| Current research tells us little about the relational dialectical tensions of people in cultures other than North American culture. Therefore, this study explores how relational dialectics can explain the cultural and religious struggles of affluent Bangladeshi people.;Bengali Muslims engage in cultural practices that appear incompatible with their religious beliefs. I conducted fifty interviews with affluent Bengalis via telephone to collect data on religious and cultural attitudes and behavior. I examined instances of struggles, and I used analytic induction to develop category schemes from the collected data.;The results of the study showed that people struggle, from both cultural and religious perspectives, mostly with the public and private dialectic, which refers to the tension between the public definitions of a particular relationship and the private interactions within that specific relationship. The most common method of coping with dialectical tensions was compromise. |
