in the world and, in the process, made the transformation from a low-income to a middle-income economy. Fast forward to 2010 and Thailand had climbed yet another rung in the development ladder to become, according to World Bank criteria, an upper middle-income economy. Throughout this period of economic and social transformation, contrary to historical experience and theoretical models, one thing has remained constant: the central role of Thai smallholder farming. This conundrum—the persistence of the smallholder in a time of extraordinary change—lies at the heart of this book. In More than Rural author Jonathan Rigg explores how people in the countryside have adapted to their changing world, the new opportunities available, and the consequences for rural life and living. The Thai government has successfully “developed” the countryside, but with unexpected results. New household forms have emerged, women have become mobile in a manner few expected, and relations between rural and urban have changed. Yet the smallholder has persisted, and Rigg’s attempts to understand why offer a fresh perspective on Thailand’s development. Setting aside the urban, industrial point of view that we so often privilege, Rigg asks different questions about Thailand’s development. What if, he wonders, the present changes are not simply way stations, transitions to the main act of urbanization? What if they represent a new form of rural livelihood? Rigg’s thoughtful, nuanced approach to agrarian change—viewing the countryside as more than agriculture, the rural as more than the countryside, and rural people as more than farmers—offers insights into Thailand’s wider transformations (class identities, intergenerational relations), its political impasse, and more. Based on over three-and-a-half decades of fieldwork in seventeen villages, across three regions, and encompassing more than one thousand households, and a deep knowledge of primary and published sources, More than Rural is a significant work with implications for contemporary development across Asia and the global South.
Author: Alan R. Johnson Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1608994074 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 259
Book Description
In Leadership in a Slum Johnson looks at leadership in the Thai social context from a different angle than traditional studies that measure well-educated Thais on leadership scales derived in the West. Seeking a cultural account of social influence processes he turns to those who have been left behind in the race to participate in a globalizing world, the urban poor. Using both systematic data collection and participant observation he develops a culturally preferred model as well as a set of models based in Thai concepts that reflect on-the-ground realities. Johnson also examines the community-state relationship and finds that in the face of state power that brings both development and the forces of eviction, the community and its leaders are not passive in this relationship but modify, reject, or resist state views in their various forms. He concludes by looking at the implications of his anthropological approach for those who are involved in leadership training in Thai settings and beyond. This work challenges the dominance of the patron-client rubric for understanding all forms of Thai leadership and offers an alternative view for understanding leadership rooted in local social systems to approaches that assume the universal applicability of leadership research findings across all cultural settings.
Author: Ruth McVey Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 9780824822736 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Most studies of Southeast Asian economic change focus on the phenomenal growth experienced by a few large cities, such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. Big business has been viewed as the economic engine fueling the region's growth and prosperity. Studies of the rural areas have concerned themselves with the social and environmental impact of metropolitan growth--villages emptied by migration to the big cities, cultures crushed by tourist development, and agribusiness and lush landscapes destroyed by the devastation of natural resources. The literature reveals that few analysts have examined the middle distance between metropolis and countryside. The contributors to this book have addressed the issue by concentrating on the intermediate level of economic, political, and social life--the world of Thailand's provincial cities and market towns. In the past decade the rise of frequently violent competition for business and political leadership in the Thai provinces, and the growing importance of provincial support for national powerholders, has drawn attention to the way in which these town and village centers are being transformed by capitalist development. This volume brings together some of the research inspired by this, drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, national backgrounds, and sites of study. Contributors: Daniel Arghiros, Chris Baker, Sombat Chantornvong, Kevin Hewison, Jim LoGerfo, Ruth McVey, Michael J. Montesano, James Ockey, Pasuk Phongpaichit, Maniemai Thongyou, Yoko Ueda.