A Genealogy of Society: Mapping the Relationship between Samaj and Civil Society in Bangladesh

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the anxious and sometimes hostile relationship between modern forms of civil society and non-modern institutions in Bangladesh. I argue that an uneasy relationship arises from civil society's inability or lack of initiative to identify and negotiate with ‘pre-modern’ social institutions and their remnants, which I conceptualise here as samaj. Such dissonance and disengagement have been historically constructed largely with regard to the way in which the roles of the state, capital and market forces have been conceptualised at the interface between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. This proposition demands a genealogical understanding of the relationship between civil society and samaj, in which the latter is represented by religious institutions such as the khanqah and the madrasa.