‘Cosmopolitan’ Villagers and Populist Democracy in Thailand

Abstract

It is the contention of this paper that, because North Eastern villagers or their urban-dwelling close relatives from North East Thailand have become workers in a global system of labour, they have come to understand their place within Thailand as what the author terms ‘cosmopolitan villagers’ rather than as traditional rice farmers. Even as this transformation has taken place, representations of ‘rural’ North East Thailand that urban Thai encounter in TV programmes, films, fiction and the media have remained predicated on the assumptions that ‘villagers’ still live lives that are primarily agrarian and that they have inadequate or misguided understandings of the larger world. It is this disjunction between the ‘rural’ that cosmopolitan North Easterners actually identify with and the ‘rural’ that Thai urban middle-class people imagine to exist that helps explain why consensus on Thai politics broke down. The actual villagers constitute the base of support for populist movements that in contemporary Thailand have mobilized to make their voices heard not only through demonstrations, but also more significantly through electoral politics.