Andrew Walker breaks new ground in the study of rural Thailand in this unique and all-important work. With theoretical depth, cultural insight, and convincing evidence, Walker's seven-chapter study argues that Thailand's rural peasantry—once defined by poverty, rebellion, revolution, and resistance—has been transformed into a “middle-income peasantry” with a modern political logic that seeks to engage sources of established power rather than resist them. Comprehensively documenting this new political calculus, Walker provides readers with an unparalleled analysis of how power is regulated, constrained, and culturally legitimated in contemporary rural Thailand. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand the cultural uses of power in village life and the evolving role of the state and market in agrarian change. The book reflects a masterful blend of method, analysis, and relevance. It contributes much to our understanding of contemporary rural Thailand and the country's broad political cleavages.

Since the 1960s, the study of political life in rural Thailand has emphasized cultural interpretations of patron-client ties, class-analytic horizontal alliances, and locally specific solidarities formed around community culture and resource conflicts. However useful these approaches were in the past, Walker argues that they have become insensitive to analyzing the politics of Thailand's economically diversified and highly commercialized countryside. Applied today, these interpretations reproduce “hackneyed images of poor, uneducated, and compliant peasants who are only legitimately political when they actively oppose external power” (24). What is needed, Walker contends, is greater emphasis on how rural people relate to “the wider political system” (10). He then fills this need by presenting evidence that a “political society” has emerged in rural Thailand—one that is commercially engaged and amenable to nonlocal connections, and that domesticates state power to pragmatically draw upon its resources. Rather than defensively resist, subvert, or evade exploitation by state structures, Walker's evidence-rich account shows how Thailand's middle-income peasantry is now focused on maximizing the benefits of state projects, support, and subsidy.

Building on Partha Chatterjee's theoretical contributions in The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (Columbia University Press, 2004), Walker argues rural Thailand's “political society” is based on productive interactions between peasant society and the modern state. The strategy of this new middle-income peasantry is “to weave the power and resources of the state into the economic and social fabric of village life” (221). The state's bureaucratic projects and subsidies effectively preserve “the persistence of the peasantry” but do not wholly transform it owing to a lack of capital accumulation (21–22). Walker claims the peasantry itself is now “assertively negotiating the terms of its persistence” (221).

Relying on extensive fieldwork conducted in Ban Tiam village, a small settlement of 130 homes in rural Chiang Mai Province, Walker documents complex and overlapping networks of livelihood security, state subsidization, and local administrative power. His chapters also usefully detail village-level economic activity including the “experimental orientation” of farmers and the growth of contract farming, community-based projects, and state-sponsored schemes. Using an anthropologically rich method, Walker details spiritual belief and ritual life in the village to show how the domestication of intangible but malleable spirits parallels the approach villagers use to manage other external powers. As with local spirits, Thailand's politicians, parties, and state agencies are manipulated in service of community goals.

Most usefully, Walker identifies an evolving set of rural values—an “uncodified rural constitution”—that regulates and draws socially distant relationships into local circuits of power. In this normative rural constitution, localism remains of value in political decision-making but the orientation of the community is to maximize fiscal subsidy from the state rather than mount a defense against its threats. Millionaire politician Thaksin Shinawatra understood this new social contract and was the first to seize it as a core political asset in electoral politics. Thaksin's policies and repeated electoral success, of course, spawned the current political tensions between the red shirt populism of his supporters and the Bangkok-based, yellow shirt coalition that advocates sufficiency economy and commercial disengagement for farmers as the “authentic morality” of Thai rural culture. Walker's research documents how in Ban Tiam village even Thaksin's governments were evaluated against the norms of this rural constitution and were not granted unqualified support.

Ruminating in the book's conclusion over the degree to which this rural political society meshes with democracy, Walker is neither sanguine nor cynical. Rather, he embraces the potential of political society to contribute to democracy while remaining realistic about its latent “dark side” (229). Ultimately, he argues, such compatibility may be determined by whether “good men” or others “guide the political process” (230).

In general, Walker's study further puts to rest James Scott's influential view that fear of subsistence failure is the core driver of rural political activity. It provides students of Southeast Asia with a new framework and vocabulary to understand rural society in Thailand. The book's useful political society framework, its convincing evidence of rural transformation, and impressive articulation of Thailand's implicit rural constitution may cause some to wonder why Walker remains wedded to the term “peasant.” Anticipating this criticism, he asks early in the book, “Are middle-income peasants really peasants?” (9). Defending the use of this term on conceptual and substantive grounds, Walker cites the lack of capital accumulation among rural households and the endurance of community structures which have been “refashioned, but certainly not dissolved” (9). He also defends the use of “peasant” in contrast to awkward terms such as “post-peasant” and “polybian” and goes to great lengths in chapter 2 to argue that, in spite of rising income and living standards, low agricultural productivity is another important hallmark of peasant persistence.

Still, even with these arguments, one might ask if Walker missed an opportunity to move us beyond the concept. If the evidence of this book does not allow us to shed the use of the term “peasant” in our English-language study of rural Thailand, then what evidence will? Some may be satisfied that “middle-class peasant” sufficiently qualifies the term, but others could legitimately argue it recasts the definition of “peasant” into an unrecognizable meaning. It is also possible that Walker's arguments for the “persistence of the peasantry” may be too theoretically subtle or lengthy for utility with respect to the day-to-day consequences of Thailand's rural transformation. With rural concern dominated by debt financing, contract farming, off-farm opportunity, acquiring pickup trucks, accessing college education, and rising expectations for state welfare, the exploitative connotations embedded in the term “peasant” remain seriously problematic. Walker's lengthy defense of the term, if nothing else, may fuel debate rather than resolve it.

Quibbles over terminology aside, the book is an intellectual tour de force that is sure to frame subsequent research on rural Thailand. My biggest problem with the book was in fact no fault of the author. The adhesive binding of the first copy I read failed with pages separating upon first reading. The replacement copy I received suffered the same fate. I now have two copies of this wonderful book with pages falling out. I recommend the e-book version.