Persistence and polarisation: A study in the dynamics of agrarian contradiction

Backward agrarian economies like that of contemporary Bangladesh are generally held to be strongly subject to a process of polarisation between those with increasing ownership of land and those who become landless with nothing but their labour‐power to sell. Empirical evidence has often been at variance with such unilinear prognosis. Using data from south‐eastern Bangladesh, this study examines the complexity of the dynamics of backward agriculture. It is shown that the very process of polarisation itself generates a contradictory process of stabilisation of the small peasantry through the creation of supplementary income opportunities. It is the resultant dynamic which often manifests itself in the persistence of a large number of small‐owner farms amidst the process of polarisation.     

From Rice to Prawns: Economic Transformation and Agrarian Structure in Rural Bangladesh

This article investigates the changes in agrarian structure brought about by the development of export-oriented freshwater prawn cultivation in south-western Bangladesh. Prawn farming in this particular context has spread among agricultural producers so rapidly within the last decade that many of the agrarian institutions have been carried over or been adapted to the new production regime. Thus the institutions governing landholdings and contractual labour arrangements involved in prawn farming have many things in common with those involved in rice production. While landholders generally have benefited from the new prawn economy, it is difficult to say whether the position of landless men and women from poor households has improved on a sustainable basis. Thus the employment gains of local male workers are currently under threat from cheaper migrants, while new jobs for women from poor households are highly intensive, potentially hazardous, and poorly paid.     

The makings of a man: social generational masculinities in Bangladesh

Abstract

The emergence of specific forms of masculinity is bounded by space and time. While attention has been given to the contexts within which forms of masculinity develop, rather less is known about men’s enactment of masculinity from a social generational perspective. To address this gap, insights from Mannheim’s work on social generations, and Connell’s notions of masculinity are drawn upon to advance understanding of social generational masculinities in modern-day Bangladesh. A multi-site cross-sectional study was conducted in three cities, using interviews to elicit narratives of masculinity from 34 men of three social generations: an older generation (aged 53–75 years and growing up in the 1950s and 1960s), a middle generation (aged 30–46 years and growing up in the 1980s), and a younger generation (aged 19–27 and growing up post-1995). Thematic analysis was used to identify key notions around what it meant to be a man. While all men subscribed to the view that ‘real’ men should be providers, they differed by social generation with respect to perspectives on work, religion and sexuality. Historical, economic and cultural changes across the generations have shaped these differences, highlighting the importance of a social generational perspective for understanding masculinities in Bangladesh.     

Religion and modernity: Gender and identity politics in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh as in other Muslim majority societies, Islamist forces have emphasized the importance of women adopting traditional religious practices, such as wearing “the veil”, as a cultural symbol and a weapon in the movement of Islamization against Western Modernization. On the question of modernity although some Islamic groups hold extreme attitudes of imagining it as ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’, there are other activists who negotiate to engage modernity by controlling its negative impacts through reinventing Islamic tradition. The discursive shift is mainly towards establishing modern civil society based, middle class led and urban organizations. In reaction to the image of commodification of the woman's body in Western modernity, they construct women wearing hijab in the public space as an image of “Modern Muslim Women”. This article explores how women negotiate modernist and Islamist discourses and thereby engage in the politics of everyday living. It argues that woman's agency moves beyond analysis of women as mere victims of ideological constructions.     

The politics of the agrarian question in turkey: Review of a debate

This article is a review of the major contributions to a debate between left‐wing Turkish intellectuals and political activists during 1969–71 over the character of Turkish agriculture and rural class structure and over the appropriate political strategy for the left. The crux of the disagreement, as in similar debates taking place at the same period in Latin America and India, was the extent to which feudal’ or ‘capitalist’ relations predominated in the countryside, and the implications for the class struggle ‐ in particular for the strategy of class alliances. On the one hand were those who supported a strategy for a ‘national democratic revolution ‘involving cooperation between peasants and workers and the progressive elements of the bourgeoisie to eliminate feudal relations and structures; on the other were those who argued that the Turkish countryside could in no sense be characterized as predominantly feudal, that the mass of rural producers were subject to essentially capitalist forms of exploitation and that any political strategy for socialists must recognize the predominance of capitalism in contemporary Turkey.     

Land expropriation and displacement in Bangladesh

This paper examines land grabbing in Bangladesh and views such seizures through the lens of displacement and land encroachment. Two different but potentially interacting displacement processes are examined. The first, the char riverine and coastal sediment regions that are in a constant state of formation and erosion, are contested sites ripe for power plays that uproot small producers on their rich alluvial soils. The second examines new patterns of land capture by elites who engage gangs, corrupted public servants and the military to coerce small producers into relinquishing titles to their ever more valuable lands in and near urban areas. These historically specific and contingent land grabs draw attention to in situ displacement, where people may remain in place or experience a prolonged multi-stage process of removal. This contrasts with ex situ displacement, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities and livelihoods. In both the char and peri-urban case, we signal new forms of collective action in response to involuntary alienation of land resources in a rapidly and violently transforming political economy. We conclude with a caution against naturalizing displacement, casting it as an ‘inevitable’ consequence of changing weather conditions in the former and population dynamics in the latter.     

Becoming a Naxalite in rural Bihar: Class struggle and its contradictions

Ever since its inception during the 1960s, the Naxalite movement in India has been the focus of scholarly interest and political analysis. In spite of internal splits and external repression by the state, this agrarian mobilization continues to gain ground in Bihar and elsewhere. Both achievements and contradictions of such Maoist-inspired agency and ideology are examined via the life story of a Naxalite – an organic intellectual – from the Dalit community. Of particular interest are the difficulties of having to protect family members, as well as positive developments, such as shifts in the language of struggle (from caste to class), and negative ones at the level of political consciousness (the persistence of traditional beliefs, receipt of pro-poor funding from the state).     

Dynamics of family size and composition: a computer simulation study with reference to rural India

"This study attempts to understand the dynamics that produce the persistent observation of a strong positive correlation between family size and extent of landholdings in predominantly agrarian economies [in India]. Such a correlation can arise from different types of demographic configurations including the rules of family formation. For example, big landholdings may be associated with large families, despite the lack of differentials across holdings of different size in fertility and mortality, simply because these families may remain undivided for long periods. In the absence of conclusive data to analyse this relationship in the Indian case, this study sets up a computer simulation model for studying the results of alternative demographic configurations."     

Endless Sex: The Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Persistence of a Legal Category

This paper challenges a view of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 as involving an unequivocal shift from the concept of sex to the concept of gender in law’s understanding of the distinction between male and female. While the Act does move in the direction of gender, and ostensibly in an obvious way through abandoning surgical preconditions for legal recognition, it will be argued that the Act retains and deploys the concept of sex. Moreover, it will be argued that the concept of sex retained is not merely an anatomical understanding, but sex in a biological sense. In this respect the Gender Recognition Act can be viewed as embodying a tension between gender and sex. Further, it is contended that this tension is explicable in terms of irresolution of contrary legal desires to reproduce the gender order and to insulate marriage and heterosexuality from homosexuality in the moment of reform.     

Reproduction and Scale: A Response to Skeggs and Wilson

This paper draws on the concepts of reproduction and scale to suggest that Skeggs and Wilson, in their contributions to this issue of Feminist Legal Studies, both identify a future-oriented reworking of historically accumulated value. The spectacular emotional labour of British reality television and the parody of mechanistic labour in Bangkok’s sex shows may be seen as instances in the affective search for future security in transnational markets. Capitalist subjectivities are still being produced through these gendered and sexual activities, but they are being produced with television audiences and sex tourists whose geopolitical baggage becomes part of the show.     

Mediated territoriality: rural workers and the efforts to scale out agroecology in Nicaragua

The Spanish word formación can be translated as ‘training’ or ‘education’, but Latin American social movements use it as inspired by Che Guevara’s notion of ‘molding’ the values of the new woman and new man for egalitarian, cooperative social relations in the construction of a ‘new society’. This contribution presents findings on the dialectical linkages between the formación processes led by the Rural Workers’ Association (ATC) and the gradual transformation of the Nicaraguan countryside by peasant families choosing to grow food using agroecological practices. We use Vygotsky’s sociocultural historical theory to explore the developmental processes of formación subjects and the pedagogical mediators of their transformation into movement cadre. The motivations of active learners to develop new senses and collective understandings about their material reality become a counterhegemonic process of internalization and socialization of agroecological knowledges and senses. In this paper, we further explore the formación process by identifying territorial mediators: culturally significant elements within and outside of individuals that facilitate the rooting of agroecological social processes in a given territory where the social movement is active. By placing the territory, rather than the individual, at the center of popular education processes, new synergies are emerging in the construction of socially mobilizing methods for producing and spreading agroecological knowledge.