The informal politics of rural livelihoods in Northern Thailand: A case study of Chiang Mai’s songthaeo drivers
Date
2017
Authors
Lane, Ryan
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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.
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Thesis (MPhil)
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DOI
10.25911/5c6e70b03d7c3