Peasants and Cities, Cities and Peasants: Rethinking Southeast Asian Models || Peasants and Cities:...

Peasants and Cities: The Cultural and Social Image of the Thai Peasant Village CommunityAuthor(s): Jeremy KempSource: Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol. 4, No. 1, Peasants and Cities,Cities and Peasants: Rethinking Southeast Asian Models (FEBRUARY 1989), pp. 6-19Published by: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41056760 .

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Peasants and Cities: The Cultural and Social Image of the Thai Peasant Village Community

Jeremy Kemp

The Thai peasant village community is an ideological construct rather than an empirical reality. Failure tô recognize this has resulted in a reification and objectivization of rural social organization both past and present. It has also supported a number of false dichotomies such as between peasants and cities which distort the real nature of relationships. The paper examines the background to the application of these ideas with reference to their consequences for social analysis and planning, together with their more direct impact on rural social organization and relations with urban centres of power.

Introduction

The literature on "peasants", "peasantry", and the "peasant village community" is huge and frequently contradictory, but within it certain themes emerge which, while not commonly agreed upon in their details, are nevertheless generally acknowledged as central to the whole discourse. However, further reflection suggests that at least some of these themes and their ordering of the subject are not what they purport to be, that is, fairly objective observations on a set of distinct phenomena. Instead, they have far more to do with the development of Western culture and society than with the empirical realities, often of the so-called Third World, which they supposedly describe and explain.

In Thailand, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, ultimately external perceptions of the peasant village underlie and affect not only academic analyses but also the actions and attitudes of officialdom and those experts who are involved with the administration and development of



PEASANTS AND CITIES: THE THAI PEASANT VILLAGE COMMUNITY 7

the countryside. In an increasingly urbanized world, images of the past, of the Thai village and its supposed traditional organization, are also part of contemporary discourse about identity and the directions in which Thai society should proceed. One is thus forced to conclude that the development of the kind of underlying social theory from which these images derive has exercised a profound and finally misleading effect on the way the village is approached and analysed in the context of its relations with the state.

The Village Community

This is not the place to explore in any detail the long-standing discussion of the meanings of terms like "peasant" and "village community". Rather, my intention is to take up the issues of separation, connection and, most especially, perspective suggested by the title of this collection, Peasants and Cities, Cities and Peasants. In particular, I consider some of the implications of the relationships inferred by a series of oppositions used to distinguish the peasant world from the wider and more complex society in which it is located. These include such familiar terms as "local and national", "Little and Great Tradi- tions", "conservative and modern", plus Gemeinschaft und Gessellschaft ("Community and Society"). Together with other similarly sweeping distinctions, they express many aspects of the assumed character of the connections and, more specifically, the purported gap between peasants and cities.

These dichotomies are themselves indicators of a relationship if only of opposition and separation, and in this respect two issues must be borne in mind. The first is that, for many different reasons, in both empirical studies and more abstract analyses of peasants the relational aspect tends to be lost sight of. The second, and more theoretically significant, is that these perceptions of opposition and separation are finally misleading: they imply a degree of categorical exclusivity which has to be demonstrated rather than taken as a given. This leads us back to a frequently false objectification and reification of the peasant community as a distinct type of cultural and social organization which in turn determines perceptions of its relations with the outside world.



8 SOJOURN VOLUME 4 NUMBER 1

One of the most familiar illustrations of the former is the way the "Redfieldian" approach often worked out in practice. In The Little Com- munity Redfield (1955) had developed a framework expressed by that term for the study of simple cultures as a whole. In Peasant Society and Culture (1960) he applied this framework to that area of cultural and social organization which in a preceding study of more complex social systems he had designated "folk society" (Redfield 1947). Although the community study was an already established "genre", it was in the later work that he provided a subsequently very influential theoretical justification for the study of the peasant village as being characterized by little community-type relations.

Redfield was at pains to emphasize that "peasant societies are part societies" (Kroeber 1948, p. 284): while exhibiting an important degree of autonomy and local integration plus many other supposed characteristics of community, peasants were part of a larger society. His theoretical formulation of the relationship was expressed in the very striking use of "Great and Little Traditions", but in empirical studies the concern with the "little community" became paramount. Then, the starting point which is the village tends to remain the prime focus to the exclusion of all else.

At a time when structural-functional interpretations predominated, the emphasis on a holistic approach led to the village being treated as a total system; the outside was relevant only in so far as elements were incorporated and integrated within village life. In the most exagge- rated manifestations it seemed as though a complete picture of society was to be created by adding together a number of village community studies (see Geertz 1962, pp. 7-10). More generally, the image was of a still largely autonomous and internally integrated peasant village.1

It is also important to note that Redfield's work is closely connected with a more explicitly evolutionist sociological theory which, in explain- ing the development of modern society, posited a fundamental change in social relations. The distinctions between, say, the "mechanical" and "organic division of social labour" and between Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft in a sense regularized and emphasized the distance between the simple and the complex, the archaic and the modern. In the case of the Asiatic Mode of Production, it went even further in pro- viding an explanation of the lack of change. What is also interesting




in restrospect is how such very global ideas of evolution could eventually be taken to apply to different sections of the same society.

Today we are in a far better position to understand that the success of the community method had much to do with the historical and geographical accidents of where it was practised. In other words, it did not reveal the generalities of peasant life in the way frequently assumed. Indeed, the relationship with, and dependence upon, a wider social universe necessitates repudiation of the claimed immutability and autonomy of the peasant village which features in so much of the earlier literature. Instead, challenging these assumed dichotomies the village has to be seen as the "creation" of the state and analysed within that context.

Villages in Thailand

In a recent publication (Kemp 1988) I documented at some length how, and in part why, the social organization of agrarian settlements in so much of Southeast Asia does not accord with many established views of the peasant village community. Very briefly, I attacked the assump- tion that the village is the basic, primordial unit of organization, the repository of those "little community" values with their associated tight communal identity and integration. In this I was building upon the work of Breman (1980) and his demonstration that in Java the presumed archetypal village, the closed corporate community, has no great history but is a direct response to Dutch colonialism (see also Wolf 1957). More specifically, whereas villages in the sense of there being clusters of households undoubtedly existed in much of Java, the village as a land- holding, territory-controlling (and sometimes -owning), formal administrative entity did not. Yet it is precisely these communal, corporate characteristics which have been taken to exemplify the unchanging village community!

As is well known, the first Thai community studies proved highly problematic In the delta area near Bangkok no clear-cut communal unit could be distinguished so that the temple and its congregation or a com- bination of temple and kinship relations were chosen as defining criteria. The Bangchan and Bangkhuad studies produced a very amorphous,




"individualistic" picture and it is no surprise that they became key sources in the debate on Embree's analysis of Thailand as a "loosely structured social system" (1950).

Later, most explicitly in the work of Potter (1976), it was argued that the lower delta was highly unusual having borne the brunt of the economic changes following the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855 and the ensuing very rapid development of the cash economy, in this instance the emergence of rice monoculture. Elsewhere, it was frequently asserted, "real villages" existed with many if not all of the communal characteristics one might expect, and Potter elucidated a number of so-called structural principles which were widely found throughout the countryside.

However, the view that the problem was simply a matter of change, of the disintegration of the peasant village in the face of capitalist penetration is mistaken as is, in my view, Potter's own very communalistic analysis of the northern village in which he worked. An increasing amount of evidence shows that the village as the key primordial structure of Thai rural society never really existed. Even the strong village identity occurring in parts of the north is not necessarily a sign of sur- vival of a timeless traditional co-operation and communality. It can, on the contrary, be interpreted as a specific response to considerable instability in the region (continuing well into the nineteenth century) which arose from warfare and the depredations of the local states as they sought to control manpower.2

Thus, whatever its communal characteristics or even the lack of them, the peasant village has to be seen in the context of its articulation with a wider society which is not merely an aspect of organization but at the very core of its existence. Instead of concentrating on the elements which are "survivals from the past" - the unchanging Asia syndrome - we have to see that village organization is intrinsically connected with the power structures (and economy) of a much larger social system. It is not just for this volume then that one must stress cities in which the loci of the higher levels of economic and political power reside. However, one must also be wary of the fact that references to the "city" and its articulation with the countryside are often influenced by the same predominantly Western perceptions that affect our under- standing of the village.




Rural Social Organization in Thai History

Bearing the above in mind plus confident assertions of the existence before capitalist penetration of the Thai corporate village community (see Douglas 1984), I now turn briefly to the evidence. When we examine the organization of Thai society in the Ayutthaya and Early Bangkok periods it seems to me that we look in vain for any indication that the village took the form assumed by classical theories of peasantry, the pre-modern state, or the Asiatic Mode of Production, and so forth. Even in the heartlands of Siam, the pattern of settlement could be very ephemeral, villages along the Singhburi-Anthong border formed neither closed nor even permanently settled units because of the cultiva- tion of swamp rice (Tomosugi 1980, pp. 22-23). We look similarly in vain for evidence of the familiar pattern of the village being a key unit for administrative purposes in the management of both immediately local affairs and the relations of inhabitants with the higher echelons of the state. Instead, sources suggest that while people undoubtedly lived in clusters of neighbouring houses the village in any formal sense did not exist.

In place of a system of territorial control we have a very different concept of the state itself. This was organized not in terms of a precise delineation of territory but of a hierarchy of centres of authority whose influence in turn extended outwards with declining effect the further away one progressed. Freemen (phrai) were under the authority of officials (nai) of the department or subdepartment of administration with which they were registered. These were links of individuals and not groups to a political superior: households/families were in no way units of control as was the case, say, in Japan. While it might well have been the situation that all residents of a place were registered in a common department, this was not necessarily so and laws allocating the claims of the respective nai on children of parents registered in different departments suggest the potential geographical dispersal of an official's phrai.1

While some undoubtedly lived in remote areas beyond any effective purview of the state, early descriptions suggest an almost urban quality to rural settlement very contrary to the assertion of the isolated and autonomous village community. In the late seventeenth century La




Loubère had noted the concentration of people along the waterways (1969, p. 6); a similar image is given in an account published in 1890.

Below Pak Nam Po the villages become more numerous, frequently lining one or the other or both sides of the river. For 55 miles below Muang In, and for 25 miles above Bangkok, the string of towns and villages on each side of the river may be said to be coter- minous - one long street of houses. Nearly the whole population of the delta, which is about 130 miles long by an average of 50 miles broad, reside on the banks of the main river and its affluents. (Hallet 1890, p. 444)

Hallet also unwittingly gives an interesting insight into local perceptions of the social significance of these so-called villages, commenting that the Siamese were less truthful than the Laos further north. He had found it necessary to ask several people the name of a village before it could be entered in the record (ibid., p. 437).

Even in the north with its very different ecology, the status of the village remains questionable. Although there is ample evidence of co- operative organization in the countryside, such as in the management of local irrigation systems, the village was not the unit of either state or local control. It was only in this century after implementation of the new administrative system that the office of village head, the phu jai ban, was introduced in Chiengrai thereby displacing in part "elders" whose influence was largely personal and not territorially defined (Tur- ton 1976, pp. 280-84).

So, putting this kind of evidence together a very different picture begins to emerge. At the level of ideas the distinction between city and countryside does not exist. Instead there were centres of power from which control was exercised; these and their domain were the myang, a use of the word quite different from the predominant contemporary one which does indeed specify town or city. The underlying political model was general to much of Southeast Asia though in the context of the Thai states centres tended to be more townlike than, for example, in Malaya. The same lack of boundaries is also apparent on examining the implications of this political order for the lives of the people. The distribution of the population was not random but highly localized along channels of communication with the major centres of power and authority.




The administrative modernization set in motion by King Chulalong- korn at the end of the nineteenth century changed not only the nature of the state but also its relations with the countryside. What is insuffi- ciently stressed is that the new arrangements were based on European models reflecting much more than contemporary administrative technology and ways colonial powers set about controlling a population and generating revenue. They reveal fundamental and unspoken ideas about the countryside itself, peasantries, village life, and relations with the higher institutions of the state. The highly varied arrangements reflecting local conditions which had formally linked freemen and their nai were replaced by the familiar, uniformly applied (ideally if not always in practice, especially in the early years) territorial hierarchy of province, district, commune, and village.

What should be remembered about the often-quoted connection with the system imposed in Burma is that the latter proved to be an inap- propriate and eventually unrealistic realization of European ideas about what Burmese villages were like. These were grounded in perceptions of a European past and, in particular, the significance of land and a government's role with respect to ownership and the guarantee of rights. (One might also refer to what happened in the Malay peninsula.) It was also affected by the immediate experience of rule in India where the jajmani system had apparently generated semi-autonomous corporate village communities. Hence, given their assumptions about the significance of the village and indeed a "policy of dealing with people by villages and not by individuals", the British had great difficulty in locating or even creating a system of effective local administration. The "principle of one village, one headman" did not work and was modified over the years in the search for effective village leadership (Mya Sein 1973, p. xxiii).

In these changes one has the adoption of an alien image of village community by the new administrative system which then imposed it on the Thai countryside. The validity of the model was subsequently rein- forced by an again ultimately foreign expertise, now represented in the form of social science texts on modernization, development planning, administrative science and the like. In the past forty years especially, such ideas have also been pumped into those countless Thai Ph.D. can- didates in Western universities who were later to become the architects




and interpreters of the huge range of administrative, developmental, and modernization programmes which are such a feature of the Mode of Bureaucratic Reproduction!

Without rehearsing the recent economic and political history of Thailand, let it suffice to comment on two things. The first is that the post-Bowring impact of the industrialized world economy and capitalist penetration was very quickly felt in the heartlands of Siam. In contrast, its more obvious economic effects were not experienced on the periphery until much later, in some cases until after World War II. The treaty also effectively undermined the traditional fiscal and administrative structures of the state and thus led directly to the administrative reforms already alluded to. The second issue is that the subsequent path of political and governmental change has been different from elsewhere because of the escape from colonialism and continuity of control of Thai élites.4 Thus there has never been any popular effective mobilization in order to win back independence with a consequent extension of participation in the political process. The would-be leaders were in a sense already in control or at least participating in what might be described as the effective polity of the society. What has occurred though is the progressive elaboration and extension of that control into the countryside, and a primary tool in that process has been the institu- tionalization of a concept of village community.

Discussion

It seems to me that both in the modern nation-state of Thailand and in the field of Thai studies we have a number of fascinating paradoxes. In the pre-modern period the political order consisted of chains of hier- archical relations between individuals emanating from major centres of power which were, in at least some respects, citylike. The demographic distribution of the population meant that the people were by no means very isolated: the whole structure of the state was in fact based on the rapid and efficient mobilization of labour which was often utilized in the centres. If this were not enough to explode the myth of the isolated autonomous communal village, Evers, Korff, and Suparb (1987) have recently drawn attention to the historical importance of trading networks




reaching to the most remote areas and to Southeast Asia having long been part of a "world economy".

The reforms instituted in the 1890s destroyed important structures of articulation between the rulers and the countryside. The old relationships based on the links of ordinary individuals as individuals to those in authority over them were removed. What one is witnessing in these changes was the creation of a major cultural and social divide between city/rulers and countryside/peasants. On the one hand this has been compounded by the development of a highly educated, urban- oriented Bangkok-centred bureaucracy which, while more closely regulating the countryside than ever before, is also more distant. At the same time the whole pattern of economic change has deepened the. gap between rural and urban, with Bangkok becoming one of the most metropolitan centres in the world. On the other hand we have to observe that with the dominance of Bangkok the links of the peasants with the cities, or at least Bangkok, have become much closer in many crucial respects. There is also the matter of the emergence of a modern mass culture which penetrates everywhere with no respect to the kinds of boundaries that I have been discussing.

In this new situation we find at a number of levels significant represen- tations of the past and sometimes an explicit yearning and call for a return to it. This last mentioned in itself is not surprising; after all, the past exists in the present, and one can readily appreciate the tremen- dous impact on people of the speed and intensity of change in Thailand and especially Bangkok. However, one of the more curious of these moves is the glorification of the traditional Thai village community, a community which never existed! Is it that surprising that one of the leaders in this romantic call to return to the roots of Thai life is a philosopher (Seri Phongphit 1986) trained in Germany? In the same volume a second German connection very different from the Roman- ticist occurs in the contribution of another very respected Thai academic where the spectre of the Asiatic Mode of Production with its own no- tion of the autonomous village community clearly lurks behind discussion of the pre-modem "Sakdina system" (Chattip 1986, p. 160).

More prosaic but perhaps far more significant in its effects is the manner in which an ideology of community has been expropriated by the agencies of government pursuing development goals as well as seek-




ing to exercise and extend their authority. This "imposition of community" from the top pervades government rhetoric It is a means of imposing control involving as it does both the expectation or demand that villages respond in a particular way to administrative dictate and the moral justification for them to do so. This is today perhaps most readily observable in the attempts to establish the institutions of formal administration and implement development policies in newly settled areas. The process has been recently documented for the district of Lan Sak in Uthaithani province where the formal boundaries of the village "rarely coincided with a single and obvious social unity" (Hirsch 1988, p. 8). Yet as Hirsch observes:

The State's image of the village community is one of cohesiveness and accountability of authority as vested in the village head and other key members of the community. State programmes rely on a closely bounded village, and a function of these programmes is to reinforce such bounding, (ibid., pp. 7-8)

Conclusion

It is evident that the so-called peasant community has been represented and acted upon by a disparate bunch of social scientists, colonial and post-colonial administrators, development workers, and intellectuals. I suggest that this has occurred in such a way as not only to misrepresent the nature of the village and its relation to a wider social universe, but also to actually play a part in changing the pattern of articulation. In particular, one has to recognize the extent to which the administrative imposition of the territorially defined village community has fundamen- tally changed many aspects of rural social structure. This is not without its ironies in that in many instances a goal has been the conservation or re-establishment of the village as an effective social unit. It goes without saying that such mistaken assumptions are closely associated with some of the unforeseen results arising from modernization.

It is against this background that one has to emphasize the extent to which the presumed characteristics of the peasant community are ideological constructs. The same kind of point has been made recently




by Anderson in his work on the rise of nationalism and his assertion that the nation is an imagined community. All that one might add here is an emphatic confirmation of Anderson's own tentative suggestion (1983, p. 15) with reference to the "primordial village" that all communities are indeed imagined! What we might also appropriately remember is that this is no reason for ignoring the issue of the village community. Concepts are powerful and thus the problem of concep- tualization is also a problem of power and authority.

Notes

1 A perspective by no means exclusive to the structural functionalists; see, for example, the kind of discussions that occur of village autonomy from the perspective of the Asiatic Mode of Production.

2 See Wijeyewardene's comments (1984) on the role of these factors in the emergence of matrilineal cults in the region.

3 But see also La Loubere's discussion (1969, p. 78) of "Bands" under the authority of nai, and rules allocating claims on children.

4 On the other hand it is sometimes stimulating to interpret modernization in Thailand as a kind of internal colonization perpetrated by the Siamese over the very diverse groups that now constitute the present-day nation.

References

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Jeremy Kemp is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, U.K. He was Visiting Pro- fessor of Sociology in the Sociology of Development Research Centre, Bielefeld Univer- sity, Federal Republic of Germany, in 1987-88.



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