Shodagor Family Strategies

Abstract

The Shodagor of Matlab, Bangladesh, are a seminomadic community of people who live and work on small wooden boats, within the extensive system of rivers and canals that traverse the country. This unique ecology places particular constraints on family and economic life and leads to Shodagor parents employing one of four distinct strategies to balance childcare and provisioning needs. The purpose of this paper is to understand the conditions that lead a family to choose one strategy over another by testing predictions about socioecological factors that impact the sexual division of labor, including a family’s stage in the domestic cycle, aspects of the local ecology, and the availability of alloparents. Results show that although each factor has an impact on the division of labor individually, a confluence of these factors best explains within-group, between-family differences in how mothers and fathers divide subsistence and childcare labor. These factors also interact in particular ways for Shodagor families, and it appears that families choose their economic strategies based on the constellation of constraints that they face. The results of these analyses have implications for theory regarding the sexual division of labor across cultures and inform how Shodagor family economic and parenting strategies should be contextualized in future studies.

One piece of the matrilineal puzzle: the socioecology of maternal uncle investment

“…In Bangladesh, purdah is expressed through practices like covering of one's body to varying degrees and largely relegating women to private spaces, avoiding work or interactions outside of the home. While some Shodagor women follow these practices more closely than others, female autonomy is generally higher among Shodagor than it is among the land-dwelling, non-Shodagor Bangladeshis [36]. However, as noted above, when women work outside of the home, they are almost always accompanied by their husbands or male relatives when fishing or by other women when trading.…”

“…Shodagor fathers provide an unusually high amount of direct investment for their children, and some fathers stay at home as the primary carer of young children for half of the year while mothers work away from home [36]. Other Shodagor men also seem to invest in direct care at unusually high rates; for example, preliminary observational and qualitative data indicate that older sons and grandfathers often care for children [18].…”

“…In order for children to receive direct care from a particular set of kin, they must have access to one another throughout the year. Given this and that ecology also plays an important role in parenting and subsistence decisions [36], as well as and nutritional outcomes for all family members [87], it is not surprising that ecological variables representing family residence patterns predict direct care from maternal uncles. It is also not surprising that the more older brothers a woman has, the more likely her children are to receive direct care from one of her brothers.…”

“…Owing to the association between living on a boat and women's occupation, this risk may be compounded for mothers who are housewives, as they are more likely than other women to have very young children [36]. Shodagor families take measures to prevent drowning by teaching children to swim at an early age, having fathers stay at home with children while the mother works, and using mostly adults as allocarers [36]. When examining the characteristics of some of the uncles who invest in their sisters' children, we also find that most of them live on land.…”

Non-Parental Investment in Children and Child Outcomes after Parental Death or Divorce in a Patrilocal Society

“…In a review of hunter-gatherer practices, for example, Konner (2005) notes that direct allomaternal care ranges from almost none in the Ache (Hill and Hurtado 1996) to a very high level in the Efe where 18-week-olds spend 60% of their time in physical contact with people other than their mothers (Ivey 2000). Factors that apparently influence alloparental caregiving include demographic variables (Hewlett 1991;Hewlett and Lamb 2005;Turke 1988), changing subsistence patterns (Hewlett and Lamb 2005;Hirasawa 2005;Perry 2017a;Valeggia 2009) and other ecological variables (Hames 1988;Hill and Hurtado 1996;Hurtado et al 1992;Starkweather 2017).…”