1 Raymond Williams, The country and the city (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 196.

2 Among many such studies documenting such change see Rigg, Jonathan and Ritchie, Mark M., ‘Production, consumption, and imagination in Rural Thailand’, Journal of Rural Studies 18, 4 (2002): 359–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Philip Hirsch, ‘What is the Thai village?’, in National identity and its defenders: Thailand today, ed. Craig Reynolds (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2002), pp. 262–76; Rigg, Jonathan, Veeravongs, Suriya, Veeravongs, Lalida and Rohitarachoon, Piyawadee, ‘Reconfiguring rural spaces and remaking rural lives in Central Thailand’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 39, 3 (2008): 355–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Attachak Sattayanurak, ‘Changes in the perception of “Thai rural society” and a new model for resource management’, Institute of Developing Economics, Japan External Trade Organization, VRF Series 455 (Feb. 2010); Dayley, Robert, ‘Thailand's agrarian myth and its proponents’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 46, 4 (2011): 342–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keyes, Charles, ‘“Cosmopolitan” villagers and populist democracy in Thailand’, South East Asia Research 20, 3 (2012): 343–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrew Walker, Thailand's political peasants: Power in the modern rural economy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); Revisiting rural places: Pathways to poverty and prosperity in Southeast Asia, ed. Jonathan Rigg and Peter Vandergeest (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012); Roland Poupon, The Thai food complex: From rice fields to industrial and organic foods (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2013).

3 Rigg and Vandergeest, Revisiting rural places, p. 7.

4 Walker, Thailand's political peasants, p. 6.

5 Rigg and Vandergeest, Revisiting rural places, p. 5.

6 Keyes, ‘“Cosmopolitan” villagers’, pp. 354–5; Thomas Fuller, ‘Antigovernment protestors vow to block elections in Thailand’, New York Times, 22 Dec. 2013; http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/world/asia/coming-election-widens-rift-in-thailands-political-crisis.html?_r=0 (last accessed 20 Dec. 2014).

7 Interview by the authors with Singchai Thamping, T. Tonthong, A. Muang, Lamphun, 23 July 2013.

8 The wai is an everyday gesture of salutation, respect, and worship in Thailand made by placing hands together in a palm-to-palm, lotus-like shape and raising them near the chest, chin, or face. The etiquette of the wai, among other things, demands that social inferiors show respect to those with higher social status by raising hands high near the face.

9 Tyrell Haberkorn, Revolution interrupted: Farmers, students, law, and violence in northern Thailand (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), p. 14.

10 See Haberkorn, Revolution interrupted, for documentation of the assassinations of FFT leaders in the 1970s.

11 Chomchalow, Narong, Somsri, Songpol and Songkhla, Prempree Na, ‘Marketing and export of major tropical fruits from Thailand’, AU Journal of Technology 11, 3 (2008): 133–43Google Scholar.

12 Wong Kai Choo, Longan production in Asia, FAO Report, RAP Publication 2000/20, http://www.fao.org/docrep/fao/003/x6908e/x6908e00.pdf (last accessed 6 Jan. 2014).

13 Lamphun's Northern Regional Industrial Estate (NRIE), created in 1983, employs over 50,000 workers in its 76 private sector plants. Over 70 per cent of employees are women. ‘Industrial estate transforms little Lamphun’, 6 July 2007, US State Department document published by Wikileaks, http://dazzlepod.com/cable/07CHIANGMAI123/ (last accessed 6 Jan. 2014).

14 Philip Hirsch, ‘Nong Nae revisited: Continuity and change in a post-frontier community’, in Rigg and Vandergeest, Revisting rural places, p. 130.

15 See, for example, ‘Thailand: Call for observers in the case of land rights and human rights defenders in Lamphun provincial court’, Asian Human Rights Commission, 4 June 2013, http://www.humanrights.asia/news/urgent-appeals/AHRC-UAC-095-2012 (last accessed 6 Jan. 2014).

16 1 rai = 6.25 hectares.

17 Barrington Moore Jr., Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1966), p. 111.

18 Ibid., p. 111.

19 Ibid., pp. 162–87, 459.

20 Eric R. Wolf, Peasant wars of the twentieth century (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. xiii–xv.

21 Ibid., p. xiv.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., pp. xiv–xv.

24 Ibid., p. xiv.

25 Ibid.

26 Bernstein, Henry and Byers, Terence J., ‘From peasant studies to agrarian change’, Journal of Agrarian Change 1, 1 (2001): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Powell, John Duncan, ‘Peasant society and clientelist politics’, American Political Science Review 64, 2 (1970): 411CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 George Rosen, Peasant society in a changing economy: Comparative development in Southeast Asia and India (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

29 Ibid., pp. 4–11.

30 Ibid., p. 206.

31 Foster, George, ‘Peasant society and the image of the limited good’, American Anthropologist 67, 2 (1965): 267–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Wolf, Peasant wars, p. xiii.

33 Foster, ‘Peasant society’; Wolf, Peasant wars; Moore, Social origins.

34 James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); James C. Scott, Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

35 Scott, The moral economy, pp. 4–5.

36 Ibid., p. 5.

37 Samuel L. Popkin, The rational peasant: The political economy of rural society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

38 Kodmaitrasamduang Chababratchabadtidyaisatan [First enacted Thai code of law] (Bangkok: Royal Academy, Royal Thai Government, n.d.), vol. 1.

39 Saichol Sattayanurak, Phraya Anuman Rajadhon: Prachsamanchonphuniramit ‘Khwampenthai’ [Phraya Anuman Rajadhon: The common folk's philosopher of ‘Thainess’] (Bangkok: Matichon, 2013).

40 Ibid., pp. 140–6.

41 Phraya Anuman Rajadhon, ‘Chiwit khong chaona’, in Ngan niphon chud sombum khong sasadachan Phraya Anuman Rajadhon [The complete works of Professor Anuman Rajadhon] (Bangkok: Krom Silpakorn, 1988), p. 80.

42 Ibid., pp. 79–115.

43 For more support on this point see Keyes, ‘“Cosmopolitan” villagers’, pp. 346–7.

44 Kukrit Pramoj, Red bamboo (Bangkok: Progress Bookstore, 1961).

45 Carle C. Zimmerman, Siam: Rural economic survey, 1930–31 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1999. [repr.]); Kenneth Perry Landon, Siam in transition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1939).

46 Embree, John F., ‘Thailand — A loosely structured social system’, American Anthropologist 52, 2 (1950): 181–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Ibid.: 183–7.

48 See, for example, Lauriston Sharp, Hazel M. Hauck, Kamol Janlekha and Robert Textor, Siamese rice village: A preliminary study of Bang Chan, 1948–1949 (Bangkok: Cornell Research Centre, 1953); Lauriston Sharp and Lucien Mason Hanks, Bang Chan: Social history of a rural community in Thailand (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).

49 Herbert P. Phillips, Thai peasant personality: The patterning of interpersonal behavior in the village of Bang Chan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

50 Piker, Steven, ‘The relationship of belief systems to behavior in rural Thai society’, Asian Survey 8, 5 (1968): 384–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hindley, Donald, ‘Thailand: The politics of passivity’, Pacific Affairs 41, 3 (1968): 355–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Mabry, Bevars D., ‘Peasant economic behavior in Thailand’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 10, 2 (1979): 400–419CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Philips, Thai peasant personality, p. 39.

53 Hindley, ‘Thailand: The politics of passivity’: 360.

54 Sharp, Lauriston, ‘Peasants and politics in Thailand’, Far Eastern Survey 19, 15 (1950): 157–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Loosely structured social systems: Thailand in comparative perspective, ed. Hans Dieter-Evers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1969); Textor, Robert B., ‘The “loose structure” of Thai society: A paradigm under pressure’, Pacific Affairs 50, 3 (1977): 467–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Howard Keva Kaufman, Bangkhuad: A community study of Thailand (New York: J.J. Augustin, 1960); Ingersoll, Jasper, ‘Fatalism in village Thailand’, Anthropology Quarterly 39, 3 (1966): 206–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bunnag, Jane, ‘Loose structure: Factor or fancy? Thai society re-examined’, Journal of the Siam Society 59, 1 (1971): 1–21Google Scholar.

57 Michael Moerman, Agricultural change and peasant choice in a Thai village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Michael Moerman, ‘A Thai village headman as synaptic leader’, in Modern Thai politics: From village to nation, ed. Clark D. Neher (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1979), pp. 229–50.

58 Edward Van Roy, Economic systems of northern Thailand: Structure and change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971); Neher, Clark D., ‘The politics of change in rural Thailand’, Comparative Politics 4, 2: 201–16Google Scholar; Charles Keyes, ‘Local leadership in rural Thailand’, in Neher, Modern Thai politics, pp. 197–228.

59 Jack M. Potter, Thai peasant social structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 34, 147. For greater context on Potter's contribution to the Embree pivot, see Turton, Andrew, ‘The peasantry of Thailand: Scientific and social revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, 4 (1978): 621–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 History and peasant consciousness in South-east Asia, ed. Andrew Turton and Shigeharu Tanabe (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1984), p. 1, quoted in Evans, Grant, ‘Sources of peasant consciousness in South-east Asia: A survey’, Social History 12, 2 (1987): 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reynolds, Craig and Lysa, Hong, ‘Marxism in Thai historical studies’, Journal of Asian Studies 43, 1 (1983): 77–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Jit Phomisak [Somsami Srisudravarna, pseud.] 1957, ‘Chomna khong saktinathai nai padchuban’ [The face of Thai feudalism today], in The Faculty of Law yearbook of 2500 (Bangkok: Faculty of Law, Thammasat University, 1957).

62 Reynolds and Hong, ‘Marxism in Thai historical studies’: 84.

63 Ibid.: 85.

64 Ibid.: 97–8. The long list of contested terms in English includes, among others, feudal/feudalism, nobility, serf, slave, and landlord; and in Thai saktina, phrai, that, chaothidin, chaohuamuang, moonnai, and phrachaopaendin, to name a few. See also Turton and Tanabe, History and peasant consciousness; and Ji Giles Ungpakorn, Radicalizing Thailand: New political perspectives (Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 2003).

65 Ungpakorn, Radicalizing Thailand, p. 11.

66 Bentley, G. Carter, Review of Turton and Tanabe, History and peasant consciousness, in Ethnohistory 33, 1 (1986): 97Google Scholar.

67 Andrew Turton, ‘Limits of ideological domination and the formation of social consciousness’, in Turton and Tanabe, History and peasant consciousness, pp. 19–74.

68 Reynolds and Hong, ‘Marxism in Thai historical studies’: 91.

69 Chatthip Nartsupha, The Thai village economy of the past, trans. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1999 [orig. Thai version 1984]).

70 Ibid., p. 73.

71 Craig Reynolds, ‘Chatthip Nartsupha, his critics, and more criticism’, in Essays on Thailand's economy and society for Professor Chatthip Nartsupha at 72, ed. Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker (Bangkok: Sangsan, 2013), p. 5.

72 See Chatthip, The Thai village economy, chaps. 3 and 4.

73 Attachak, ‘Changes in the perception’, pp. 7–8.

74 Reynolds, ‘Chatthip Nartsupha, his critics’: 12.

75 Chatthip, The Thai village economy, p. 120; Reynolds, ‘Chatthip Nartsupha, his critics’: 9.

76 Attachak, ‘Changes in the perception’; Dayley, ‘Thailand's agrarian myth’.

77 Chatthip, The Thai village economy, pp. 59, 75.

78 See, for example, Charles F. Keyes, Thailand: Buddhist kingdom as modern nation-state (Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamol, 1989); Laothamatas, ‘A tale of two democracies: Conflicting perceptions of elections and democracy in Thailand’, in The politics of elections in Southeast Asia, ed. Robert H. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 201–3; Political change in Thailand: Democracy and participation, ed. Kevin Hewison (London: Routledge, 1997); Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thailand's boom and bust (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1998); Money and power in provincial Thailand, ed. Ruth McVey (Singapore: ISEAS, 2000); Reynolds, National identity; Duncan McCargo and Ukrist Pathmanand, The Thaksinization of Thailand (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2005); and James Ockey, Making democracy: Leadership, class, gender, and political participation in Thailand (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2006).

79 Jeremy Kemp, Seductive mirage: The search for the village community in Southeast Asia (Amsterdam: Center for Asian Studies, 1987); The village in perspective: Community and locality in rural Thailand, ed. Philip Hirsch (Chiang Mai: Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University, 1993); Rigg, Jonathan, ‘Redefining the village and rural life: Lessons from South East Asia’, Geographic Journal 160, 2 (1994): 123–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Philip Hirsch, ‘What is the Thai village?’, in Reynolds, National identity, pp. 262–76; Rigg and Ritchie, ‘Production, consumption, and imagination’.

80 Rigg, Jonathan, ‘Grass-roots development in rural development: A lost cause?’, World Development 19, 2: 119–211Google Scholar; Rigg, Jonathan and Nattapoolwat, Sukanee, ‘Embracing the global in Thailand: Activism and pragmatism in an era of deagrarianization’, World Development 29, 6 (2001): 945–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rigg and Vandergeest, ‘Reconfiguring rural spaces’.

81 Thailand's rice bowl: Perspectives on agricultural and social change in the Chao Phraya Delta, ed. François Molle and Srijantr Thippawal (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2003); Marc Askew, ‘The cultural factor in rural–urban fringe transformation: Land, livelihood, and inheritance in western Nonthaburi, in Thailand's rice bowl, pp. 287–321; Lindsay Falvey, Thai agriculture: Golden cradle of millennia (Bangkok: Kasetsart University Press, 2000); and Poupon, The Thai food complex.

82 Falvey, Thai agriculture.

83 Ibid., p. 200.

84 Ibid., p. 4.

85 Poupon, The Thai food complex.

86 Ibid., p. 281.

87 For elaboration on competing views about the rise of alternative agriculture and ecological movements in Thailand, see Peter Vandergeest's ‘Deagrarianization and reagrarianization: Multiple pathways of change on the Sathing Phra Pennisula’, in Rigg and Vandergeest, Revisiting rural places, pp. 135–56.

88 Walker, Thailand's political peasants, pp. 7–10.

89 Ibid., p. 9.

90 Ibid., pp. 7–10.

91 Ibid., p. 10.

92 Ibid.

93 Thabchumpon, Naruemon and McCargo, Duncan, ‘Urbanized villagers in the 2010 Thai Redshirt protests’, Asian Survey 51, 6 (2011): 1017CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keyes, ‘“Cosmopolitan” villagers’.

94 Walker, Thai political peasants, p. 10.

95 Naruemon and McCargo, ‘Urbanized villagers’: 1005.

96 Ibid.: 1017; Keyes, ‘“Cosmopolitan” villagers’.

97 Hirsch, ‘Nong Nae revisited’, p. 130.

98 Williams, The country and the city, p. 196.

99 Attachak, ‘Changes in the perception’; Dayley, ‘Thailand's agrarian myth’.

100 Williams, The country and the city, p. 196.