Agrarian Aspirations Among Ageing Farmers: An Ethnographic Inquiry of Fruit Gardening in Rural Chiang Mai, Thailand

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What does it mean by being an ageing rural subject? How are agrarian aspirations and meanings and beings of “old persons” mutually shaping one another? This paper examines societal-agrarian changes of rural Chiang Mai by focusing on the ageing fruit garden owners who are mostly in their seventies. Despite technological improvement and adoption, small-scale fruit gardening, primarily longan, demands intensive skilled labor input, such as longan tree grafting. Although physically demanding, many of these veteran owners are persistent in cultivating fruits and taking care of their gardens, to some of them as part of their post-retirement life, against opposition from their children and grandchildren who refused to succeed in fruit gardening. Through intensive ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the paper showcases that their decisions – whether to continue their fruit cultivation or not, strategies of fruit cultivation, and succession plans of their gardens are informed by the intersection of multitude factors and conditions: availabilities of skilled daily wage garden workers in the vicinity, costs of fruit cultivation, volatilities of fruit market, title deed conditions of their gardens, any foreseeable supports from the governmental authorities, and climatic conditions, etc., in conjunction with their ageing conditions – a wide array of human-non-human sociocultural-biological factors. Whilst it is ideal to pass on their gardens and life as a gardener – indispensable to what means by Northern Thai rural subjects – to their next generations, the fate of fruit gardening and their gardens are yet to know.

Dr. Siu-hei Lai is a socio-cultural anthropologist and currently Lecturer at the Integrative Center for Humanities Innovation (ICHI), Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University. He has a wide range of research interests – youth, migration, agrarian change, technology, governing, ageing society – coalescing around the theme of aspirations in Thailand and Hong Kong. His works have been published or accepted by Journal of Social History, Journal of Chinese Overseas, and Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia.