Local Perspectives on Economic Development in Rural Bangladesh

The video interviews included in this archive are part of an ethnographic research project conducted in Bangladesh in 2018, 2019, and 2022, exploring how wealth and health disparities emerge and/or change with economic development. The goal of this research was to investigate the foundations of inequality in the developing world.

Our fieldwork was conducted in Matlab, a rural area located about 75 kilometers southeast of the capital city of Dhaka, with around 240,000 people spread across 142 villages (as of 2018). Now in the earliest stages of industrialization and urbanization, Matlab has been experiencing rapid economic development since the 1990s. This has included significant shifts in occupation away from traditional farming towards wage labor and professional jobs, along with increasing labor migration rates from Matlab to Dhaka and other cities in Bangladesh, as well as to other parts of the world, especially the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

We interviewed residents from all walks of life about the changes they have observed taking place in Matlab over the past twenty years. The interviews were designed to elicit emic perspectives on economic, social, and technological change in the region. Participants discussed changes in occupation, the rising importance of education, the impact of development on health, novel familial and social dynamics, transformations in moral attitudes and religious practices, and their conflicted relationship with new technologies. We also asked participants to talk about their expectations regarding Matlab’s future. Their answers reveal an ambivalence, and at times cognitive dissonance, that reflects the scholarly debates about development and captures the complexities of the process.

The project was carried out in partnership with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). The project was made possible through a grant from the National Science Foundation. Additional funding was provided by Pennsylvania State University via the Center for Digital Humanities and Information, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Asian Studies.