The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

252. Laurence D. Stifel
have been identified and all the land registered under a single surname
aggregated to reach the total land held by the group. The cohesiveness
of these family-name groupings varies greatly. Frequently, the members
will live in a common compound and engage in mutually supportive
economic activities, but in other cases the common surname is only a
formal relic of a past relationship. Nevertheless, the family groupings
tend to represent power blocs in the village and their rise or fall affects
the power structure. As shown below in Table 2, the top five familyname
groups currently control about one fifth of the land in these villages,
and the share held by these same families has expanded remarkably
slowly over the last several decades-from an average of 18 percent of the
total area in 1952 to 20 percent in 1962 and 21 percent in 1972.
TABLE 2
Total Land Held by Five Largest Family-Name Groupings By Village
Percent of Total Titled Land in the Sample Villages
1952 1962 1972
Nl 28.9% 31.0% 31.3%
N2 19.4 15.5 16.6
N3 11.4 14.6 15.9
N akhon Path om Average 19.9% 20.4% 2!.3%
Al 21.4 22.2 24.1
A2 14.8 18.9 19.0
A3 11.9 17.1 17.9
Ayuthia Average 16.0% 19.4% 20.3%
If it were possible to account for population growth and the addition of
land not p.r:eviously identified with a surname, it is probable that these
families experienced a decline in landholding per person.I2 The largest
families have not inexorably swallowed the smaller landowners. A random
rise and fall of individual groups better characterizes the experience,
especially during the last decade when under half of these individual
family groups realized increases in their land-share. The analysis in
this section does not purport to define standards of equality or illuminate
12) The time series has not bee.n extended prior to 1952 because the family-name
problem makes earlier classification increasingly incomplet~ and unreliable.