The Role of Anthropology: Part III

Wells are used almost exclusively by women in Bangladeshi communities (Ohtsuka, Sudo, Sekiyama, Watanabe, Inaoka, & Kadono, 2003). The water gathered on a daily basis is used domestically for cleaning, personal hygiene, cooking, and consumption. Consequently, education of women may well prove to be the most successful approach in disseminating information about arsenicosis. Female community health workers have had success in educating at the household-level (Hadi, 2003); future studies might focus on the transmission of such information among families and neighbors and within a village.

Several investigations have focused on the possibility of well-sharing as a viable mechanism for delivering safe water to a large number of individuals. While many tube wells in rural Bangladesh are privately owned, an estimated 80% of these wells contain dangerously contaminated water, and thus a large portion of the Bangladeshi population is at risk for arsenic exposure and, ultimately, arsenicosis (Chowdhury, Rahman, Mondal, Paul, Lodh, Biswas et al., 2001). Initiatives that have installed community wells have found that a single tube well can provide enough water to sustain approximately 500 people (van Geen, Ahmed, Seddique, & Shamsudduha, 2003). Moreover, such community-wide well-sharing efforts have proven successful, thus, in theory, well-sharing among non-kin and non-neighbor groups is a promising possibility in some regions (van Geen, Ahsan, Horneman, Dhar, Zheng, Hussain et al., 2002). Others believe that well-switching behavior will be a viable option for some immediately, but that others will be slower to adopt the practice (McLellan, 2002).

Very little has been written thus far on the nuances of well-usage—this may be because of a high degree of variability in patterns from one village to the next. If broad-based trends do indeed exist, however, an understanding thereof would prove crucial in further discussions of arsenicosis, and must therefore be examined presently. Community dynamics may dictate which tubewells are accessible to whom. If culturally-specific complexities are at the root of well-use and –switching, ethnographic analysis could help to determine the most locally relevant methods for encouraging safe water access.

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