Not available in 2022/23
AN282 Half Unit
Bangladesh and Beyond: Anthropological Perspectives
This information is for the 2022/23 session.
Teacher responsible
Professor Katy Gardner
Availability
This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in Social Anthropology, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Melbourne) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.
Undergraduates taking this course should normally have completed an introductory course in anthropology unless granted exemption by the course teacher.
Pre-requisites
Undergraduates taking this course should normally have completed an introductory course in anthropology unless granted exemption by the course teacher.
Course content
This course takes Bangladesh and its diaspora as a starting point for a range of anthropological debates, situating ethnographic material in comparative perspective and thus moving beyond a narrow regionalist approach. Whilst routinely overlooked in India centric South Asian studies, Bangladesh has much to teach us. Since its independence in 1971 it has moved from being an international ‘basket case’ to being a ‘middle income country’; it is the birth place of micro credit, lauded for programmes of ‘female empowerment’, a ‘hybrid regime’ in which secular nationalism and Islam uneasily co-exist, and a new frontier of corporate capitalism and speculation. Questions of mobility are central. As we shall see, from its colonial heritage to the present day Bangladesh and its people have always been on the move; as an ethnographic or cultural region what we might describe as ‘Bangladeshi’ therefore cannot be spatially bounded, confined within national or regional borders or understood in narrow regionalist terms. Moreover, as we progress through the course we will be intellectually mobile, studying comparative ethnographies from South Asia and far beyond and seeking intellectual, geopolitical and cultural connections as well as context specific particularities. Topics covered include: the legacies of colonialism, partition and war; political protest and mobilisation; speculation and extraction; climate change and the environment; micro finance; piety and freedom; marriage, divorce and dowry; tra