Books

Bangladesh
Anthropological Studies

Sanyat Sattar

Global Migrants Local Lives
Katy Gardner
Oxford University Press; March 1995

Long-term migration is one of the most important factors in the formation of cultural identities in the modern world. Katy Gardner looks at the 'sending' communities (neglected by academic research) and covers major aspects of Bangladeshi life (land, family structure, marriage, and religion) to show how out-migration has become a central economic and social resource--the route to social, as well as physical, mobility, transforming those who gain access to it. At the heart of this important text is a presentation of the dynamic nature of migration and the possibility of self-transformation it holds for migrant cultures.

Civil Society by Design
Kendall W. Stiles
Praeger Publishers; June 2002

Drawing on years of research and direct experience in Bangladesh, Stiles pulls together theoretical strands from economics, sociology, and anthropology to help explain an emerging social structure in the Third World. These structures, which he calls "intermestic development circles," bring together international donor agencies with various domestic community and private organisations. In Bangladesh not-for-profit agencies are dramatically transforming their operation and organisational cultures, while in turn Western NGOs are themselves changing in subtle ways. Scholars of development will find Stiles's intriguing account of the reciprocating effects of extensive interaction, cooperation, and tensions between international donors and domestic recipients informative and provocative.

Eloquence in Trouble
James M. Wiles
Oxford University Press; October 2003

Eloquence in Trouble captures the articulation of several troubled lives in Bangladesh as well as the threats to the very genres of their expression, lament in particular. The first ethnography of one of the most spoken mother tongues on earth, Bangla, this study represents a new approach to troubles talk, combining the rigour of discourse analysis with the interpretative depth of psychological anthropology. Its careful transcriptions of Bangladeshi troubles talk will disturb some readers and move others beyond past academic discussions of personhood in South Asia.

(Those who want to know more about these books can email to sanyatsattar@hotmail.com)