Rural Thai
Rural Thailand Featured in Recent Blog Posts
Sometimes very simple, homespun blog entries give very fine portraits of people and places. Recent posts by a New Zealand man about his adopted home in Rural Thailand provide a good example. The blogger, who goes by MeMock, was traveling in Australia and New Zealand with his Thai wife and daughters last week when his […]
Rural Thai Politics and the 2006 Military Coup [journal article review]
Though his corruption was legendary, Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Prime Minister of Thailand, was quite popular with the Rural Thai people, the majority of the electorate in that nation. When the Thai military removed him from power on September 19, 2006, the rationale for the coup by his opponents was that the elections which he […]
Excellent Roads Foster Pride in Rural Thailand [journal article review]
Until the 1970s, rural Thailand’s Suphanburi Province, located only 100 km north of Bangkok, was extremely isolated from the rest of the country. The province was the butt of jokes by other Thai people because their roads were either nonexistent or in such bad condition as to be virtually impassable. A fable told at the […]
Kathina Ceremony of Rural Thailand
Over the next week or two, villages throughout rural Thailand will be holding kathina ceremonies—events that reinforce commitments to such Buddhist values as generosity, selflessness, and charity. The highlight of the kathina ceremony, which lasts from one to three days, is the presentation of gifts and new robes to the Buddhist monks in local temples […]
Women Help Resolve Political Conflicts in Rural Thailand [journal article review]
The intensity of local political elections in Rural Thailand can place immense stresses on Thai women, who have to maintain harmony within and between communities. In contrast to other authors, who see local Thai politics as primarily a male preserve, Katherine Bowie recognizes, in a recent journal article, the important role that women play as […]
Toleration for Transexual Boys in Rural Thailand
A rural Thai secondary school recently opened a third toilet, between the boys and the girls rooms, for students who feel they are transsexuals. A BBC story last week on the new arrangement in the community of Kampang includes a photo of the icon for the transgendered toilet: a human figure representing half a boy […]
High Fuel Costs Affect Thai Farmers
Rural Thai farmers are coping with increased costs of fuel by abandoning their machinery and relearning how to use water buffaloes to plough their rice fields. According to a news report last Saturday, diesel tractors have been used commonly all over the Thai countryside in recent decades, but with the high cost of fuel recently, […]
A Towering Achievement for Rural Thailand [journal article review]
Banharn Silpa-archa, a corrupt politician from rural Thailand, is as skilled in fostering local pride as he is in fighting yaa baa, the local name for methamphetamine. Yoshinori Nishizaki, who wrote a fascinating article a few months ago about Banharn’s nonviolent campaign to get the young rural Thai people to avoid drugs, has written another […]
The Peaceful Politics of Yaa Baa in Thailand [journal article review]
Banharn Silpa-archa, a leading Thai politician, has frequently been criticized in the press for corruption and scandals, but he is well loved in the rural Thai province of Suphanburi, north of Bangkok. A recent journal article describes his nonviolent approach to dealing with a major social problem in rural Thailand—drug use by young people. His […]
Prosperity Increases on Rural Thai Farms [journal article review]
The economic and social characteristics of rural Thailand improved dramatically between 1987 and 2004, according to a recent analysis. In 2004, two researchers gathered data from two different provinces in rural Thailand—one in the Central Plains and the other in the Northeast—in order to make comparisons with 1987 findings from the same two areas. The […]
