ABSTRACT
People between two countries always feel sorrow. Mothers and fathers worry about what their child is doing in another country. The child sometimes finds happiness. According to Bangladeshi perceptions they are sleeping in a big bed, eating chicken and wearing expensive saris. As part of these processes, people’s relationship to particular places, like their self-identity, is continually changing, being made and remade over time and space. This is partly because global movement transforms one’s attachments to place in complex ways. Like the study of gender, the study of ageing and the life course can therefore bring important insights to contemporary anthropological conceptualizations of the relationship between place, identity, movement, and ‘home’. The role of the body is central to this; bodies that move and change across space are also bodies that move and change across time. Different elders subscribe to the images to a greater or lesser extent.
