Lopita Huq

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I am an anthropologist working in the development research sector for 20 years. I love doing fieldwork. I work on gender aspects of norms, livelihoods, labour market, migration, violence, micro credit, digital technology. I have worked in particular with the ready made garment sector. I also work with adolescents.

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Barbara Wolfe

University of Wisconsin-Madison

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Maurizio Ambrosini

Università degli Studi di Milano - State University of Milan (Italy)

Md Mizanur Rahman

Qatar University

Jenna Loyd

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sandra Gil Araujo

CONICET

Avdeev Alexandre

Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne

Bruno Riccio

Università di Bologna

Ariane Utomo

University of Melbourne

Garumma T Feyissa

Drexel University

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Mediation at the Grassroots: Claiming Rights by Empowering Citizens in Bangladesh

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2014

Although Bangladesh has been a parliamentary democracy with a popularly elected government in pow... more Although Bangladesh has been a parliamentary democracy with a popularly elected government in power for the last two decades, citizens experience neither the formal promise of equality, nor an accountable and transparent state. Indeed, citizen participation in the democratic process is limited to voting at the time of five-yearly elections. State-citizen relations are fragile in most sectors and the state is near absent in the governance structures of the arenas and institutions that the poor populate. This disjuncture between ‘the people’ and the so-called democratic state is evident from the fact that many rural poor people perceive the state/government as a group of powerful, distant, inaccessible people or an individual who rules the land or ‘kingdom’ (Mahmud and Huq 2008).

Does dowry improve life for brides? A test of the bequest theory of dowry in rural Bangladesh

In recent years, dowry levels have risen to previously unforeseen levels. Among Hindus in north I... more In recent years, dowry levels have risen to previously unforeseen levels. Among Hindus in north India dowry can amount to three or four times a family's total assets. Among Muslims in Bangladesh and Hindus in south India, dowry has become commonplace whereas the practice did not exist a generation ago. The institution of dowry has been widely criticized, socially maligned, and legally banned. Some recent economic writings suggest that dowry functions as a bequest or pre-mortem inheritance, implying it persists because it is "good for the bride." Using panel data from an adolescent study in rural Bangladesh, this paper explores the association between dowry and the prevalence of domestic abuse to test the bequest theory of dowry. We find that, contrary to the prediction of the bequest theory, married females who paid dowry at marriage have a higher likelihood of reporting domestic violence compared to those who did not. In addition, the relation between dowry and abuse is highly level-specific: respondents who paid small dowries report much higher levels of abuse than those who paid large dowries. In fact, paying no dowry is just as protective, if not more so, in terms of preventing abuse as the largest dowry payments.

Lopita Huq

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