A good deal has been written about the ‘puzzling’ persistence of the smallholder in Southeast Asia, and more widely across Asia. Explanations have ranged from the agroecology of wet rice to the precarities of late capitalism. In this lecture, however, the ‘social’ factors and conditions of smallholding lives and livelihoods are brought to the centre of the explanation. Drawing on field research in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as in Nepal, the lecture will seek to ‘render social’ the Southeast Asian smallholder. It will be argued that the failure fully to appreciate the power of the social when it comes to understanding the attractions of otherwise sub-livelihood farms also helps to explain why policies so often fail to achieve their aims.
This seminar was recorded and the video can be watched here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Prof. Jonathan Rigg is a Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. Formerly he was based at the National University of Singapore, where he was Director of the Asia Research Institute, and Durham University and SOAS in the UK. In 2022 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Jonathan is author of More that rural: textures of Thailand’s agrarian transformation (Hawaii University Press, 2019) and Rural development in Southeast Asia: dispossession, accumulation and persistence (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).