1. Rural Southeast Asia and the Global Context
2. Recasting the 'Agrarian Question'
3. Delineating the Rural Past
4. Imagining the Future
5. Diversifying Livelihoods
6. Hybrid Households
7. Agriculture's Place in a Diversifying Economy; Rural Industry and the Farmers in the City; the End of the Rural?
8. Ordinary Lives in a Global World

More than the Soil focuses on the social, cultural, economic and technological processes that have transformed rural areas of Southeast Asia. The underlying premise is that rural lives and livelihoods in this region have undergone fundamental change. No longer can we assume that rural livelihoods are founded on agriculture; nor can we assume that people envisage their futures in terms of farming. The inter-penetration of the rural and urban, and the degree to which rural people migrate between rural and urban areas, and shift from agriculture to non-agriculture, raises fundamental questions about how we conceptualise the rural Southeast Asia and the households to be found there.