Communal Irrigation, State, and Capital in the Chiang Mai Valley (Northern Thailand): Twentieth-Century Transformations

In this paper we examine the impact of political and economic changes, at the local, national and international levels, on the traditional communal irrigation systems of the Chiang Mai Valley, northern Thailand. The development of communal irrigation is first placed in ecological and historical context; then the transformations of this century are analyzed in three phases marked by critical changes in the political economy of Thailand. The political economy perspective of our paper has been influenced by what Roseberry calls "anthropological political economy" which attempts to understand "the formation of anthropological subjects at the intersection of local and world history" and emphasizes "the unity of structure and agency, the activity of human beings in structured contexts that are themselves the products of past activity but, as structured products, exert determinative pressures and set limits upon future activity".1 It is this interaction between "structure" and "agency" which, we argue, helps explain the transformation of the traditional autonomy of communal irrigation systems of the Chiang Mai Valley into partial dependence on the state.