These rural immigrants are well awa

These rural immigrants are well aware of glamorous shopping malls that remain outside their economic reach, and they keep close contacts with their original villages, sending back money to parents and children they have left behind, or going back to vote. The anthropologist William Klausner, who has studied rural Thailand for sixty years, observed in one of his essays about a visit he paid to a village during the Thaksin era that the traditional Buddhist abbot had lost his importance to a political activist who is pro–Red Shirt. “Political views are held adamantly and aggressively, at least by Thaksin supporters,” he wrote, estimating that those Thaksin supporters made up 95 percent of some villages.4