Seminar Series: Abstract

Exploring power among Thailand's middle-income peasants
Dr Andrew Walker

Extraction of surplus by external power holders is often seen as a central definitional criterion of the peasantry. In The Moral Economy of the Peasant, James Scott wrote that “taxes and rents, together or individually, form the twin issues around which peasant anger in Southeast Asia has classically coalesced". Scott's famous “moral economy” derives from the subsistence vulnerability of rural cultivators: with only a fine line separating sufficiency and hunger, peasants are driven to resist any externally imposed measures that undermine local security or disrupt social protections. But what happens to peasant politics when the rural economy becomes much more affluent and when peasants become a target of state subsidy and electorally-motivated benevolence? What happens when resistance is transformed into desire? This paper addresses these questions by exploring orientations to power in the northern Thai village of Ban Tiam. It briefly surveys four different domains of power: the supernatural world, the state, the market and the community. The paper argues that these overlapping networks of power are important elements in a new form of "political society" (a term borrowed from Chatterjee) which is oriented towards binding powerful forces into relationships of productive exchange. In forming this new political society, Ban Tiam’s peasants are confronting some of the classic economic and political challenges faced by middle-income countries.