Publicness and Taken-for-granted Knowledge: A Case Study of Communal Land Formation in Rural Thailand

The lack of public-mindedness can cause problems in the social order of people’s daily lives, such as the tragedy of the commons and the problem of free riders. Some scholars such as Habermas assert that communicative rationality is the solution, expecting that individuals will communicate with each other to reach a consensus without being bounded by aspects of social background. Other scholars advocate the revitalization of traditional community culture. These arguments, however, are not based on reality. By using the case of communal land formation in rural Thailand, the author shows that collective action is neither a revival of tradition nor a result of communication free from social constraints. Rather, cooperation emerges because the people rationally respond to their present needs and have built, through daily social interactions, taken-for-granted knowledge about how they should behave for cooperation.

Land and labor reallocation in pre-modern Japan : a case of a northeastern village in 1720-1870

In agricultural societies, adjusting land and labor according to changes of labor endowment that result from family life cycle events is premised on making full use of resources for each farming household and for the economy as a whole. This paper examines how and how well households in pre-modern Japan reallocated land and labor, using a population register covering 150 years from 1720–1870 for a village in the Tohoku region. We find that households reacted to equalize their production factors; land-scarce households tended to acquire or rent-in land and out-migrate their kin members, while land-abundant households tended to release or rent-out land, in-migrate kin members, or employ non-kin members. Estimates suggest that more than 80% of the surplus or deficit area of land was resolved if the household rented or "sold" land. We discuss a potential underlying mechanism; namely, that the village's collective responsibility for tax payment (murauke) motivated both individual households and the village as a whole to reallocate land and labor for the efficient use of resources.