Even as a high school student in Luristan I was interested in folklore, in recording folk tales, songs, and poems, and in the various customs of the different peoples of Iran. When I returned from the United States in 1974 with a Ph.D. in anthropology and started to teach at what then was Pahlavi University (now Shiraz University), I realized that my professional interest amounted to a scholarly mission, given the fact that so few anthropologists were active in Iran and how much there was to record ethnographically. As I like to travel (mostly by car so as to have easy and spontaneous access to locations of interest) and to interact with people, I have taken my work to many places. I have no problems making contacts or communicating with people of all walks of life, although gender is, of course, an issue. As a rule, I work on projects where I do not have to interact privately with women, or else where I can rely on the services of a female assistant.

More than half the population of Iran is under the age of seventeen, but despite these more than 30 million children and adolescents, social scientists know little about their experiences, culture, or history.

This ignorance is a reflection of what social scientists deem important. The dismissive attitude toward research with children is similar to earlier attitudes toward research with women: at best women were quantified and described. Most social scientists were male, seeing women from a male point of view. Out of the innocent arrogance that a male-dominated science breeds in its practitioners, women's own culture was largely ignored; “culture” was male culture. This changed only when women social scientists started to look at women through their own eyes.

Among the newest developments in the ethnography of Iran is research on Iranians living outside of Iran. The large post-revolutionary Iranian diaspora raises many interesting issues and questions, including to what extent Iranian culture can be maintained abroad and how effectively displaced Iranians can function within host societies. Several features of the Iranian diaspora also make this population attractive for testing general theories concerning migration and adaptation. In addition, the conditions that led to the Iranian diaspora of the last 25 years also made it difficult for anthropologists to carry out research in Iran, enhancing the attractiveness of studying Iranian populations outside of Iran.