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LEVEL 3: Sao Phao PhD Thesis, Explanations As of April 2015, the parallel mains page held a link to Mike's PhD thesis and to papers that came out of the PhD research. Other aspects of the fieldwork are covered in other pages at the same level on ceremonies and comments. The comments that follow amount to rationalizing after the event to make myself look better, so take them with a grain of salt. My thesis was done in 1989. While writing my thesis, I got progressively more ill with ailments that I do not describe. I had generated huge amounts of data and of computer analysis. At the same time, I got progressively more disgusted with academia and with some particular academics. The members of my thesis committee mostly liked me as a person but were indifferent - at best - to what I was doing. My thesis committee had on it two people with opposed antagonistic points of view who got quite annoyed when I tried to bridge the points of view. I got tired of trying to get across to both of them. So I decided to use as little theory as possible, and to present the facts as a self-evident case. So the thesis explains a self-evident case of social organization, over time, formed from the interactions of families, in response to their physical and social environnments. The "cleanest" way to describe it in terms that would make more sense now is as a case of micro-level Darwinian history over about 250 years. For that, it is pretty good. I am fairly sure my committee members didn't get that. In retrospect, I am sorry I did not anchor the data better in theory, especially my view of theory, but, at the time, I did not have it in me to do the fighting. The copy of the thesis that you see from the link below is what officially resides at University Microfilms in Ann Arbor. It is a poor copy. I don't have an electronic copy because mine was stolen out of a storage barn in Athens, Ohio. I think I have a paper copy that would produce a clean scan. If anybody wants that, I wills can the paper and give the scan to you. Among the theoretical points I wished to make in the thesis but didn't is one about prestige. I use the idea of "adaptation". I think people use their resources to succeed as well as they can. Most obviously, resources are physical such as land and boats. But social non-physical resources can be just as important. Prestige is one of those, and it can serve as a shorthand for the other social resources as well. Because the Thai had a history in chiefdoms and states, they have a ready-made system of offices and of prestige points. I could to assign points to most of the people in the villages I studied. With the prestige, I could assess how people arranged marriages, sought office, got into religion, got good jobs when they could not inherit land, etc. In addition to assessing the importance of resources by direct market price, economics uses something called "shadow prices" to assess the importance of resources according to how much difference the resource makes. The details are not important here. Social resources also have their prices and shadow prices. In work done before I wrote up the thesis, I called social resource shadow prices "ghost prestige". Nobody got the joke. Because of the heavy theoretical baggage, I did not use shadow "ghost" prestige much in the thesis but the idea is there anyhow. Again, I regret not developing the idea more at the time, but hindsight is always great. Thanks.
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