Researching Middle-Class Consumption in Bangladesh: Contextualising Technology and Moral Economy

Abstract

Bangladesh is frequently portrayed as a place of poverty, fragility and vulnerability. Such accounts misrepresent a complex, diverse, dynamic reality. Certainly, they deny the narrative of 32 million middle-class Bangladeshis. These accounts constitute a Northern discourse that extends a developmentalist perspective, and positions the global South in terms of a putative deficit. My research is a counter to such narrow, hostile and one-sided representations, by investigating an urban and affluent Bangladeshi middle-class through their consumption of everyday domestic technologies. This is an ethnography of consumption, combining participant observation and semi-structured interviews across 14 households in the city of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. The thesis operationalises a “theory of domestication”, a theoretical framework that is fixated on exploring the ways technologies are used within the socio-cultural fabric of everyday life, in which households are the key units of analysis. Most significantly, household culture, or as it is denoted by its proponents, “the moral economy of the households” shapes the way technologies are appropriated and consumed. An account of urban infrastructure is implicated in my research which is indeed a novelty for a domestication study and an inevitable component for a research located in countries such as Bangladesh. Infrastructure in Bangladesh must be understood in terms of its irregularity even among the affluent middle-class dwellings. This acknowledgement is in sharp contrast with how infrastructure is represented and positioned in the global North (or, more accurately, Northern accounts of the global North). I note that infrastructural disruptions have prompted the domestication of a new set of technologies that secure alternative and personalised supplies of water and electricity. However, the potential for increasing fragility in the infrastructure of the global North, means that adaptive strategies of middle-class households in Bangladesh, and the global South more generally, should not be understood in terms of developmentalism and deficit. I highlight that technology is often used to claim and reclaim power and privilege within the household. Hence, the appropriation and consumption of technology in middle-class households is associated with the reproduction of social structure and position. Importantly, it is used to assert a “middle-classness” - the material and cultural possessions of a middle-class lifestyle - to create and recreate class distinction. My research explores how an urban Bangladeshi middle-classness is crosscutting many global, local and traditional elements and is increasingly oriented toward contemporary transnational developments.