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Thailand Rural Social Patterns
Certain basic rural social patterns were discernable in
modern Thai society. According to United States anthropologist
Jack M. Potter, "The spatially defined rural village, which
receives the allegiance of its members, furnishes an important
part of their social identity, manages its own affairs and
communal property, and has its own temple and school, is present
in all parts of Thailand as an ideal cultural model, although in
many cases the actual form of community life only approximates
it."
Affecting the degree to which specific communities approached
the model were "ecological, economic and demographic
circumstances and the nature of rural administration," Potter
writes. In the densely settled central plain, villages were often
spatially indistinct, although boundaries defined by patterns of
marriage, wat (Buddhist religious complex) attendance, and
other social factors might be discerned. In other cases, some of
the important features of a functioning community were lacking.
Thus, if the proportion of nonlandholders was high and if
landowners were absentee and did not provide the social or
political leadership typically supplied by wealthy local
peasants, community structure was weak.
The wat in the 1980s remained the center of the rural
community in
many respects, although some of its functions, e.g., as an
educational
center, were lost, and it was increasingly difficult to retain
monks. Most rural communities built and maintained a wat
because,
as Potter states, the Thai consider it "necessary for a civilized
social existence." The wat included the special quarters
and facilities
reserved for monks, a building for public worship and religious
ceremony, and a community meeting place. Typically, the
wat was run by a temple committee that consisted of
prominent laymen as well as monks
who had left the sangha without prejudice. Abbots and
senior monks
often enjoyed considerable prestige. In times of personal crisis,
people often sought their advice.
The wat was first of all a center for religious
ceremony, much of
which was regularly carried out according to a ritual calendar.
These
scheduled rites involved the community as a whole, even if their
ultimate purpose was the acquisition of merit by individuals.
Other
irregularly held rites also took place in the wat and
almost always included the community or a significant segment of
it. The temple was also the locus for astrological and other
quasi-magical activities. Although such rites were outside the
canon of Buddhism, they were important to the community and were
often carried out by monks. Thus, a person would go to a monk
versed in these matters to learn the propitious day for certain
undertakings (for example, a wedding) or to be cured of certain
illnesses by the application of holy water. A large wat
usually had a crematorium; almost all dead were cremated.
The temple committee often administered a loan fund from
which the poor of the community might borrow in emergencies. The
wat was also the repository of mats, dishes, and other
housewares that could be borrowed by members of the community. If
an aged person had nowhere else to go, the wat was a
refuge. The wat was not reserved solely for serious
matters; entertainment and dances open to the community were also
held there.
Within the village in the 1980s, the basic organizational
unit was the family, which changed its character in the course of
a developmental cycle. A nuclear family became, in time, a larger
unit, but the death of the older generation once again left a
nuclear family. Typically, a man went to live with the parents of
the woman he married. Such residence was temporary except in the
case of the youngest daughter. She and her husband (and their
unmarried children) remained with her parents,taking care of them
in their old age and inheriting the house when they died. Thus,
at some point in the cycle, the household included what has been
referred to as a matrilineal extended stem family: the aging
parents, their youngest daughter and her husband, and the younger
couple's children.
Emerging from this developmental cycle was a cluster of
related and cooperating households consisting of the extended
stem family household and the households of those daughters who
had settled nearby with their husbands. That pattern was
predicated on the continuing control over land and other
resources by the senior couple. The closeness of these related
households and the extent of their cooperation in a range of
domestic activities varied considerably. With a growing shortage
of arable land in parts of the country and the aggregation of
substantial holdings by a limited number of landowners, the
pattern was no longer as common as it had been. The senior couple
may have had little or no land to allocate to their older
daughters, and the daughters and their husbands may have had to
move elsewhere. In the case of wholly landless agricultural
workers, even the extended stem family might not be possible.
Most villages were divided into local units or neighborhoods.
In the North, neighborhoods were often the entities that on a
weekly basis collectively provided food for the monks in the
local wat, but these neighborhoods also engaged in other
forms of cooperation. Inasmuch as the nucleus of a neighborhood,
perhaps all of it, often consisted of related households,
activities such as house-raisings might be undertaken in response
to either territorial or kinship requirements. If the community
was the result of relatively recent pioneering by landless
families from other communities, the neighborhood was important,
and those living in the same area might come to address each
other in kinship terms.
The labor exchange system was initially based on villagers'
relative parity in landholding and their participation in
subsistence agriculture. Typically, those involved in an exchange
system were kin or neighbors, but the system sometimes extended
beyond these categories. Each household arranged with others to
provide labor at various stages in the agricultural cycle; in
return, the same number of units of labor would be provided to
those who had worked for it. Besides a labor exchange, the system
provided opportunities for socializing and feasting. Although the
arrangements were made by a single household with other specific
households, the regularity with which representatives of
households worked together gave the households a grouplike
character.
The growing commercialization of agriculture in certain parts
of the country and increasing landlessness and tenancy in the
1980s diminished the ubiquity of reciprocal work arrangements.
Wealthy peasants hired labor; those who had no land or too little
to subsist on worked for wages. Commercialization alone, however,
did not prevent the use of a labor exchange system if those in it
held roughly equivalent amounts of land. In some cases, a
household would hire labor for one task and engage in the
exchange system for others.
Peasants could be categorized on the basis of the nature of
their land rights and the quantity of the land they held. The
holdings that made a peasant family rich in one part of Thailand
might not make it rich elsewhere. A rich rural family was one
with substantial landholdings, some of which it might rent out.
Moreover, if a family had the capital to hire agricultural labor
and the implements necessary to cultivate additional land, it
might rent plots from others. In any case, such a family would
rely almost exclusively on hired labor rather than on the system
of labor exchange, and it was likely to invest in other local
enterprises, such as rice mills, thereby acquiring additional
sources of income. The category of rich peasants could be
subdivided into those with very large quantities of land and
those with smaller but still substantial amounts. Usually that
distinction would correlate with the magnitude of their
nonfarming enterprises and the extent to which they had money to
lend to others. In any case, rich peasants tended to be
creditors, while other peasants were often debtors.
At the other end of the scale were the agricultural laborers,
who held no land as owners or tenants except, perhaps, for the
small plot on which their houses stood. To the extent that
opportunities were available, they supported themselves as hired
farm workers. Life was so precarious for some families, however,
that they had to resort to hunting and gathering. Between the
wealthy peasants and agricultural workers were two other
categories. The families in the first group had sufficient land
(some of it rented) to meet their own rice needs. If there were a
crop surplus, it would be sold, but the families in this category
did not produce primarily for the market, as the rich peasants
did. They might also acquire cash through wage labor from time to
time if opportunities were available. The families in the second
category owned less land and had to rent additional parcels.
Owned and rented holdings combined, however, did not always
provide the means for subsistence, so these families frequently
had to resort to wage labor. Not all tenants were poor. In some
cases, tenants did well in good crop and market years,
particularly in central Thailand. In general, however, the tenant
farmer's situation was precarious. Rents, whether in cash or in
kind, tended to be fixed without regard for the size of the
harvest, and in a bad year tenant farmer families were likely to
go into debt. Tenants and agricultural laborers had little or
nothing of their own to pass on to their children.
In some areas, particularly in central Thailand, the land was
controlled by absentee landlords who lived in Bangkok or in
provincial towns and for whom landownership was another form of
investment. They could have direct or indirect effect on the
social and political lives of their tenants, and some
occasionally acted as patrons to their tenants. At the local
level, however, it was the rich peasant who wielded political
power and was granted deference by others in the community.
Differences in wealth were consistent with the Thai villager's
understanding of the Buddhist concept of merit
(see Religion
, this ch.). According to this view, the accumulation of merit led
not to nirvana but to a better personal situation in this world,
preferably in this life. Wealth signified that one had merit. One
might, therefore, demonstrate one's merit by striving and
succeeding. Villagers at the lower end of the social scale,
however, sometimes questioned the doctrine of merit if they
perceived the behavior of those at the upper end as unrighteous.
Most observers agreed that the patron-client relationship was
pervasive in Thai society, not only at the village level but
throughout the military and the bureaucracy. There was less
agreement on its links to a class system and the degree to which
the relationship was typically marked by social ties of affection
and concern as opposed to a clearly calculated assessment of
relative economic or political advantage. At the village level,
it was not necessary to be rich to have a client, although a
wealthy family was likely to have more than one client. It was
possible for an ordinary peasant (although not a landless one) to
provide limited benefits to someone less fortunate in return for
certain services. Often such a relationship was arranged between
kin. In the modern era, however, it was the wealthy villager who
could provide benefits and expect, even demand, certain services
from his client.
In principle, a patron-client relationship lasted only so
long as both parties gained something from it, and the
relationship could be broken at the option of either. Often,
however, the client had few alternatives and would remain in the
relationship in the hope of eliciting more benefits than had
hitherto been forthcoming. To the extent, however, that prestige
and power accrued to the person (or family) who had and could
retain a large number of clients, the patron was motivated to
provide benefits to those dependent on him.
The patron-client relationship also linked villagers and
persons at other levels of the social, political, and economic
orders: leading figures in the village, themselves patrons of
others in the rural community, became clients of officials,
politicians, or traders at the district or provincial levels. In
such cases, clientship might reinforce the status of the rich
villager who could, at least occasionally, call on his patron at
a higher level for benefits that he might in turn use to bind his
own clients to him. Just the fact that the rich villager was
known to have a powerful patron outside the village could enhance
his status.
Data as of September 1987
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