Katy Gardner
Lives in motion: the life-course, movement
and migration in Bangladesh
Article (Accepted version)
(Refereed)
Original citation:
Gardner, Katy (2009) Lives in motion: the life-course, movement and migration in Bangladesh.
Journal of south Asian development
, 4 (2). pp. 229-251. ISSN 0973-1741
DOI: 10.1177/097317410900400204
© 2009 SAGE Publications
This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/52765/
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Lives in Motion: The Life-Course, Movement and Migration in Bangladesh
October 2008
Katy Gardner
University of Sussex
As a particular genre of self help manual is apt to assert: ‘life is a journey’.
Whilst somewhat clichéd, the imagery evoked - of movement through one’s life
course over a variety of emotional or spiritual terrains - forms a useful entree to the
theme of this paper: the relationship between the embodied journeys through time that
anthropologists term ‘the life course’, and the journeys through space and place that,
according to different contexts may or may not be classified as ‘migration’.
If life is a journey, one might ask, how does migration to particular places affect our
experience of moving through life? Turn the question around and the answers
provide fertile terrain for those seeking to understand why people migrate: how does
movement through the life course affect our propensity to move? Whilst at first sight
these answers would seem to concern the vagaries of individ ua l lives and biographies
1
and hence the micro-level of analysis, by paying attention to how gendered life
courses are shaped by culture, history and global economics, and how, in turn, these
articulate with various forms of movement and migratio n between different places, we
might discern the interconnectedness of all levels of analysis
2
, from the young man
leaving his villa ge, to the social networks that assist him in moving, and finally to the
global histories and economic structures that have helped create the ‘transnational
habitus’ (Vertovec, 2004: 11) of his community, in which movement abroad is seen
not only as the only way to get on in life, but has become an expected part of his life
course, in which by travelling abroad, he finally becomes a man.
In what follows, I shall discuss the relationship between the geographical
movement of bodies and their movement through time with reference to cases drawn
from my on-going research amongst Sylheti transnational communities in Bangladesh
and the U.K. By doing this I hope to contribute to a broader discussion in migration
studies concerning the relationship between migration and time (cf. King, Thompson,
Fielding and Warnes, 2004), in which focussing on the life course has been invoked
as a means of understanding the articulation between individual biographies with
‘meso’ level formations, such as households or other social networks, which are in
turn shaped by wider conditions. As King et al comment: ‘The relevance to migration
is immediately apparent: the life course framework contextualises not only individual
and group decisions about the timing of migrations but also the formative influences
and outcomes.’ (ibid: 19). In sum, my aim is not simply to present individua l life
histories, useful though such a project is (cf. Brettell, 2003: 23-45), but to indicate
how these histories arise from particular life courses, which themselves are
underscored by culture, context and, of course, gender.
The research on which the paper is based involves two villages in different
parts of Greater Sylhet: Talukpur, in Habiganj, where I conducted my doctoral
research in the late 1980s and have been regularly visiting ever since, and Jalalgaon, a
1
For discussion of the life history / biography approach to migration research, see Halfacree and Boyle,
1993; Thompson, 1999, Bertaux-Wiame, 1979, Gardner, 2002
2
For discussion of the challenges of intergrating micro, meso and macro levels of analysis in migration
research, see Brettell, 2000, 2003; Massey, 1990; Kearney, 1986
village in the thriving ‘Londoni’ (ie out migration to the U.K) area of Biswanath, a
short distance from Sylhet Town, where I have been involved in recent research
3
.
Whilst the work in Talukpur arises from my own ethnographic fieldwork, the research
in Biswanath was carried out by a small team of researchers from the University of
Jahangirnagar, who lived in the village for twelve months, following largely
qualitative methods, including participant observation, interviewing and a household
survey. In considering different forms of embodied movement through time and
space we shall see how whilst migration must indeed be understood in terms of global
and local political economies, we also need to appreciate how these broader
contextual factors articula te with the everyday (or ‘micro’) concerns of self hood,
gender and generation, as well as the livelihood strategies of individuals and
households. Indeed, as the Bangladeshi examples indicate, the life course cannot be
understood in isolation, for lives are not lived alone. To this extent it has to be
analysed alongside another classical anthropological concept: the household
development cycle.
Before returning to Bangladesh, I wish to consider the notion of the life course
in rather more detail. This will be followed by a brief discussion of the various types
of movement with which the paper deals.
Mapping Lives: Understanding the Life Course
By ‘life course’ I am referring to the phases of life that we move through over time;
an approach which emphasises interconnection rather than the disjuncture suggested by
‘stages’. (Arber and Evandrou, 1993) Whilst in general the physiological processes of
ageing are universal
4
, the way that these processes are experienced and the meanings given
to them are understood by anthropologists as being culturally constructed. The phases of
life are therefore not necessarily fixed to pre-defined physical markers, although
physiological processes may, in some contexts, be central. For example, during my
fieldwork in Sylhet in the late 1980s the tradition of painting a girl’s hands with henna at
her first menstruation was still carried out by some families, symbolising the advent of her
womanhood as well as her marriagability. In the British context however, girls are not
legally perceived to be women until they have reached their sixteenth birthday. Here it is
the exact measurement of calendar years, rather than physiology, which is significant. The
relationship between different phases of the life course is similarly diverse. In Uganda, for
example, Karimojong men are organised into age sets, which move through life together
and are distinguished from other generations by the colour of their ornaments (Dyson
Hudson, 1966). Elsewhere, relationships between generations are more fluid, the produce
of shifting social factors. In my research amongst Bangladeshi elders (murubbi) in East
London, for example, I was told that one becomes a murubbi not when one reaches a
certain age (in rural Bangladesh birthdays are not celebrated and people generally don’t
know how old they are) but according to family position (becoming a grandparent) as well
as the knowledge and authority that a person is thought to have. The role of murubbi is
actively performed: men grow beards and wear kameez and lungis rather than the more
western clothes of younger men, and expect due deference to be shown to them (Gardner,
2002).
3
This research was funded by Dfid, as part of the Development Research Centre in Migration, Poverty
and Globalisation, run at the University of Sussex. Primary data collection was carried out by Rushida
Rawnek Khan, Abdul Mannan and Zahir Ahmed. I was the principle investigator of the project.
4
This is not always the case. See, for example, Lock’s discussion of cross cultural variation in the
menopause in Northern America and Japan (Lock, 1995)
As the above indicates, as well as being culturally constructed, the life course is
gendered, as Sylvia Vatuk and Sarah Lamb have shown with reference to women in India.
Whilst Vatuk’s work indicates the different roles and relationships that women pass
through during their lives (Vatuk, 1987) Lamb’s work focuses upon the embodiment of
gender amongst women in West Bengal, describing how this changes over the life course
(2000). As well as gender, the life course is also structured by ethnic identity and class (c.f.
Catz and Monk, 1995; Sintonen, 1993, O’Brien, 1994). Finally, the way in which the life
course is constructed is not fixed but continually changing. In the process, narratives of
how childhood or old age ‘used to be’ are apt to become a metaphor for disquiet about the
pace or direction of such change (cf. Cohen, 2000).
Focussing upon the life course opens up important questions concerning the ways in
which gendered roles, relationships and identities change over time, as well how these
shifting roles are embodied. As the Bangladeshi examples indicate, embodied movements
through time often coincide with movement across space as well as shifting imaginings of
and relationships to different places. Indeed, the experience that one has of places and the
journeys one takes to get to them are informed by where one is situated in one’s life. As we
shall see, this can have significant implications for migrants, especially those moving
across national or continental borders; the experience of elderly migrants in their places of
settlement is an important area of enquiry (Norman, 1985; Blakemore, 1993; Boneham,
1989).
We should not, however, fall into the trap of assuming that people at certain points
in the life course necessarily think of and experience places in the same way. We should
also distinguish between the various and often contradictory images that the same person
might hold about a single place. As I describe elsewhere, whilst Bangladesh may be
idealised by some British based Bengalis as ‘good’ to age in, they also vote with their feet
by largely staying put in Britain. British health care and the reluctance of British based
children to accompany them back to Bangladesh are major factors (Gardner, 2002). In
understanding how the life course is affected by place, we must therefore pay attention both
to empirical realities: the existence of the National Health Service in the U.K, for example,
as well as to the shifting and complex terrain of ideology.
Similarly, we need to beware reductive descriptions of ‘ideal types’. As we shall see,
movement through one’s life from one expected phase to another is not necessarily
guaranteed and the life course may not go as planned; for example, in cases of divorce, or
when marriages fail to bear children. In the Bangladeshi context, these disruptions and dead
ends can directly affect peoples’ movement across space, either in propelling them into
journeys they may not otherwise have taken, or by doing the opposite and keeping them in
one place. Whilst in these cases unexpected life course events may lead to migration,
migration may itself lead to unexpected twists of the life course: elderly Bengalis in the
U.K describe how ‘growing old in a foreign land’ has meant they cannot fully enjoy the
roles of grandparent and murrubi (elder), whilst the young Sylheti men who marry British
brides may find the role of ‘husband’ or ‘father’ quite different from what is expected in
Sylhet.
In sum, it may be useful to think of the life-course as a ‘design for life’, a template
that we all, to some extent, are aware of, whether we adhere to it or not (for example, by
doing or not doing ‘what’s expected’). This ‘design for life’ is deeply influenced by
culture and history, as well as by gender, and underscores the roles and relationships we
have throughout our lives. It is also, as some of the cases described in this paper show,
continually changing.
Movement and Migration: What’s The Difference?
5
The ethnography that follows involves a range of movements, only some of which
would conventionally be described as ‘migration’. People move through time as well as
travelling up and down the social scale. Few physically stay in one place throughout their
lives; indeed, Bangladeshi women are expected as a matter of course to move to their
husband’s home at marriage. Not all do, but the norm of patrilocality remains strong
6
.
Combined with this, the inhabitants of East Bengal have always been mobile; the image of
stable and sedentary villages is largely a myth (Samadar, 1999: van Schendel, 2005; Inden,
1990). In classifying some types of movement as ‘migration’, and suggesting that such
movement is relatively new we are thus in danger of creating a false dichotomy between
the past, in which people didn’t move, and a modern age, in which ‘migration’ is a key
trope, disrupting ‘traditional’ (read ‘sedentary’) life.
Yet it would also be misleading to suggest either that rural Sylhetis are
nomadic, or that there is nothing new in the scale and type of movements taking place
in the region. As we shall see, neither is true. People living in rural Sylhet have a
strong sense of home and rootedness, exemplified by the phrase ‘desh’ (homeland).
There has also been a quantifiable shift in the scale of emigration to foreign countries
over the last generation. In my use of the term ‘migration’ I am therefore referring to
a specific type of geographical movement, which involves stepping over real or
imagined borders. For many Sylhetis the borders are national: they have travelled
overseas to join transnational communities in the U.K, the U.S, South East Asia and
the Middle East. In other instances people have moved from villages of origin in
which whilst they may be joining existing social networks in the new destination they
are perceived as being to a greater or lesser extent ‘outsiders’. In local terms they are
no longer in their desh but bidesh (in a foreign place). This latter term refers to a
sliding scale of locations, ranging from another region in Bangladesh to the other side
of the world. As we shall see, whilst for some people migration is a yearned for step
in projects of self transformation, for others it signifies crisis and disruption. In all
cases, whether migration is welcomed or not, I would suggest that there is a degree of
rupture, a sense of moving to a new land (bidesh), where even if one is joining the
other half of one’s transnational (or transregional) community, one is still, to a greater
or lesser degree, in the role of being a foreigner (bideshi) vis a vis those who think of
that place as their desh.
Let us now turn to the historical background of migration and movement in
Sylhet and Eastern Bengal, where, as we shall see, people have always been on the
move.
Migration in Sylhet : A Background
As Tasneem Siddiqui points out, migration has been a part of life for East
Bengalis for many centuries (2003). Indeed, the territory of what in the colonial
period was East Bengal, in 1947 became East Pakistan and only since the War of
Independence in 1971 has been known as Bangladesh has always been characterised
by high degrees of fluidity, both within and across its shifting political borders. From
pre-colonial times migrants from the west settled the highly fertile but often
waterlogged lands of the east, whilst other historical evidence points to movement in
5
This question was raised by Sophie Day during discussion of an earlier version of the paper presented
at Goldsmiths College, December 2006.
6
In Sylhet: the ghar zamai (literally ‘house husband’, or husband who lives with his wife’s kin) is a
figure of fun
