Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic study reveals that perception, identity and livelihood of Northern Thai farmers were bound up in and with the weather. Memories, religion, cultural and scientific knowledge influenced how the “appropriateness” of the weather conditions were interpreted, and responded accordingly.

Paper long abstract:

There has been growing concern about the lack of emphasis on local perception and place in human adaptation to climate change studies (Adger et al. 2013). Yet, the popular discourse of climate change, a product of scientific purification, detaches climate and its changes from situated human cultures. Following Hulme (2009; 2015), Brace and Geoghegan (2010), and Ingold's concept of the weather-world (2005; 2011), this research turns to the entanglement of landscape, humans, and weather, a change in the atmospheric conditions that can be immediately experienced, and which has always been a resource for human culture. By employing a 14-month-long ethnographic study, a focus group and a series of photo-elicitations, this research explores how fruit and glutinous rice growers of a Tai ethnicity (Kon Muang) in Nan province, Northern Thailand, who are Buddhists and animists, make sense of changes in weather through daily agricultural practices. Findings show that body comfort, emotions and movements in the fields and at home varied throughout the weather seasons. Being in harsh weather also forged farmer identity of being mentally resilient. These, together with memories of past livelihoods, crop productivity, plant and animal behaviours, and traditional and scientific weather forecast, constituted and influenced how weather conditions were interpreted in terms of their perceived "appropriateness". Apart from infrastructural adaptation, reinvention of ceremony was used as a response to repent for weather that didn't perform to expectation. These findings support the claim that farmer's life and knowledge are bound up in and with the weather and its flows.