Elephant Economics and Agrarian Transitions: Conditions for Benefiting From Elephant Tourism Market in an Upland Karen (Paganyaw) Village

In rural, upland northern Thailand, Indigenous Karen (Paganyaw) communities have long practiced diversified subsistence cultivation and forest-based livelihoods. Yet state conservation policies and tourism-led development are reshaping these agrarian systems and livelihoods. This paper explores how one Karen (Paganyaw) community in Chiang Mai province reconfigures its livelihood strategies amid the decline of swidden cultivation and the rise of elephant tourism as a new rural economy. Beyond subsistence cultivation, villagers are seeking to diversify their households and personal income by participating in this new economic sector. We argue that the transition out of small-scale agriculture into tourism is not a neutral market choice but responds to the same political-economic pressures that have historically displaced swidden systems. Drawing on 32 qualitative interviews, this ethnographic research examines diverse forms of Indigenous involvement in the elephant tourism supply chain crucially determined by non-capitalist social relations and kinship networks. By identifying the socio-economic conditions – land and capital ownership, and familial and social networks – that result in socially-differentiated and stratified allocation of benefits from elephant tourism, it disenchants the notion of a monolithic ‘community’ yet reveals one empirical case of how Indigenous peoples navigate shifting economies and sustain meaning in their livelihood.