วิถีการดำรงชีพและความแตกต่างทางสังคมของคนขมุในการพัฒนาเศรษฐกิจบริเวณชายแดนไทย-ลาว

Abstract

My thesis examines how socio-economic development affects the interethnic context of a border area in Northern Thailand. It shows how the notions of ethnicity and class differentiation interact and the strategies adopted by local farmers to enhance their status. I focus on Khmu farmers in Huawkoung village Chiang Khong district Chiang Rai province, a population that has traditionally had a low status in Thai society. This dissertation is based on a fieldwork conducted in 2013 and it emphasizes four main findings: First, Chiang Khong area has been for long a center of trans-Mekong and trans-ethnic relationships, connecting highland areas with the lowlands. Since the early 1990s, regional economic development has deeply affected social space and interethnic relations and led to new forms of competition between various populations. Second, the Khmu people are relatively recent settlers in the area compared to the other ethnic groups (Tai lue, Hmong, Yao, Chinese, Akha, Lahu) in Chiang Rai province. Most of them arrived from Laos during or just after the Indochina war. As latecomers, they experienced difficulty to access agricultural land and many of them became wage laborers for their neighbors as well as for Thai middlemen.

However, and this is my third point, class differentiation develops as rich households, usually those arrived before 1987, can upgrade their status through land access, Thai education and citizenship as well as interpersonal networks with Thai farmers and local administrators. On the other hand those arrived after 1987 have limited land and no access to nationality card. They work as wage laborers in the rice-fields or in factories in Chiang Rai, Lampang and Bangkok. A last point relates to the importance of religion, and more precisely of conversions to either Christianity or Buddhism, as a way to subvert socio-economic marginalization in the capitalist context as well as to reassert a distinct ethnic identity and claim access to natural resources as well as education and cultural networks. More than, the religion practices cause to their identities change to civilization