Authors
Ritu Parna Roy
Publication date
2018
Source
PhD Thesis-University of Auckland
Institution
ResearchSpace@ Auckland
Description
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 …
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