“No one walks to their farm with a big bamboo hat on. That’s over,” said Mr. Udom, 63, sitting next to his pickup truck.
As campaigning for the national election Sunday entered its final days, there was broad consensus that rural votes would be crucial in deciding the outcome. But no one is quite sure what rural means anymore.
Villagers here complain of slow Internet download speeds. On a single street that winds past rice paddies, residents tell of work stints in Taiwan, Singapore, Israel and Saudi Arabia, enough frequent-flier miles to rival the inhabitants of a tony Bangkok condominium.
Once passive and fatalistic, villagers are now better educated, more mobile, less deferential and ultimately more politically demanding.
Researchers who study rural life say villages like Baan Nong Tun may be ground zero for understanding why Thailand’s political crisis — warring political factions, five years of street protests and violent military crackdowns — has been so intractable. The old social contract, whereby power flowed from Bangkok and the political establishment could count on quiet acquiescence in the Thai countryside, has broken down.
Villagers describe a sort of democratic awakening in recent years and say they are no longer willing to accept a Bangkok-knows-best patriarchal system. It is an upheaval that has been ill-understood by the elites, said Attachak Sattayanurak, a history professor at Chiang Mai University, in northern Thailand.
“The old establishment and the Thai state have a picture of an agrarian society frozen in time,” he commented on a television program that aired in June. “They maintain a picture of local people as well-behaved and obedient, which in fact they aren’t. Peasant society doesn’t exist anymore.
“If the country’s leaders do not understand these changes, they will not be able to solve our problems,” Mr. Attachak said.
Charles Keyes, a U.S. academic who first studied village life here nearly five decades ago, describes a transformation from “peasants to cosmopolitan villagers.”
“There is a sense in Thai society that the social contract is being renegotiated,” said Mr. Keyes, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Washington.
The convulsive changes to village life and the breakdown of a national political consensus are not just relevant to Thailand, but are a cautionary tale for other countries in Asia that are developing so rapidly, Mr. Keyes says.
“It’s definitely something the Chinese, for one, should be more aware of,” he said.
For most of Thailand’s tumultuous modern history of military coups and countless constitutions, democracy trickled into this rice-farming village. Villagers felt far removed from national elections and rarely met the members of Parliament they voted for.
Then, in the 1990s, as part of an effort to decentralize power, the government introduced a system of local councils, known as township administrative organizations.
Kayun Thapthani, who won a seat on the first council in Baan Nong Tun, remembers a timid gathering of farmers in a meeting hall next to the Buddhist temple. Villagers listened quietly and politely to proposals for road building and support for the elderly. But as time wore on, and when budgets rose and meetings dealt with controversial projects, the deference dissipated. Mr. Kayun described rowdy sessions when “everything became messy, everything went mad.”
The councils gave villagers a sense that they could control their own political destiny, said Mr. Udom, the village wise man. The system has come with its disappointments — council budgets are strained and have shrunk in recent years — but the system has brought a greater sense of political intimacy than elections for the national Parliament in Bangkok, a seven-hour drive away. “We have a lot more expectations,” Mr. Udom said.
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