The Village Concept In The Transformation Of Rural Southeast Asia

Using examples from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, the book considers what scholarship has defined as a village within the rapid changes taking place in rural Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia is one of the most dynamic regions in the world. This volume offers a timely approach to Southeast Asian Studies, covering recent transitions in the realms of urbanism, rural development, politics, and media. While most of the contributions deal with the era of post-independence, some tackle the colonial period and the resulting developments. The volume also includes insights from Southern India. As a tribute to the interdisciplinary project of Southeast Asian Studies, this book brings together authors from disciplines as diverse as area studies, sociology, history, geography, and journalism.

More than the Soil focuses on the social, cultural, economic and technological processes that have transformed rural areas of Southeast Asia. The underlying premise is that rural lives and livelihoods in this region have undergone fundamental change. No longer can we assume that rural livelihoods are founded on agriculture; nor can we assume that people envisage their futures in terms of farming. The inter-penetration of the rural and urban, and the degree to which rural people migrate between rural and urban areas, and shift from agriculture to non-agriculture, raises fundamental questions about how we conceptualise the rural Southeast Asia and the households to be found there.

This volume explores how migration is playing a central role in the renewing and reworking of urban spaces in the fast growing and rapidly changing cities of Asia. Migration trends in Asia entered a new phase in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War which marked the advent of a renewed phase of globalization. Cities have become centrally implicated in globalization processes and, therefore, have become objects and sites of intense study. The contributors to this book reflect on the impact and significance of migration with a particular focus on the contested spaces that are emerging in urban contexts and the economic, social, religious and cultural domains with which they intersect. They also examines the roles and effects of different forms of migration in the cauldron of urban change, from low-skilled domestic migrants who maintain a close engagement with their rural homes, to highly skilled/professional transnational migrants, to legal and illegal international migrants who arrive with the hope of transforming their livelihoods. Providing a mosaic of insights into the links between migration, marginalization and contestation in Asia’s urban contexts, Asian Cities, Migrant Labor and Contested Spaces will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, migration studies, urban studies and human geography.

Rural life in Southeast Asia is being transformed by new and intensifying processes of migration and mobility. Migration out of rural areas creates new forms of class mobility, familial relations, production processes and income. Migration into rural areas creates a new and sometimes marginalized workforce, contestation over resource access, and the juxtaposition of culturally different groups. At the same time, everyday mobility stretches the spatial boundaries of village and family life. The bounded space of the village is no longer adequate to understand the dynamics that are driving (and resulting from) rural social change. This collection of original studies explores the cultural, economic and environmental dimensions of intensifying migration and mobility in rural Southeast Asia at multiple scales. Diverse processes are explored including rural-urban flows, rural-rural movement, everyday mobilities, and international migrations into regional and global labour markets. Drawing on fieldwork in six countries across the region, these essays also explore what migration means for our understanding of class, citizenship, gender and the state in a rapidly changing part of the world. This book was based on two parts of a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

More than the Soil focuses on the social, cultural, economic and technological processes that have transformed rural areas of Southeast Asia. The underlying premise is that rural lives and livelihoods in this region have undergone fundamental change. No longer can we assume that rural livelihoods are founded on agriculture; nor can we assume that people envisage their futures in terms of farming. The inter-penetration of the rural and urban, and the degree to which rural people migrate between rural and urban areas, and shift from agriculture to non-agriculture, raises fundamental questions about how we conceptualise the rural Southeast Asia and the households to be found there.

In the 1970s, Thailand was developing but poor and largely agrarian. By the 1980s it had become the fastest growing large economy in the world and, in the process, made the transformation from a low-income to a middle-income economy. Fast forward to 2010 and Thailand had climbed yet another rung in the development ladder to become, according to World Bank criteria, an upper middle-income economy. Throughout this period of economic and social transformation, contrary to historical experience and theoretical models, one thing has remained constant: the central role of Thai smallholder farming. This conundrum—the persistence of the smallholder in a time of extraordinary change—lies at the heart of this book. In More than Rural author Jonathan Rigg explores how people in the countryside have adapted to their changing world, the new opportunities available, and the consequences for rural life and living. The Thai government has successfully “developed” the countryside, but with unexpected results. New household forms have emerged, women have become mobile in a manner few expected, and relations between rural and urban have changed. Yet the smallholder has persisted, and Rigg’s attempts to understand why offer a fresh perspective on Thailand’s development. Setting aside the urban, industrial point of view that we so often privilege, Rigg asks different questions about Thailand’s development. What if, he wonders, the present changes are not simply way stations, transitions to the main act of urbanization? What if they represent a new form of rural livelihood? Rigg’s thoughtful, nuanced approach to agrarian change—viewing the countryside as more than agriculture, the rural as more than the countryside, and rural people as more than farmers—offers insights into Thailand’s wider transformations (class identities, intergenerational relations), its political impasse, and more. Based on over three-and-a-half decades of fieldwork in seventeen villages, across three regions, and encompassing more than one thousand households, and a deep knowledge of primary and published sources, More than Rural is a significant work with implications for contemporary development across Asia and the global South.