Book Number: 21 723

Tanabe, Shigiharu

ECOLOGY AND PRACTICAL TECHNOLOGY -
Peasant Farming Systems in Thailand

This study explores the rice farming system through which peasants live in and act on their immediate environments. While the peasant farming system is intrinsically founded on ecological relations, it actually works through human practices and complicated social processes at various levels. In dealing with this articulation between the ecological and the social, Professor Tanabe develops an anthropological concept of practical technology that explains how peasants organize their practices of farming by interacting and negotiating with the environment. Practical technology. he argues, constitutes the fundamental basis of peasant farming. It is bodily accumulated and transmitted, as opposed to modern scientific discourse and standardized technical prescriptions.

In the light of such a theoretical perspective, this comparative study of peasant farming looks closely at ecological relations, irrigation practices, sequences of rice farming, and labor utilization in two communities in very different parts of Thailand; Chiang Mai and Ayutthaya. The detailed ethnographic accounts of peasant farming illuminate the differentiated relationships between human agents and the environment within the two farming systems, the structures of which are based on historically developed forms of production.

This original and innovative study of peasant farming and practical technology is of considerable interest not only to students of anthropology, geography and development studies but also to anyone who is concerned with agrarian and environmental problems in Southeast Asia and beyond.

(Bangkok 1994)

ISBN 974-8496-24-4

320 pp., 150 x 230 mm, pbk.

25.- US-Dollar

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