[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar Wednesday 14 May

[Melinda Hinkson]

Anthropology seminar, 9.30 am Wednesday 14th May, Seminar Room A, Coombs
Building

Andrew Walker, RMAP
 
ŒNow the companies have come¹: local values and contract farming in northern
Thailand
 
Over the past five years the farmers of Baan Tiam, a small lowland village
in northern Thailand, have participated in a rapidly changing agricultural
sector. By far the most important change has been the adoption and rapid
expansion of contract farming. Farmers who previously grew crops on their
own account are now commonly entering into contracts with companies to grow
crops according to predefined schedules and techniques. This paper examines
the ways in which Baan Tiam's farmers have participated in this agricultural
transformation. Those looking for outright resistance to what might be
portrayed as a process of rural proletarianisation will be disappointed.
Overall, the arrival of contract farming in Baan Tiam has been welcomed as
providing a range of low risk agricultural alternatives for cultivators.
Farmers have actively participated in what is often clumsily described by
academic commentators as the 'penetration' of capital into the countryside.
But their agency and enthusiasm is not unqualified. Far from it. Farmers
draw on an array of values to assess and critique their new forms of
agricultural practice, and the role of corporate and government actors in
agricultural transformation. My aim in this paper is to show how this new
phase in the commercialisation of agriculture intersects with local
perceptions about appropriate forms of economic activity and ongoing farmer
commentary about their changing relationships with corporations and the
state. I suggest that acts of resistance, to the extent they are evident in
Baan Tiam, need to be understood in terms of a broader 'experimental'
orientation to agricultural change.
 
All welcome. 

____________________________________
Melinda Hinkson
School of Archaeology & Anthropology
A.D. Hope Building
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

T: +61 2 6125 8246
F: +61 2 6125 2711
W: http://arts.anu.edu.au/AandA/

Information about the Master of Visual Culture Research
is available at: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/vcr.php