The informal politics of rural livelihoods in Northern Thailand: A case study of Chiang Mai’s songthaeo drivers

Abstract

This thesis adopts a livelihoods perspective to explore the historical transition and contemporary lives of a group of northern Thai villagers who exited village-based farm work in the 1970s and 1980s to enter the emerging public transport sector of Thailand’s northern capital – Chiang Mai. Through an ethnographic study of these songthaeo drivers, the thesis draws on the story of the drivers’ shift from farm to urban-based, wage labour to interrogate dominant portraits of rural Thai history and to explore the politics through which the drivers have forged and consolidated comparatively healthy livings. In so doing, the thesis contends that rather than a monochromatic history of peasant economic passivity or political resistance to state intervention, the drivers demonstrate an adaptive, aspiration-oriented agency in pursuing enhanced livelihoods. Further, they symbolise a rural politics of actively seeking to cultivate connections with state actors identified as supporting desired exit options away from the land and into more productive labour fields. The thesis proceeds to describe the labour-world ‘invented’ by Chiang Mai’s songthaeo drivers, in terms of both its relatively stable economic dimensions and its familiar rural cultural sociality. It notes that despite the generation of modestly healthy incomes, the drivers remain discontent with their economic position. Describing their livelihoods in desultory terms, the drivers’ pessimistic outlook reflects the ‘status games’ in which they are implicated, indicative of comparisons with men from the professional ranks, and demonstrative of anxieties arising from a new historical epoch marked by the potentially disruptive realities of the Asian Economic Community. To negotiate the new economic era now dawning upon them, and to defend their livelihoods and familiar way of life, the drivers engage in a largely informal mode of politics. Reflective of what Partha Chatterjee has termed ‘political society’, this politics draws on traditional masculine modes of rural Thai power, now deployed within a modern setting of bureaucracy and electoral competition. Centred on the figures of the Presidents of the two largest driving Cooperatives, this politics operates in a murky world of connections, influence, threats, administrative innovations and legal exceptions. Rather than seeking to transform the broader political environment however, this politics is narrowly and parochially focussed, attempting to maintain the status quo rather than fundamentally change it. For the drivers, defending their livelihoods takes precedence over competing political visions of modernising the city or appeasing the city’s growing middle-class residents. As such, the drivers are representative of multiple facets of contemporary Thailand, bridging the formal and informal, rural and the urban, the traditional and the emerging modern within a city itself caught within these often competing dynamics.