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This article builds upon work which aims to 'de-exceptionalise' displacement [Cabot and Ramsey, 2021. Deexceptionalizing Displacement: An Introduction. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 12(3):286–299] by describing two hitherto unresearched examples of 'unexceptional' displacement. Both involve abandonment and going missing, and both throw light on the ways in which gender, space and emplacement work together to produce particular vulnerabilities via what I have called 'spatial precarity'. In the first, lost or abandoned girls are held in a government-run Safe House on the outskirts of the city. In the second, women are displaced from their marriages when their husbands go missing. The context is a rapidly changing urban environment in which the rapacious development of property and infrastructure has led to a cityscape that is never stable. This environment, and the socio-political relations that are constitutive of it, have helped to create the conditions in which certain people get lost and others go missing, leading to highly gendered forms of displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overseas migration in Biswanath, Bangladesh has led to an economic boom in the area, whereby people from poorer communities are provided employment. But the extent to which the poor are helped and provided social protection depends on whether they come from nearby places and whether they have established social relations with the rich patrons.

This article discusses the circumstances surrounding death and bereavement amongst Bengali families in East London. Based on fieldwork amongst Bengali elders in the Spitalfields area the article suggests that death and some of the rituals surrounding it are rapidly moving from the private to the public domain within Britain. Whilst `traditionally' in Sylhet most deaths involve the mobilisation of locally based social networks for support and ritual, material and social factors mean that in London death often takes place within hospitals and hospices rather than homes. Combined with this, rituals of bereavement are often carried out in Bangladesh, where bodies are returned for burial. This can mean that some members of the family, especially widows who do not usually accompany their husbands' bodies to Sylhet, are excluded from important processes of ritual grieving. Many widows are also far more socially isolated in Britain than stereotypic images of Bengali extended families might suggest. The situation is not, however, static. Within the context of rapid social and cultural change and the `Islamisation' of some parts of London's East End, Muslim cemetaries are becoming established, and the ritual centre increasingly moving from Bangladesh to Britain., Death in the Bangladeshi community is becoming increasingly Anglicized and traditional rituals changed or omitted due to social circumstances. Widows said that their husbands often died in hospital without prayers or their family beside them. Nor could the widows comply with the necessary seclusion period. Often men were buried in the UK rather than being flown to Bangladesh. Compromises have to be made but as Britain becomes more Islamised, Muslims will find it easier to perform their religious and cultural rituals., As the most profound of all rites of passage, death is not solely a matter of individual experience and emotion but is also inherently social. As Bloch and Parry comment: [...]

The economic effects of migration has a serious impact on the home region of migrants, according to a study of migrant and non-migrant families in Talukpur, a village in Sylhet, Bangladesh. In the village, 29 of the 70 households had family members in the UK, seven households had moved to the UK, and 26 were not involved at all in migration. There is 'migration mania' in Talukpur at present, with everyone believing economic success lies abroad. Families who had relatives in the UK were sent money and bought land from their neighbours, which led to a land-owning prevalence linked to migration by 1987. This led to higher prices. Since the early-1970s, however, migration has been cut back, and original Bangladeshi migrants have settled in the UK, and gifts of money are petering out, therefore accepting the standard of living in Bangladesh.