A Quiet Violence
View from a Bangladesh Village
BUY:
by Betsy Hartmann and James K. Boyce
Originally published by Zed Books, London and Food First, San Francisco, 1983
Reprinted 2013
A quiet violence today stalks the villages and shanty towns of the Third World, the violence of needless hunger. In this book, two Bengali-speaking Americans take the reader to a Bangladesh village where they lived for nine months. There, the reader meets some of the world’s poorest people – peasants, sharecroppers and landless laborers – and some of the not-so-poor people who profit from their misery.
The villagers’ poverty is not fortuitous, a result of divine dispensation or individual failings of character. Rather, it is the outcome of a long history of exploitation, culminating in a social order which today benefits a few at the expense of many.
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Praise for A Quiet Violence
Beautifully written, the book is a timely reminder of the quiet violence that oppresses the poor throughout the developing world.
Here, in microcosm, is a fascinating, carefully constructed account of the way life works in a million Third World villages.
A book written by insiders, able to see as well as a Bangladeshi the social mechanisms which rule village, town and country.
Through the sensitive eyes of Hartmann and Boyce, we meet some of the extraordinary people whose lives and struggles are hidden in the anonymous statistics of world hunger. Their powerful, first-hand account enables us to pierce through the many myths about the world’s hungry majority…by taking us with them into a single country – a single village.