Finding Their Voice: Northeastern Villagers and the Thai State by Charles Keyes (review)

Northeast Thailand, known as Isan, is the largest of Thailand’s four regions, covering nearly a third of the total land area, and accounting for about a third of the kingdom’s population. It has always been the most impoverished part of Thailand, characterized by poor soils, uncertain rainfalls and flooding, and it remained tied to a subsistence-oriented economy while much of the rest of the country developed in the post-war period (p. 75). The vast majority of Northeasterners are more closely related, culturally and linguistically, to the Lao people of neighbouring Laos, and the region was only properly integrated into modern Thailand at the beginning of the twentieth century. A strong sense of ethnic difference from the Central Thai or Siamese persists, and Keyes shows (p. 7) how people who used to think of themselves as khon lao (Lao people) now tend to identify as khon isan, demonstrating a “growing sense of ethnoregional identity” which is quite new. Out-migration from the Northeast to Bangkok began in the 1960s, and in the 1970s expanded to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (p. 151), and later to Taiwan. Today Northeasterners account for a large proportion of Bangkok’s working classes and have formed the mainstay of the popular “Red Shirt” protests in favour of a democratically elected government led by supporters of Thailand’s exiled former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

Charles Keyes began his anthropological fieldwork in a village in the Northeast of Thailand in 1962, and for over half a century has revisited and studied the village, the region and the country. This is an authoritative and masterly work, a sequel to his 1967 Isan: Regionalism in Northeastern Thailand. It charts the development of the largely isolated and traditional peasants of “A Small Rural World in the Early 1960s” (pp. 136–40) towards the “cosmopolitan villagers” (p. 14) of the twenty-first century. These migrants still remain “farmers”, he stresses, since they regularly return to their home villages to assist with farming, but the “cosmopolitan nature of rural northeasterners” is little understood by the Bangkok elite and middle-class Thai who still characterize them as stupid and ignorant (and politically naïve) subsistence agriculturalists (p. 186 ff.). The implication is that the “sufficiency economy” championed by Thailand’s king and the government installed following the 2006 coup is almost totally out of touch with the realities of Thailand’s present-day rural populations.

Chapter One provides a historical overview and a summary of the book’s argument, presenting the village and its Buddhist temple as the “bedrock of Isan identity” (p. 3). Chapter Two describes the physical characteristics of the region and gives an account of its history from the twelfth century up until the consolidation of Thai control around the time of the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1893, which ceded the Lao territories on the left bank of the Mekong River to French Indochina. Chapter Three deals with the Buddhist millennial uprisings against Siamese rule at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, arguing that from the start, “Siamese officials and northeasterners understood power in quite different cultural terms” (p. 48).

Chapter Four charts the gradual integration of Isan into the Thai nation-state up to and immediately following the Second World War. Keyes stresses the extension of modern communication and transportation networks to the region, and how educational reforms led to the village primary school becoming the locus of a new sense of Thai national identity. Following the 1932 coup which established a constitutional monarchy, Northeasterners began to play a part in national politics as members of the National Assembly, torn between the rivals Pridi Phanomyong, who led the anti-Japanese Free Thai movement during the war, and the military officer Plaek Phibunsongkhram. Fears of communist and separatist sympathies among Northeastern politicians dated back to shortly after the 1932 coup, when several arrests of political leaders were...