<資料・研究ノート>南タイ農村の発展史的把握 (I) : 派生村形成の社会過程

Abstract

This is the fifth of the serial articles titled "Socio-Economic Basis of Social Communication in Southern Thailand." The main aim of this article is to present an analytical view on the social processes of "Baan-mai formation" in a Thai-Islam community in Southern Thailand. This article also incidentally aims to propose a hypothetical method to reproduce the history of a village in Thailand. One of the basic characteristics of a Thai village is that, through the familiar habit of squatting ownerless land, new hamlets are easily formed inside or outside the original village boundary. It is, in a sense, a social mechanism by which a good balance is constantly achieved between population and land holding. This sequence of "baanmai formation" is one of the basic themes of the history of a Thai village. The easiness of the "baan-mai formation" has long functioned to obscure the actual extent and range of a village community in Thailand as well as to keep the Thai social structure fairly loose. In the village of Don-Khilek, where the author conducted a field survey on the subject, the "baan-mai" formation has taken place in three different waves at three different junctions in the course of its history. Don-Khilek originally consisted of a single hamlet, but it has produced seven or eight different hamlets in the past eighty years. The phenomenon of "baan-mai" formation has to be analyzed in a two-partite way; that is, the physical process of a new hamlet formation on the one hand, and the social process of seperation of community activities like religious rituals, on the other.