Bangladeshi Society - Family, Household, and Kinship

Family, Household, and Kinship

Family and kinship are the core of social life in Bangladesh. A family group residing in a bari functions as the basic unit of economic endeavor, landholding, and social identity. In the eyes of rural people, the chula defined the effective household—--an extended family exploiting jointly-held property and being fed from a jointly operated kitchen. A bari might consist of one or more such functional households, depending on the circumstances of family relationship. Married sons generally live in their parents' household during the father's lifetime. Although sons usually build separate houses for their nuclear families, they remain under their fathers' authority, and wives under their mothers-in-law's authority. The death of the father usually precipitates the separation of adult brothers into their own households. Such a split generally causes little change in the physical layout of the bari, however. Families at different stages of the cycle display different configurations of household membership.

Patrilineal ties dominate the ideology of family life, but in practice matrilineal ties are almost as important. Married women provide especially important links between their husbands' brothers' families. Brothers and sisters often visit their brothers' households, which are in fact the households of their deceased fathers. By Islamic law, women inherit a share of their fathers' property and thus retain a claim on the often scanty fields worked by their brothers. By not exercising this claim, however, they do their brothers the important service of keeping the family lands in the patrilineal line and thus ensure themselves a warm welcome and permanent place in their brothers' homes.

A woman begins to gain respect and security in her husband's or father-in-law's household only after giving birth to a son. Mothers therefore cherish and indulge their sons, while daughters are frequently more strictly disciplined and are assigned heavy household chores from an early age. In many families the closest, most intimate, and most enduring emotional relationship is that between mother and son. The father is a more distant figure, worthy of formal respect, and the son's wife may remain a virtual stranger for a long time after marriage.