Benjamin Zeitlyn

Maintaining transnational social fields, the role of visits to Bangladesh for British Bangladeshi children

The visit is a key experience in the socialisation of British Bangladeshi children. It is an emotional and sensory rollercoaster for children which challenges and confirms their sense of who they are. For, while they enjoy some aspects of the visit, they find others deeply unsettling. Visits to Sylhet in Bangladesh give children a lasting lesson in both Sylheti beliefs and practices and their own sense of belonging. Their deep, embodied sense of disorientation makes children feel that they do not belong in Sylhet, despite the importance of the people, places and practices they encounter. This paper explores the impact of visits on British Bangladeshi childrens identities and argues that these experiences help to create a distinct British Bangladeshi transnational social field and habitus.

Researching Transnational Childhoods

This paper reflects on experiences of conducting research with transnational children. It brings together criticisms from within anthropology of the conceptualisation of stable and bounded fields, and discussion of conceptual and methodological approaches to researching children and childhoods. Taking research with British Bangladeshi transnational children as a case in point, the paper addresses the challenge of conducting research with transnational and fast-changing communities, arguing that it requires the use of multi-sited methods, an awareness of power relations at research sites, the building of a good rapport with the children and a range of methodological approaches set within long-term ethnographic engagement with research participants.

Desh bidesh revisited

This article discusses the emergence of a ‘British Bangladeshi social field’. It makes two connected arguments about its effects. First, it argues that the emergence of the British Bangladeshi social field has rendered the discourses of desh and bidesh less important. Second, it argues that British Bangladeshis are embedded into many transnational social fields and lead multiply orientated rather than binary lives. It uses the example of the importance of the global Islamic umma (community) to British Bangladeshis to illustrate this and argues that it has also contributed to the decreasing importance of the discourse of the desh. What this shows is that the transnationalism of today is very different from that of 20 years ago, both in terms of how it is experienced and how it is analysed.

British Muslims, British soldiers: Cultural citizenship in the new imperialism

The discursive positioning of Muslims as a ‘security threat’ or ‘enemy within’, in government policies and the media, has cast young Muslim men in particular as criminalized anti-citizens. Meanwhile, since the inception of the Afghanistan campaign, the soldier has become increasingly prominent as a figure of militarized citizenship in the public sphere. This article juxtaposes accounts from Pakistani Muslim youth in the West Midlands with those of soldiers and family members involved with the Hero Net online community, attending to the notion of cultural citizenship – namely, the everyday subjective experience of national belonging beyond its legal–political aspects. Our research suggests that, for both groups, mindful critique or dissent are central to the process through which individuals are brought into being in relation to the nation-state. However, we demonstrate that formations of cultural citizenship in Britain continue to be informed by the logics of race and orientalism. The article offers insights into how gendered and racialized formations of citizenship conjoin with imperialism and militarization.

The making of a moral British Bangladeshi

This article traces changing notions of a moral upbringing among British Bangladesh families in London. It reviews ideas of the making of a moral person (manush corano) in Bangladesh and contrasts those with contemporary practices and ideas about the good child in London. It argues that in London, British Bangladeshis have embraced a form of Islam that for them represents progress on the ‘Bengali culture’ that they have left behind and the ‘Western modernity’ that they live amongst, it is a third way. For British Bangladeshi children this involves socialisation into a global Muslim community (umma) and an Islamist interpretation of Islam. Learning to recite the Qur’an correctly (tajweed) is an important manifestation of the third way.

The Sylheti Bari and the Londoni Flat

This article examines the ways in which migration from rural homesteads in Sylhet, Bangladesh, to urban flats in London has affected the practices of British Bangladeshi families around gender and childhood. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu on the “Kabyle house,” I describe relations between the spatial arrangement of homes and practices. Analyzing the “Sylheti bari” (rural homestead) and contrasting it with the “Londoni (British Bangladeshi) flat,” I describe the significance of the way in which ideas of “inside” and “outside” have translated from one setting to another. I will show how the translation of these ideas to the urban landscape in London affects British Bangladeshi practices surrounding headscarf wearing, children’s play, and socializing, as well as attitudes toward school and language.

Childhoods, Space and Place

This song cited by Blanchet (1996) describes a vision of childhood in Bangladesh that is full of laughter and play. Blanchet says that this is a ‘romantic reminiscence of what no longer is’ (1996: 44). Childhood is constructed in the song as a time of freedom, innocence and play, but in Blanchet’s account this is no longer the case. In London, British Bangladeshi ideas about childhood and the stages of life did not subscribe to this romantic notion either. Childhoods and the ways that they are understood have changed over time and space.

Introduction: Transnational Childhoods in a Global City

On a grey July day in 1986 I stood in Heathrow Airport, aged six, looking out of the large windows at the giant planes arriving and taxiing on the runway. Tiny men waved what looked like table-tennis rackets as we waited for our plane. We were leaving London and going to Bangladesh, a country I had never heard of. I thought sometimes that it was all a dream, and perhaps I would one day wake up; maybe Bangladesh did not exist after all. I went to live in Bangladesh with my parents for eight years.

British Bangladeshis in Education

Childhoods, as I discussed in the previous chapter, are socially constructed in ways that are contingent upon context, culture, history and geography. This chapter focuses upon the school and education system as an important site for British Bangladeshi children’s socialisation. At school children learn about being a child in contemporary London, and they learn about class, race and gender in ways that they do not at home. The school’s curriculum is not neutral, it is politically determined by the British state, and as such is part of the state’s project of social reproduction.