² For seminal discussions of the emergence of the closed corporate village in Java, see Wolf, Eric, “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java”, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (1957): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Breman, Jan, The Village on Java and the Early Colonial State, CASP 1 (Rotterdam: Comparative Asian Studies Programme, Erasmus University, 1980)Google Scholar. For a more general critique of the village as it is often presented in Southeast Asian studies, see Kemp, Jeremy, Seductive Mirage: The Search for the Village Community in Southeast Asia, Comparative Asian Studies 3 (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1988)Google Scholar.

³ See Kemp, J., “Peasants and Cities: The Cultural and Social Image of the Thai Peasant Village Community”, Sojourn 4 (1989): 6–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Tönnies, F., Community and Society (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), original publication 1887Google Scholar.

⁵ Gusfield, J.R., Community: A Critical Response, Key Concepts in the Social Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 10Google Scholar.

⁶ Embree, J., “Thailand — A Loosely Structured Social System”, American Anthropologist 52 (1950): 181–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ For Bangchan itself see Sharp, L. et al. , Siamese Rice Village: A Preliminary Study of Bangchan 1948–1949 (Bangkok: Cornell Research Center, 1953)Google Scholar; Hanks, L.M., Rice and Man (Chicago: Aldine Atherton, 1972)Google Scholar; and Sharp, L. & Hanks, L.M., Bang Chan: Social History of a Rural Community in Thailand (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. For the nearby settlement of Bangkhuad see Kaufman, H.K., Bangkhuad: A Community Study in Thailand (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J.J. Augustin, 1960)Google Scholar.

⁸ For example, see the discussion on pp. 280–84 of Turton, A., “Northern Thai Peasant Society: Twentieth Century Transformations in Political and Jural Structures”, Journal of Peasant Studies 3 (1984): 267–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Kemp, , Seductive MirageGoogle Scholar. Breman, Jan, The Shattered Image: Construction and Deconstruction of the Village in Colonial Asia, Comparative Asian Studies 2 (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1988)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Wilson, C.M., “The nai kong in Thai Administration, 1824–68”, Contributions to Asian Studies 15 (1980): 42–57Google Scholar.

¹¹ See Tomsugi, Takashi, “The Land System in Central Thailand”, The Developing Economies 7, no. 3 (1969): 288Google Scholar. More generally, Prince Damrong remarked: “the government used to mobilize the common people, wherever they lived, through their divisional and sub-divisional heads. These men were thereby enabled to give orders with disregard for district boundaries, as a result of which there were struggles over territories and the common people's service and commutation tax”. Quoted in Bunnag, Tej, The Provincial Administration of Siam 1892–1915 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 109Google Scholar.

¹² See Reid, A., “The Structure of Cities in Southeast Asia, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11, no. 2 (1980): 235–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the Chiangmai valley in northern Thailand see Wijeyewardene, G., “Great City on the River Ping: A Theory, Mainly about Chiangmai”, International Conference on Thai Studies, 22–24 08 1984, vol. 1Google Scholar: Rural Thai Society/Development of Thai Economy (Bangkok: Thai Studies Program, Chulalongkorn University, 1984), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.

¹³ “There would be no kingdom in the Indies more populous than Siam if the same conditions as those that prevail on the banks of the rivers were to be found elsewhere. But those who, like myself, have spent some time travelling there know that there are fearful deserts and vast wildernesses where one only finds wretched little huts, often as much as seven or eight leagues distant from one another.” Gervaise, N., The Natural and Political History of the Kingdom of Siam (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1989), p. 57Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Hallet, H.S., A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1890), p. 444Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Tomosugi, T., A Structural Analysis of Thai Economic History: Case Study of a Northern Chao Phraya Delta Village, I.D.E. Occasional Papers Series: 17 (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 1980), pp. 22–23Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For the emergence and role of “the Indian village” in the literature on rural India see Dumont, L., “The ‘Village Community’ from Munro to Maine”, Contributions to Indian Sociology 9 (1966): 67–89Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Siffin, W.J., The Thai Bureaucracy: Institutional Change and Development (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1966), p. 73Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Sein, Daw Mya, The Administration of Burma, Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. xxiiiGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Whereas a shift from non-spatially defined administrative relations was an early aim of the reforms, it took some time for the present explicitly territorially defined system to emerge. The “village” as an administrative unit was initially a unit of ten households close to one another. Variations on this approach included units of between five and twenty houses. Bunnag, Tej, The Provincial Administration of Siam, pp. 109–111Google Scholar. It was not until 1914 that an Act “codified the decision reached at the meeting of the superintendent commissioners in 1904 when it had been decided to define the village on the basis not of the number of inhabitants but of the natural features of the locality”. See Ibid., p. 198.

²⁰ See Ingram, J.C., Economic Change in Thailand 1850–1970 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), pp. 43–45Google Scholar.

²¹ See van der Heide, J. Homan, “The Economical Development of Siam During the Last Half Century”, Journal of the Siam Society 3 (1906): 74–101Google Scholar.

²² An issue explicitly raised by Hanks, Lucien some twenty-five years ago in “The Corporation and the Entourage: A Comparison of Thai and American Social Organization”, Catalyst 2 (1966): 55–63Google Scholar.

²³ Potter, J.M., Thai Peasant Social Structure (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Kemp, J., “Kinship and Locality in Hua Kok”, Journal of the Siam Society 70 (1982): 100–113Google Scholar; and “Processes of Kinship and Community in North-Central Thailand”, in Cognition and Social Organization in Southeast Asia, ed. Hüsken, F. and Kemp, J. (Leiden: KILTV Press, 1990), pp. 91–107Google Scholar.

²⁵ Furnivall, J.S., An Introduction to the Political Economy of Burma (Rangoon: Peoples' Literature Committee and Publishing House, 1957), pp. 30–31Google Scholar; and Breman, , The Village on JavaGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Kemp, J., “A Tail Wagging the Dog: The Patron-Client Model in Thai Studies”, in Private Patronage and Public Power: Political Clientism in the Modern State, ed. Clapham, C. (London: Frances Pinter Ltd., 1982), pp. 142–61Google Scholar.

²⁷ Primary sources of revenue included the goods and services rendered by phrai or payments in lieu, the profits from royal trading monopolies and, increasingly important in the nineteenth century, profits from the sale of tax farms.

²⁸ Or in the case of the help traditionally given in housebuilding, a more general obligation to return such aid if called upon to do so.

²⁹ In other words, the kinds of relationships which are rather too broadly described as patron-client.

³⁰ Wijeyewardene, , “Great City on the River Ping”, p. 21Google Scholar.

³¹ Moerman, M., Agricultural Change and Peasant Choice in a Thai Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

³² Vickery, M., “Thai Regional Elites and the Reforms of King Chulalongkorn”, Journal of Asian Studies 29 (1979): 863–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Johnston, D.B., “Bandit, Nakleng, and Peasant in Rural Thai Society”, Contributions to Asian Studies 15 (1980): 98Google Scholar. See also Johnston, , “Rural Society and the Rice Economy in Thailand 1880–1930” (PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 1975), pp. 167–71Google Scholar.

³⁴ Ishii, Yoneo, “A Note on Buddhist Millenarian Revolts in Northeastern Siam”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 6 (1975): 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ This was the system observed in Trang in 1903 by C.W. Kynnersley. “Under the Ampur is the Kam-nan or village headman. Of these there are about 30 in Trang…. Under the Kam-nan is the Phoo-yai-ban or head of 10 houses. The people of 10 houses or any collection of houses up to 20 elect the Phoo-yai-ban and Phoo-yai-bans elect the Kam-nan, one of their number.” “Notes of Visits to Puket, Ghirbee and Trang”, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 42 (1905): 14Google Scholar.

³⁶ Nor, for that matter, to tap as a source of local leadership. Tej notes frequent early reports of the failure of the elected phu yai ban to be effective leaders which sound remarkably similar to comments made much later by anthropologists and others, thereby raising once more the whole question of the social character of the units they supposedly led. Bunnag, Tej, The Provincial Administration of Siam, pp. 189–91Google Scholar.

³⁷ As Sydel Silverman observes: “…his use of key notions such as ‘community’, ‘tradition’ and ‘way of life’ … have seemed so self evident and persuasive — that they now make up a basic vocabulary of the peasant literature, both in anthropology and outside of it”. Silverman, , “The Peasant Concept in Anthropology”, Journal of Peasant Studies 7 (1977): 56Google Scholar.

³⁸ Two examples of reports by Toshio Yatsushiro arising from this type of work are “A Summary of the Northeast Villagers Approach to their Problems and Needs: A Study in Village Organization and Leadership in Thailand”, mimeo (Bangkok: USOM/Research Division, 1966); and The Village Organizer in Thailand: A Study of His Needs and Problems (Bangkok, Department of Community Development, Ministry of Interior and USOM/Thailand, 1964)Google Scholar.

³⁹ For instance, Blakeslee, D.J., Huff, L.W. and Kickert, R.W., Village Security Pilot Study: Northeast Thailand (Bangkok: Joint Thai-U.S. Military Research and Development Center, 1965)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ A good example containing explicit references to the ideology of community development is the Evaluation Report on Community Development Accomplishments: Fiscal Year BE 2510 (1967) (Bangkok: Research and Evaluation Division, Department of Community Development).

⁴¹ Locale, size of settlement, local communications plus historical and ecological factors would all have played a part in determining the existence and strength of such connections. Even where found it should in no way be assumed that the social boundaries of such linkages coincided with those of some natural village community.

⁴² Piker, S., “The Closing of the Frontier”, Contributions to Asian Studies 9 (1976): 7–26Google Scholar.

⁴³ Hirsch, P., “Bounded Villages and the State on the Thai Periphery”, Paper presented at the CASA Workshop, “The Village Revisited: Community and Locality in Southeast Asia”,Amsterdam,7–9 April 1980, pp. 7–8Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Phongphit, Seri “Introduction”, in Back to the Roots: Village and Self-Reliance in a Thai Context, ed. Phongphit, Seri (Bangkok: Rural Development Documentation Centre [RUDOC], Village Institution Promotion [VIP] 1986), pp. 13–21Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 15.

⁴⁶ Tongyou, Apichart, “Village: Autonomous Society”, in Back to the Roots, ed. Phongphit, Seri, p. 47Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Nartsupha, Chattip, “The Village Economy in Pre-capitalist Thailand”, in Back to the Roots, ed. Phongphit, Seri, pp. 155–56Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Lysa, Hong, Thailand in the Nineteenth Century: Evolution of the Economy and Society (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1984), pp. 142–51Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Evers, H.D., Korff, R. and Pas-Ong, Suparp, “Trade and State Formation: Siam in the Early Bangkok Period”, Modern Asian Studies 21 (1987): 751–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ See Kemp, J., “Cognatic descent and the generation of social stratification in South-East Asia”, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 134 (1978): 63–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.