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Classy Kids and Down-at-Heel Intellectuals: Status Aspiration and Blind Spots in the Contemporary Ethnography of Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Zuzanna Olszewska
Zuzanna Olszewska*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Abstract

This article reviews the ways in which class, status, social mobility and their cultural ramifications have been considered (or failed to be considered) in recent ethnographic studies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It argues against the trend of privileging “resistance” to an oppressive state as a theoretical frame for documenting social phenomena in Iran: lifestyles and consumption patterns cannot be interpreted merely as signs of political rebellion because they are endowed with symbolic value as status attributes in a society whose class configurations are shifting. I present a number of sources and concepts that help to rethink these phenomena, and show how the experience of Afghan refugees living on the margins of Iranian cities illuminates both the opportunities and constraints created by the Islamic Republic's uneasy mix of political Islam, populism and neoliberalism. A focus on aspiration to upward mobility becomes a useful analytical lens that allows us to sidestep reductive dichotomies such as tradition/modernity or religion/secularism that are in practice blurred by its very pursuit.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 6 , November 2013 , pp. 841 - 862
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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Footnotes

This article was written during a Junior Research Fellowship in Oriental Studies at St John's College, Oxford; the author is grateful to that institution for its support. The primary material discussed in this article is based on ethnographic fieldwork with Afghan refugees in Iran in 2005–07 and 2010, and ongoing internet-based contact with a group of informants in subsequent years. The author wishes to thank the participants of seminars at the universities of Oxford and St Andrew's, where earlier versions of this article were first presented, and the reviewers for their helpful comments. She is also grateful to Orkideh Behrouzan for an insightful reading of the manuscript.

References

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6 Khosravi, Young and Defiant, 16; Varzi, Warring Souls, 2.

7 The first group includes the most popular such works: Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (London and New York, 2004)Google Scholar and Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York, 2003)Google Scholar and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (New York, 2004)Google Scholar. Typical of the second is Moaveni, Azadeh, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran (New York, 2005)Google Scholar, along with numerous others described in Motlagh, A., “Autobiography and Authority in the Writings of the Iranian Diaspora,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no 2 (2011): 411–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20 For a fascinating micro- and macro-level study of the 2009 protests and the class basis of their mobilization, see Harris, K., “The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class: An Ethnographic Analysis of Iran's 2009 Green Movement,” Mobilization: An International Journal 17, no. 4 (2012): 435–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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26 Ibid., 196.

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28 Ibid., 199.

29 Ibid., 202, 209.

30 Behdad and Nomani, “What a Revolution!”

31 The Islamic Republic achieved startling success in the field of education, building schools in poor and rural areas, enforcing single-sex primary and secondary schooling which made it easier for girls to attend, and reaching near-universal literacy among youth of both sexes. See Higgins, P. and Shoar-Ghaffari, P., “Women's Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran, ed. Afkhami, Mahnaz and Friedl, Erika (London, 2004), 19–43Google Scholar; and Abrahamian, “Why the Islamic Republic has Survived,” 13.

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38 There is a similar division in Mashhad, where I carried out most of my research with Afghan refugees, despite the fact that the old city radiated out from the centrally located shrine of Imam Reza. Of the newly built suburbs, the wealthiest extend westwards on either side of a long boulevard that leads gently uphill towards a series of mountain pleasure spots and orchard villages, while the poorest are now well-established former squatter neighborhoods eating up more and more agricultural land on the plain to the northeast. In Mashhad, too, people talk of a bālā-ye shahr and pā‘in-e shahr and their inhabitants as bālā-ye shahri and pā‘in-e shahri. When I traveled to the poor areas of Mashhad where most Afghan refugees lived, I saw parts of town in which my upper-middle-class Iranian friends told me they had never dreamed of setting foot.

39 Bayat, “Tehran,” 116–17. Nomani and Behdad note that members of the paramilitary organizations and other “political functionaries of the state” are an “ambiguous class category” (Class and Labor, 23).

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46 Adelkhah, Fariba, Being Modern in Iran (London, 1999).Google Scholar For an interesting comparison with Shi‘is in Lebanon who similarly reconcile piety and modernity, see Deeb, Lara, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton and Oxford, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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54 Ibid.

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60 All names are pseudonyms.

61 A much more common form of “passing” among Afghan refugees is avoiding discrimination by simply never admitting one is not Iranian (at least in situations where proof of identity is not demanded). This is easier for young people who have been brought up in Iran and already speak with an Iranian accent, and for those who are not visibly different from most Iranians. One Afghan friend told me how he went to tortuous lengths to avoid being exposed as Afghan when he traveled to another city in Iran: he preferred to say he was from Georgia and to invent an elaborate back-story, as well as giving impromptu answers to all manner of questions about the people and customs of Georgia. He later regretted the glaring dishonesty that had arisen between him and his admiring new friends, but was reluctant to undo it. Some take the ultimate step to overcome all legal hurdles by purchasing Iranian identity documents on the black market, necessary e.g. for owning a business; Hamideh had told me that her mother had been able to open her salon in this way.

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