In migrant villages in Sylhet, places, and the images with which they are associated, represent different and at times competing forms of power. While the 'homeland' refers to spirituality and religiosity, 'abroad' is linked to material bounty and economic transformation, and local desire has become centred on travel abroad as the only route to material prosperity. The 'imagined' foreign worlds of those who have never migrated can therefore be viewed as the ideological concomitant of international dependency, and their ambivalent relationship with the homeland, a key element in the cultural contradictions of migration