The term ‘class mobility’ in this study refers to the movement between social strata, which can be both upwardly and downwardly mobile. Class is indicative of social relations and the class mobility of each social group depends upon several factors that may change with time along with the transformation of people’s lives and relations with different social groups. Nam Jam has changed from the rural village it was in the past into the peri-urbanised community it is today. Class relations in the village have changed from a relatively homogenous characterization built around production, specifically in the field of agrarian relations, when people’s livelihoods were overwhelmingly rooted in homogeneous agrarian relations into an increasingly heterogeneous society based on urban consumption and lifestyles. The conditions in each period have been determined by economic capital and invariably gender has determined people’s ability to achieve upward class mobility.
In the rural past, class relations in Nam Jam were clearly tied to agricultural means of production. People had similar backgrounds, activities, education level and they had little connection with the outside. Families that owned several tracts of land were obviously more economically viable than those who had no land or had to work at wood turning in the forest. So, local class relations were mostly based around access to land as a key factor of production. Through agrarian transformation, villagers have been able to develop themselves and accumulate capital, albeit differently. Therefore, occupations and class have become diversified. In addition,
in-migration, class mobility and stratification have rendered Nam Jam even more complex and dynamic.
When Nam Jam’s socio-economic and demographic situation changed, farming land in the village was sold and many people migrated to work outside of the village. As a result, people’s activities and livelihoods gradually became diverse.
Land was not only an indicator of wealth and class but also a source of income and allowed people to improve their livelihoods. In Nam Jam, working outside of the village clearly influenced people’s class mobility. In the 1980s, young and male villagers opted to move further afield, some to Bangkok, while the elderly and females generally worked in Chiang Mai township. Two men from the better off families mortgaged their land and left to work in Saudi Arabia. Only two women moved to Bangkok. The first married a construction sub-contractor; then, with her new connections, she invited her younger sister to work in Bangkok as an elder sitter but only for a short period of time. Those who went to Bangkok usually earned more money, renovated their houses, bought pickup trucks and motorcycles, and developed their careers more effectively than those who worked in Chiang Mai. Having good economic capital at the outset also made a difference. People who had land or whose parents had land to sell shared the benefits. They could use their money to start small businesses. Most of this group now own small grocery stores and dormitories.
Livelihood improvement also depended on hard work and villagers’ ability to save money. However, in some cases, those who worked in Bangkok could not save much money. Two families that worked in Chiang Mai upgraded their economic status by working as two sewing sub-contractors. People who sold their land or received land from their parents but could not invest well could fall into debt. People who failed to become financially and economically viable remained locked in their status of being worse off than others. However, today in Nam Jam, as a result of transition, every family at least has a permanent houses and basic means of transportation.
Within this small community, local villagers know the backgrounds, status, assets and debts of their fellow villagers well. Economic capital is still the most important aspect of class stratification. Nowadays, apart from their backgrounds, and the wealth that their parents’ generation accumulated that seems to have remained unchanged, younger generation’s levels of education and their job prospects appear to outsiders like me to indicate class difference. Studying engineering, architecture and medicine is considered better than studying languages and the humanities. Parents often talked about their children’s education in comparison with their own education.
One single father aged 47 said that he had reached Grade 12, which was quite good for his generation. His sisters only reached Grade 4. He had been working as a security guard at one of the forestry offices in Chiang Mai for 22 years. He modestly said that while his position is quite low, it was an official position, secure, and allowed him all of the welfare benefits. In addition, he could afford to send his son to the Engineering Faculty, Chiang Mai University, the most well known university in the North. He never personally had a chance. He was very proud that his son had received a scholarship for a Master’s degree in Bangkok. One poor family complained that their two children had not at least finished the high school like the others. They had to work as wage labourers and would find it difficult to support their parents who were also wage labourers. Villagers also noted and discussed the new assets of other villagers such as when someone in the village bought a new car.
The series of in-migrations of diverse social classes into the village created wider scopes of social relations for the local villagers. At the same time, it shaped new forms of class relations for both the villagers and the newcomers. As regards the villagers, new social groups, both temporary residents and urban middle class newcomers, became included in class stratification. Regarding the newcomers, their class position in their place of origin was transformed into relations with people in the new community in which they found themselves.
The Tai Yai workers were not the poorest group in their villages in Myanmar, but they are in Nam Jam. Among the workers in dormitories, many have land in their villages but when compared with the villagers and urban middle class newcomers,
they are a lower class due to their conditions of residence, backgrounds and ethnicity.
Some urban middle class newcomers, including foreigners, have farming backgrounds. At the same time, some have education lower than university level, but they are assessed as urban middle class in Nam Jam based on their large houses and occupations. Class is thus geographically contingent rather than fixed in an individual.
Since class is a social relation rather than an isolated characteristic of an individual or household, class mobility, and the nature of class stratification, can shift when people develop themselves and when new social groups migrate into a community. In addition, units of class stratification can become complex. In one household, different generations may have different levels of education and pursue different lifestyles, thus social class cannot be easily defined within the limits of a family unit. Class is more fluid than in the past. These issues will be discussed further in Chapter 6 of this thesis.