ABSTRACT
Social life among all the peoples of Thailand has been shaped by their religious worldviews. Unlike Muslim women in communities in southern Thailand, Buddhist women from rural areas, and especially from the rural north-eastern region, have migrated in large numbers to Bangkok and other centers of economic growth in search of nonagricultural work. Just as every Thai is born either male or female, so too is every Thai born as the child of particular parents who, in turn, are linked to other people through kinship ties. Many Thai use an extended kinship idiom to express their identification with a people who share a common heritage. Such ethnic identities have their roots in the premodern social order of Siam but have been given new significance in the context of the modern nation-state. The Thai government has sought to encourage tribal peoples to abandon swidden cultivation and especially to give up the growing of opium poppies.
