Localizing development: Environment, agriculture, and memory in northern Thailand

This dissertation focuses on the philosophy and practice of sustainable development an environmental conservation as ways of incorporating global ideas and processes into local structures of meaning and power. Nan Province, northern Thailand, has undergone intense social change over the last few decades, through years of economic boom to the more recent bust. As even the most isolated areas of Nan have been tightly bound to events in faraway places, local patterns of power, meaning, and identity have been challenged by new social forces and actors. "Development" and "environmental Conservation" emerged as fields within which some people in Nan "localized" the forces of global integration in order to better understand (and influence) social, cultural, and enviromental change.;To illustrate the process of localization, I explore the relationship between memory and development in three groups: Non-Governmental Organization activists and Buddhist monks, farmer leaders, and poor farmers. While sustainable development and conservation in Nan shared some conceptual and practical elements with global development discourse, I also find that people in Nan "thaified" development by adapting it to their own local circumstances. I demonstrate that orientations to development were influenced by contending memories of the rural past---memories which highlighted the particular concerns and interests of each group within the rural social order of Nan Province.;While memory is sensitive to social position and context, the actual historical experiences of different unequal groups in Nan varied in important ways. For example, NGO activists and farmer leaders experienced a past of privilege for themselves and their families, while the lives of their poorer neighbors tended to be marked by a more arduous struggle for survival. Such experiences were not reproduced mechanically in the memories of each group, but reemerged in constant revision according to shifting demands of social position and situation, including the macrocontext of national and world events and the micropolitics of personal interaction. The social process of memory, sensitive to both power differences between groups and shifts in context, provides a window on the dynamic ways in which people in Nan engaged and localized the global.