Appropriate‐ing Rubber: scalar translations in Southern Thailand |
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| Abstract: | Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in two provinces of southern Thailand, Nakhon Si Thammarat and Phatthalung in 2015 and 2016, this paper engages with literature on the politics of scale to consider the relationships among the practice of growing rubber and regional belonging. In many ways decoupling low rubber prices (at the time of writing) from a larger story of substantial, multinational increases in rubber cultivation and production since the early 2000s, a common calculus in southern Thailand among smallholder rubber farmers, or chao suan yang in Thai, of current price woes points in large measure to past policy moves by the Thai government, and especially under the administration of Thaksin Shinawatra in the mid‐2000s, to promote rubber cultivation into northern and northeastern provinces. I contend that emphasis given to such a regional‐national, in other words Thai, story of declines in rubber prices entails noteworthy moments of translation whereby rubber's scales are reconstru(ct)ed through appeals to regional legacies and perceptions of a transmission of ‘southern Thai rubber’ outside of the south. |
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