Rural‐Urban Obfuscations: thinking about urban anthropology and labor migration in Thailand

Abstract

The 2000 SUNTA Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology was awarded to Mary Beth Mills for Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves (1999). The book traces the movement of young women from rural Thailand into urban wage employment, primarily in the capital city of Bangkok. In her analysis Mills explores migration as one of the complex structures that link rural and urban places into a single social formation as well as the ideological conditions that underlie Thai labor mobility and shape its lived experience. The study seeks to make sense of ruralurban dichotomies and to acknowledge their meaningfulness for local actors without reifying the categories themselves. Mills argues that in order to get beyond what Anthony Leeds called the obfuscations of urban‐rural oppositions it is necessary to reframe our understandings of these terms to take account of their discursive meanings and powers. [Labor, rural–urban migration, Thailand]