The Village In Transition

INTRODUCTION Starting from the 1950s, Thailand had experienced unprecedented economic boom in the nation’s history until the 1980s. The average annual growth in the 1960s was 8%, 7%in the 1970s, and 4-6% in the beginning of the 1980s [1]. Thai people, especially those who are in the nation’s capital, Bangkok, enjoyed the economic boom and started to have “modernized” lifestyle. However, behind the scene of the national economic success, rural villages were forced to face predicament because of the urbancentered industrial economy based on neo-liberal economic beliefs. In light of the historical context of the relationship between Thai community and the high-powered state authority, examining one specific community which is struggling to find a way of development in the globalized world today will be of great help to understand the contemporary notion of rural development in Thailand. In this paper, focus is centered on a village called Mae Kampong, which has been under great influence of the Royal project and the Government in terms of development, and yet has a great deal of potential for achieving a selfreliant way of community governance because of its traits as a traditional agrarian rural community. This paper aims to examine the socio-cultural changes that occurred in the village over the course of the contemporary development and ultimately the outlook of community self-sufficiency and selfreliance, deploying a realistic and empirical approach to look at the Thailand’s contemporary phenomena happening in the rural communities. Mae Kampong is the third village of seven villages in Huai Kaew sub-district, Mae On district, Chiang Mai province, Northern Thailand, known as a major producer of Northern Thai traditional tea product called Mieng. It is located east of Chiang Mai province, about 50 kilometers from the city, average 1,300 meters above the sea level. It has been about 100 years since the first generation of this village that had been searching for suitable places for tea cultivation came from nearby areas to settle in the location and started to form the community. Now, the village has 134 households and 374 people in total. The village consists of six clusters, Pang Nok, Pang Klang, Pang Khon, Pang Ton, Pan Nai No.1, and Pang Nai No.2.

China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or migrate to cities, and that cyclical transit and engagement with new technoscientific and medical practices is transforming village life. In this thoughtful ethnography, Gonçalo Santos paints a richly detailed portrait of one rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region. Unlike previous studies of rural-urban relations and migration in China, Chinese Village Life Today—based on Santos’s more than twenty years of field research—starts from a rural community’s point of view rather than the perspective of major urban centers. Santos considers the intimate choices of village families in the face of larger forces of modernization, showing how these negotiations shape the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to personal hygiene and public sanitation. Santos also outlines the advantages of a rural existence, including a degree of autonomy over family planning and community life that is rare in urban China. Filled with vivid anecdotes and keen observations, this book presents a fresh perspective on China’s urban-rural divide and a grounded theoretical approach to rural transformation.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

Mrs. St. Ehrlich, a leading Yugoslav sociologist, seized the opportunity just before World War II to examine objectively the fast-vanishing style of life of Yugoslav peasants and villagers. This book, based on a widely distributed questionnaire and many interviews, provides a new picture, based on sympathetic understanding of family relationships and customs in 300 villages. The early chapters deal with the historical background of Yugoslavia and lay a groundwork for the assessment of the influence of centuries of Austrian and Ottoman domination, the brief years of independence, and the recent penetration of a money economy. Subsequent chapters explore attitudes and traditions relating to intra-family relationships. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book offers a set of methods, drawing on the tool kit of modern economics, to ascertain what Vietnam's economy would have looked like without reforms and assesses what types of households are likely to gain from the reforms. The book's findings have implications on broader issues of social protection in developing rural economies.