SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt

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220 The Meaning of Sufficiency Economy International Conference The ritual cycle, together with the agricultural cycle, gave meaning to most villagers for most of their lives from their birth, through their adolescence, courting, and marriage and concluding with their ageing and deaths. There were also other influences on their lives that emanated from the Thai nation-state that the village had long since been incorporated into and the economy linked to markets that extended even beyond Thailand. VILLAGERS EMBRACE CAPITALISM The Village on the Eve of ‘Development’ The village in the early 1960s was not totally self-sufficient. Some cash was generated through the sale of rice, a few other agricultural and craft products and through some wage labor outside of the village. Nonetheless, total cash income per household in 1963 was only about 3,000 baht, then equivalent to US$150. Cash was used for such thing as metal tools, corrugated iron roofing, health care, and especially support of the wat and the monks and novices. The one significant village enterprise was blacksmithing. Until the mid-1960s there were at least four blacksmiths in the village. The main cash crops, while still bringing very small amounts of income to villagers, were khao cao, the dominant varietal of rice in Thailand but different from the glutinous rice consumed by villagers, tobacco, and kenaf, a jute-like fiber crop. Rice was raised in paddy land while tobacco and kenaf were raised on land that was too high for paddy cultivation. By the 1960s a new economic practice was becoming significant especially for village men – namely, non-agricultural work for extended periods especially in Bangkok. In a survey carried out in 1963 I found that about 30% of men over the age of 20 had spent some months or even years working in jobs in Bangkok. While most who engaged in migrant work in the 1960s remitted or saved little money, some became the first entrepreneurs of the village. One young man had earned enough from work for six years in a Chinese noodle factory in Bangkok to open the only shop and the only rice mill in the village. First shop and rice mill in Bãn Nông Tün, established by same man (photos by Jane Keyes) This young man had been able to save sufficient money for his investment during his six years work in a Sino-Thai noodle factory in Bangkok because he knew how to ot thon, to withstand desire for immediate gratification. His ability had been cultivated during his six years as a novice and a monk. In short, he embodied a Buddhist version of the Protestant Ethic 6 . This ability to ot thon was also 6 I developed this interpretation further in another paper (Keyes 1983); also see Keyes (1990 and 1991b).
The Meaning of Sufficiency Economy International Conference 221 characteristic of many women who learned to subordinate their own desires to help their parents and later their husbands and children. This ethic would enable both men and women to work to improve the conditions of their lives and those of their families as they took advantage of new opportunities created by an expanding Thai economy. For villagers to enter successfully into the capitalist economy of Thailand, they also needed basic literacy in standard Thai and basic numeracy. These skills they acquired from government-sponsored primary schooling. Ban Nông Tün, like most villages in northeastern Thailand, had had a government school since the mid-1930s and since the late 1940s almost every villager completed the four years of compulsory primary education. From schooling villagers learned to see themselves as ‘Thai’ even though culturally and linguistically they were ‘Lao’. This identification together with competence in standard Thai and in the fundamentals of arithmetic learned in school enabled many villagers to interact in a Thai-national dominated world (see Keyes 1991a). Village school in the grounds of the wat (Buddhist temple-monastery), 1963 (photo by Jane Keyes) As the Thai economy expanded rapidly from the 1960s on, more and more villagers – including women – would follow their older siblings and parents to Bangkok and elsewhere to find work. Re-orientation of the Village toward ‘Development’ In the 1960s villagers wholeheartedly embraced a new orientation toward the world – namely ‘development’ (kãnphatthanã). This term and what has come to be called the ‘development era’ (samai phatthanã) in Thailand is usually associated with government policies introduced at the time when Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat was the country’s military dictator. There is no question but that some of the development programs introduced by the government over the next decades – especially road-building, rural electrification, and support for industrialization – greatly facilitated growth not only of the national economy but also the economy of rural northeastern Thailand. It was, nonetheless, actions taken by villagers themselves which brought the radical changes to rural lifestyles that they came to associate with ‘development’. One of the most profound changes in village life occurred when village women began to adopt birth control methods. They first did this in the 1970s when it was government policy to promote more births. By the mid-1980s few women were having more than two children. The dramatic change in population in the village can be seen in the following tables comparing population distributions in 1963, 1980 and 2005.
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SUFFiciENcy EcONOMy ANd GRASSROOtS DEvElOPMENt

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