Discussant: Amara Pongsapitch, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

This is a special panel aiming to pay homage to and celebrate Prof. Charles F. Keyes’ career achievements and contribution to Asian studies, particularly the anthropological studies of the Golden Peninsula.

Engaging with a major portion of Charles Keyes’ scholarship on mainland Southeast Asia’s changing ‘moral economy’ of the ethno-culturally complex rural world, the panel aims to revisit debates concerning village studies and to relocate the rural village in the broader contexts of rapid urbanization and transnationalization.

What is the rural village (mu ban/kampong) in the post-development world? Has it actually vanished? What has happened to rural villages after decades of urbanization and transnationalization? How have ‘rural’ villagers experienced and responded to the onslaught of urbanization and transnationalization?

Papers presented in this panel will examine and explore these questions from different ethnographic and methodological angles. Marjorie Muecke discusses theoretical and methodological aspects of her longitudinal research project on reproductive health and families during the era of rapid policy-directed "development" and urbanization in Northern Thailand. Eric Thompson explores evolving rural identities as experienced by Malay migrants living and working in Malaysia’s urbanizing areas. Maureen Hickey uses her case studies of Thai-Isan taxi drivers in Bangkok to locate the issues concerning globalization on the ground and the geographies of transportation to link the local and the global. Pattana Kitiarsa takes the ‘contracted and imagined life’ of transnational labor migrants from Northeastern Thailand’s countryside as popular culture. Altogether, they contribute to issues of how and why rural villages should be located and viewed in the contemporary contexts of urbanization and transnationalization.

Marjorie A. Muecke, University of Washington

Long-term ethnographic relationships such as those created by Charles Keyes with "his village" of Northeastern Thailand can yield new understandings of the intricate processes of social change and can sometimes make new knowledge by demonstrating cause-effect relationships. Dr. Keyes’ mentorship guided a number of his first doctoral students, myself included, to follow suit and develop long-term relationships with our respective "fields." The new knowledge that emerges from this work involves greater understanding of the fluid and complex nature of "the field" studied and of its ever-metamorphosing relationships to the world at large, as well as of the ethnographer’s own changing situatedness in the world over time. In contrast to the knowledge based upon static images and outcomes provided by cross-sectional studies, an ethnographer’s studies over the long-term with the same people or place provide keys to the processes of change because each visit to "the field" provides a comparative perspective on previous encounters and points to emergent trends. Yet the gains are obtained against steep odds.

In this presentation I will identify and examine theoretical and methodological issues that long term study raise, using examples from my experience in a three decade study of families whom I first met in urban Chiang Mai. I will discuss the challenges posed and the benefits promised by long-term study during the era of rapid policy-directed "development" and urbanization of Thailand. The paper will focus on the parallel sea changes that challenge the long-term study of change in people and places: profound changes in anthropological theory; concomitant changes in technology (including the introduction of the computer; advances in medical technology; and the revolutionary shift in ease of distance communication); increased monitoring of all research for observance of ethical standards that were developed in Europe and the USA for empirical interventionist research; and changes in the ethnographer as an instrument of her / his Zeitgeist.

Eric Thompson, National University of Singapore

Malaysian society, like much of Asia, has undergone a transformation from agricultural and rural to industrial and urban. This transformation is not only demographic and economic, but has consequences for cultural beliefs and identity formations. The Malay world has long been a world of frontiers, long-distance trade, and radical mobility. Yet in the wake of European colonialism, Malays came to be seen – and importantly, to see themselves – as a backwards and largely rural community. The "orang kampung" (lit. village person) in particular became a figure of pity if not contempt. This paper maps the details of a cultural construction of rural marginalization in Malay discourse and the political consequences of cosmopolitan chauvinism. In this regard, I argue that it is more productive to see rural conservativism – which in the case of Malaysia includes support for the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS) – as a product of cultural urbanism than as a "natural" characteristic of rural peoples.

Maureen H. Hickey, University of Washington

More than five decades on, rural out-migration remains a central facet of life and livelihood for the majority of Northeastern Thai villagers. But as Thailand increasingly participates in a "globalized" economy and culture focused on Bangkok, and as many Northeastern Thais now spend the majority of their lives as city dwellers, does it make sense to speak of these migrants as "villagers" any longer? How do migrants maintain and build relationships in their "home" villages? How do migrants "place" themselves and their experiences in an increasingly modernized and globalized Thai society? Based on ten-months of dissertation research with taxi drivers from Northeastern Thailand, this paper argues that while more and more migrant taxi drivers are spending the majority of their adult years working in Bangkok, the "village" -- both as a geographic place and as the focus of personal, familial and ethno-cultural identity -- remains at the center of most drivers’ lives. Northeastern taxi drivers in Bangkok continue to frame their migration experiences in terms of traditional masculine responsibilities to provide for their wives, children and extended village communities. Even as drivers struggle to adjust to new economic realities, such as the deregulation of taxi ownership, and to new social priorities, such as providing children with higher education, most drivers continue to "place" themselves, even in an ever expanding and increasingly fragmented social world, in terms of their identities as "village men" who will one day return home full time to farm and to take up positions of local responsibility.

Pattana Kitiarsa, National University of Singapore

Transnational labor migration constitutes multiple sites and signs of cultural production, circulation, and consumption. While recent literature on the subject in the Asia-Pacific region seems to overlook these prolific transient cultural significations, this paper takes Thailand’s labor migratory flows across national borders as forms of popular cultural practice. Representations of the overseas ‘labor-selling’ culture of Thailand’s overseas migrant workers (OMWs) will be gathered from a selection of materials like romantic, tragic, and comedic stories in popular musical genres (e.g., lukthung, molam, and pleng phue chiwit), novels, TV dramas, and films. It is my argument that Thailand’s overseas migrant workers’ identities and selfhoods have been commoditized subjects in the popular cultural media since the mid 1980s. The ways which OMWs’ selfhoods are produced, circulated, and consumed are contingent to the positions subscribed to by people at home rather than their harsh realities abroad. OMWs’ stories are portrayed as the romances of the emerging transnational working class, aiming to place the underprivileged and outclassed selfhoods ‘at home in the world.’ Nurtured by the growing transnational entertaining industry, these popular media weave the webs of self-comforting and nostalgic sensibilities to be marketed and consumed both at home and away.