Globalisation
Beyond the paradox: religion, family and modernity in contemporary Bangladesh
Changes in gender and generational relations: provoking anxiety about social status and material security
Authors:
S.C. White
Publisher:
International Development Department, University of Birmingham, 2009
This paper reflects on how people talk about religion and the family to explore the apparent paradox of a contemporary Bangladesh that is both “more modern” and “more Islamic”. The paper sheds light on the ways in which reformist Islam is attempting to use the family to capture and re-shape the social or political order.
The paper views how notions of the family and especially the gender order are mobilised in rhetorical conflicts between “religion” and “development” and in moves to capture the moral order and attach it to a particular religious vision. It also examines how changes in gender and generational relations provoke profound anxiety about social status and material security.
Markedly, the paper finds that recent symbolic confrontations between fundamentalist religion and development or women’s organisations call on different understandings of religion. Moreover, the paper finds the following:
- social and economic change reshapes both the character of religion, and the ways that it can be drawn on to marshal that order more broadly
- in the Bangladesh context there seems no obvious reason why being identified as “religious” should either qualify or disqualify actors from engagement with development objectives and activities
- the organisations and the work that they are doing in Bangladesh should be judged in social, economic and political terms, with their religious identity considered only if it impacts on development objectives
- the changing place of religion and the changing uses that people seek to make of it are part of a much broader process of moral questioning and social realignment
