ABSTRACT
The signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855 forced Siam to open itself to world trade, and large areas of the Chao Phraya basin were planted with rice. This chapter discusses the differences between subsistence-oriented and cash-oriented economies. Subsistence-oriented farmers must earn the small amount of cash that they require from time to time in ways that are compatible with their subsistence economy. The words indigeny and exogeny indicate a psychological attribute of the people, the individual’s ‘taken-for-granted’ world and their conceptualization of space and place, rather than their overt discourse, or the historical condition or geographical origin of a population. The chapter describes how a different level of indigeny and many-strandedness is responsible for the different individual and collective economic choices in the two areas, and for the endurance of a more subsistence-oriented economy in Mae Kha Pu than in Bo Kaeo.
