ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to delink rural space from exclusively agrarian livelihoods, communities and landscapes, and to challenge some of the more static and romanticized constructions of Southeast Asian rurality, based largely but not exclusively on the experience of Thailand. Thailand is perhaps more exaggerated in the gaps between urbanite images and rural realities than other countries in Southeast Asia, given the combination of wealth gaps, urban primacy of Bangkok and the place of rural-urban dynamics in the country's recent and ongoing political imbroglio. Beyond the constructions of rurality and the gap between imagined and actual realities of the Southeast Asian countryside, there remains an economic and political salience to rural imagery. The changing nature of the Southeast Asian countryside has been documented in numerous studies, sometimes explicitly in terms of development and its impacts, but also through productionist-oriented conceptual lenses such as that of agrarian change.
