Bang Chan

Social History of a Rural Community in Thailand

Lauriston Sharp, Lucien M. Hanks

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781501721380
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501721403
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

Bang Chan traces the changing cultural characteristics of a small Siamese village during the century and a quarter from its founding as a wilderness settlement outside Bangkok to its absorption into the urban spread of the Thai capital. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book sums up the major findings of a pioneering interdisciplinary research project that began in 1948. Changes in Bang Chan's social organization, technology, economy, governance, education, and religion are portrayed in the context of local and national developments.

CHAPTER 1

Departure

The Road to Bang Chan

Go any day in Bangkok to that great intersection of streets and canals called the Water Gate (Pratū Nām). There the locks hold the fresh water of a vast network of up-country canals and prevent it from pouring out into the tidal canals of Bangkok. Buildings stand between the waterways and the streets and can be entered from either side. Within them big and little vendors sell anything that anyone will buy: golden buckles, squid, Thermos bottles, melons. These days most customers thread their way from the street among rows of country women sitting on their heels next to baskets of prickly durians. A few years ago people were found mainly on the canal side. One then saw the cluster of boats for hire, family skiffs, and slow tubby grain boats scurrying to make way when the steam passenger launch approached from Bāngkapi canal, its decks bristling with eager disembarkers. Today more people take the bus on their way to and from the countryside.

Red, blue, green, and white buses park in tired rows along the curb, and those who cannot read the signs on the front must ask some driver lounging on a passenger’s bench which bus goes north to Minburī. The dark glasses hiding his eyes make it difficult to judge whether he really knows; if not, the boy ticket taker polishing the hood of another bus may know. The bus is just leaving, so we dash for the rear step, where hands stretch out to help us climb aboard.

We add to the lurching crowd of passengers. Two boys standing next to a deeply tanned woman reach for a handhold to avoid being thrown into a basket of chickens. Instead they bump against an elderly man wearing a worn brown felt hat of European style. His toes are slightly protected by his canvas shoes, but unguarded bare feet extend from the khaki pants of the man sitting next to him. Between shoes, bare feet, sacks, and baskets the youthful ticket taker picks his way skillfully to collect his fares. Like a drillmaster, he whistles “Go!” to the driver after each stop. Those who climb aboard seem grateful for the breeze that blows through the open sides.

Houses thin out, and along the shaded highway the bus picks up speed, dodging perilously around pushcarts and bicycles and oncoming trucks. Inside the woman’s basket, the chickens begin to stir and cluck, attracting the gaze of a bobbed-haired girl who was leaning quietly against her seated father. The ticket taker relaxes against the back of the driver’s seat and makes a bantering remark to his colleague. His ease is suddenly broken by a woman’s call to stop the bus. She and an adolescent boy clamber over baskets, laps, and feet to the exit. The bus pauses a minute while the ticket taker mounts to the roof and hands a bicycle to the waiting boy. Another shrill whistling starts the bus off again.

After the man with the European hat swings down in front of a glistening temple near the southeast corner of Don Myang airport, the bus turns east onto a branch road. Dyked padi fields extend on both sides to island-like clusters of trees and beyond to other clusters stretching toward the horizon. Green shoots of transplanted rice stand above a glistening carpet of water. Children with blue school uniforms file along the dykes toward some farmhouse in one of the clusters. A group of highway workers pauses from digging with mattocks to exchange a passing shout and laugh with the bus driver. Occasionally we pass a raw, mounded road leading to a new house with stucco trim; the residents commute daily to the city. The newly planted trees, the glistening automobile, and the urban clothes have not yet quite blended with the country scene.

An hour’s ride has brought us some thirty kilometers to a row of open-fronted stores and a small rice mill at the broad bridge across Bang Chan canal. Here the bus pauses for us to descend, and then is off. The noises of the countryside rush to fill the silence left by a roaring motor. Somewhere a paddle dropped in the bottom of a boat pierces the stillness. A white egret circles to a landing on a distant dyke. Nearby a second one settles, and both stand motionless on their long legs.

Over a plank across a watery ditch we move to the stores. In a café two chess players and several kibitzers look up from their game to watch us approach. The stocky, white-haired proprietor smiles and asks what we have brought him from Bangkok. We reply that the zookeeper would not let us bring him that tiger today because another man asked for it earlier. The proprietor laughs at the excuse and moves to hold the sampan near the little dock so that we may climb aboard.

We paddle under the highway bridge in a northerly direction along the watercourse winding past teak-paneled houses set back among the trees. Wading in the shallow brown water along the ill-defined bank, a black-haired girl plunges a basket cone into the muddy bottom and reaches through the open top to catch a darting fish. A naked toddler stands on the bank watching her. The schoolteacher on his way home drives his skiff swiftly along and greets us with a brief question. “We are going to the temple,” we reply before he is out of earshot. Next we pass the schoolhouse, whose long, flat roof sits like a lid on an empty container; the flagpole stands naked in the vacant school yard. On the veranda of a pile house opposite the school an old woman plaits a mat while her grandchildren play tag among the posts beneath the house. The acrid odor of chicken dung blows by as our boat passes.

We disembark at the temple. Before our eyes appear the customary features of a country temple compound: the sanctuary (bōt) where priests make their devotions, the congregating hall (wihān) where villagers listen to sermons, the cremation platform, the monks’ quarters, all set about a court facing the canal. Rather than bearing an air of tidy sanctity, the compound seems neglected. Though the gilded cosmic serpent gleams on top of the congregating hall, built by village contributions in the 1930s, the weathered boards in the building point to the beginnings of decay. Even on the fifty-year-old sanctuary the ceramic decor is defaced, and surrounding columns lurch as if disarranged by some destructive demon. Mangy dogs sniff in the refuse under houses. Across the weed-filled courtyard, a cluster of temple boys pauses from swimming to watch us. We call to ask for the abbot or head priest, and a boy with dripping shorts runs along the walk to show the way. We pause in a musty passage between two buildings, and the boy disappears into a doorway through which a softly chanted prayer reaches our ears. In a moment the boy is back with news that the head priest has not yet returned from Bangkok but is expected back before sundown.

Seeing a group of yellow-robed priests sitting cross-legged on a veranda, we make obeisance. They reply to our salutation with cordial smiles; one politely asks if we intend to spend the night in Bang Chan. “Just visiting for the day,” we reply.

Back at the edge of the canal we pass a shelter where an elderly woman is lighting a fire to begin the evening meal for three men who lie in faded clothes napping on the plank floor. The temple houses and feeds them remnants of the food received by the priests. If Buddhism offers a theme of preservation, it consists in giving to sustain life. Otherwise no one gains merit by holding back decay from material things.

From the temple the canal leads our boat under a rickety footbridge past a row of closely spaced dwellings. In one a young woman, working at a sewing machine, modestly continues her work as if we were not there. Tall trees arch over the canal, and the monsoon is a refreshing breeze. A man, chopping bits from a chunk of wood, pauses to call out, “The water is rising well! I have finished transplanting all my fields and the two additional ones I rented this year. This is a good time to visit, if you want, for I’ll have time to talk. Farther up the canal you’ll see my son cutting grass for the buffalo.”

Beyond the grove we are again in the open fields. The water stands clear and warm, a few inches deep, around the precisely planted rows of rice shoots. The farmer’s son can be seen clipping grass along a dyke. The canal continues on past farther groves and farther farmhouses. In the remote distance a single blue hill rises from the plain and above it floats a towering thundercloud.

The Community

This is Bang Chan, whose households and fields merge with neighboring communities as do the turgid waters of the canals. We might paddle for days through the network of waterways in Thailand’s central plain and still feel ourselves in Bang Chan. The succession of rice fields, shaded wooden houses, and thatched huts is punctuated by occasional open-sided stores, temples, and schools. Bang Chan’s school and temple roofs are distinctive, however, and stand as beacons for those returning homeward from their journeys. The country people who call Bang Chan home are those who send their children to the local school or who visit the temple on holidays. Of course, a few farmers who live only some minutes away from the temple prefer occasionally to take their bowls of food and their flowers an hour’s boat trip to Ku temple or in the other direction to Bam Phen temple. In Bang Chan the headmen of the hamlets (mūbān) can tell the approximate geographical boundaries of their jurisdictions; at least they claim to know who lives where. A dozen or so hamlets are grouped into a commune (tambon) under a chief (kamnan), who is elected by the hamlet headmen from among themselves. In fact, the name Bang Chan stands officially for a commune rather than for the community of a school and a temple. On some maps the name also appears as Bang Chan Canal Village or Ban Khlāūng Bāng Chan (L. M. Hanks 1972:7). People living on the west side of Bang Chan canal live officially in commune Kannā Jāō, while those on the east live in commune Bang Chan. If they must visit the district offices (amphōē), the west siders go a half day’s journey to Bāngkapi, while the east siders go three or four miles to Minburī. There they go on official business to pay taxes, register births, vote in elections, and collect salaries if they work for the government. If occasionally they transfer land or must defend their rights at law, the district offices may also provide these facilities.

To discover what was going on in this village community, the research group established geographical boundaries for its work, somewhat less arbitrary than the government’s administrative boundaries. Bang Chan, for purposes of research, became in 1948 the 1,600 people in the seven hamlets in the neighborhood of the temple and the nearby school: hamlets 5, 6, 7, and 8 in Kannā Jāō commune and 4, 5, and 6 in Bang Chan commune. Probably 95 percent of the children at the school came from this area and 90 percent of the regular worshipers at the temple. The area of the community is shaped more like a pronged fork than a circle, for the homes of the inhabitants cluster along branching canals in a northerly direction. To the south, outside of Bang Chan, a predominantly Moslem hamlet performs its devotions at its own local surao, so called because it is too small and flimsy a structure to be dignified by the name masjid. This hamlet also maintains a vernacular school where after regular school hours children learn to read scripture in Arabic. A few households of the faithful lie scattered about in Bang Chan as well, where they live amicably enough among Buddhists.

Beginning in 1949 three censuses, at intervals of four years, were taken in the seven hamlets that we call Bang Chan. Each enumeration was conducted by a different set of workers, and not all data are strictly comparable. Definition of residence, for instance, varied, so that a son who worked for a season in Bangkok may have been counted in one census and omitted in another. Thus Tables 1 and 2 must be regarded as involving approximations, particularly where differences are small or trends inconsistent.

The apparent stability of our census figures disguises a flux of population in this area. Janlekha (1957:29) found that by 1953, 38 (13 percent) of the 288 households present in 1949 (excluding the temple) had disappeared and 48 (17 percent) had been added. Of the 38 that disappeared, 11 disintegrated or merged with other households after a death or some other social disturbance. Twenty-seven households (9 percent) moved away from the community. This loss to the community grows in significance in Janlekha’s sample of 104 farming households, where 26 (25 percent) disappeared between 1949 and 1953 (ibid.: 78). The movement seems to have abated somewhat between 1953 and 1957, when 23 moved into the community and 24 (8 percent) disappeared.

While we lack exact annual figures for comparison, the average rate of migration for the period we have covered varies between 2 and 6 percent per year. Although the lower limit may be small, the upper limit suggests a rather large, restless, and mobile segment of the population. This we might expect in an urban community but not in one where more than 85 percent of the households work in agriculture, where more than 70 percent are farm operators, and where less than 15 percent are laborers without landholdings (ibid.: 45). Such a migration rate might also be expected where the land is mainly worked by tenants. Here only 30 percent of the land is operated by tenants, who constitute 38 percent of the farm operator households. Of the remaining 62 percent of farm householders, 22 percent work their own land exclusively, while 40 percent rent some portion of the land in addition to their own holdings (ibid.: 57). Two-thirds of this population own land.

Table 1. Summary of demographic data from three research censuses of Bang Chan

Table 2. Age and sex data from three research censuses of Bang Chan

The changes in residence and occupation between 1948 and 1953 have been analyzed by Janlekha (1957: 90–92). He points to an occupational group of marginal farmers and farm laborers as the main source of these changes (ibid.: 44–46). They are found living in little thatched dwellings interspersed with the paneled teak houses of the more prosperous. We judge that during the years 1953 to 1957 fewer variations in the fortunes of such people cast them out of the village and brought others like them to their places in Bang Chan. Yet always the people on these lower levels of the economic scale are shifting and changing their residences or their means of livelihood or both.

The Cornell Thailand Project

Field research in Bang Chan began in 1948 as an initial phase of the Cornell Thailand Project. This project, in turn, was part of a larger Cornell University program of comparative studies of cultural change which had been inaugurated in 1947. The program offered instruction and training on the campus and in the field on the problems of changing cultural behavior in nonindustrialized societies; but as a necessary concomitant, at a period before Point IV or other large-scale government or private technical-aid programs had been organized, the Cornell program also provided for a coordinated investigation of the tide of modern technological and other cultural influences, indigenous and foreign, flooding into village communities of such regions as Thailand, India, Peru, and the American Southwest. Separate studies in these and other widely scattered areas not only would provide discrete descriptions of the cultural life of local communities in the context of their differently developing regions, but would also focus on a common problem: How may the ramifying influences of the present, most of them stemming ultimately from the Atlantic civilization, affect the future of peasant communities and of the agrarian societies of which they are a neglected part?

After initial field investigations, staff members of the Cornell Thailand, India, Peru, and Navaho projects worked together in a series of seminars dealing with the problems of cultural transfer, cultural continuity, and cultural change. Cases were collected and analyzed for their relevance to the problems of facilitating the introduction of agricultural, industrial, medical, ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. Departure
• 2. The Dispensable Ones
• 3. Newcomers
• 4. Migration
• 5. The New Life
• 6. Patrons and Their Work
• 7. Years of Austerity
• 8. Transformation Scene
• 9. Five Perspectives
• Appendix A. Schooling of Bang Chan population by age and sex, 1953
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index