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Farming is no longer the only or even the primary source of income in the rural world, and yet, for centuries smallholder farmers have continued to defy predictions of their own imminent demise. In contemporary Southeast Asia, small farms have not gone away as both Marxists and modernization theorists anticipated, rather, holdings have gotten smaller and more numerous (Rigg et al., 2016b). In one compelling recent explanation for why this might be the case, Jonathan Rigg and his colleagues (Rigg et al., 2018) argue that the significance of land, in the past closely tied to its rice production potential, has shifted. Land is increasingly valued as a crucial site for intergenerational reproduction, redistribution, and care, even in the face of widespread migration and agriculture's decreasing economic share. In the absence of state welfare, land serves as the household's social safety net. In contemporary Myanmar, where …