Formation of the 'Middle Class' in Bangladesh
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-08-27

A history of the formation of the 'Middle Class' in Bangladesh with Seuty Sabur

Both an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report (2016) and a World Bank report (2014) have spoken of the possibility of Bangladesh becoming an upper-middle-income country by 2021. From 1990 to 2010 the size of the middle classes expanded from 9% to 20%. Despite this newfound interest in the middle class, questions about its composition, the practices and aspirations of its constituents are hardly ever raised, while the political implications of such questions are never acknowledged, let alone debated.

Seuty Sabur’s longitudinal research attempts to make a section of this class tangible. Using memoirs, genealogies, intergenerational family histories and archives, she explores the material conditions under which these gendered-class formations were possible during subsequent colonial and postcolonial periods. In her talk she locates these transitions and the historical events that provided the impulses for the emergence of the affluent middle classes in postcolonial Bangladesh.

Dr Seuty Sabur is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology and just completed her tenure as the Coordinator of Social Sciences in the Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Brac University. She obtained her PhD in Sociology from the National University of Singapore, and MA in Cultural Dynamics from Hiroshima University, Japan. She is currently working on her upcoming book Marriage and Friendship: Social Networks of the Bangladeshi Affluent ‘Middle Class’.

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