This article argues that the notion of Iranian culture employed in the public discourse of Zoroastrians allows them to tackle the dilemma of Shiʿi-dominated Iranianness without provoking Shiʿi authorities. The piece offers an analysis of ethnographic data, including detailed speech acts documented in Zoroastrians’ ritual spaces and cultural exhibitions. It explores the Zoroastrian configuration of an Iranian culture that summons and encodes pre-Islamic tropes and modern nationalist sentiments by constantly maneuvering around national, religious, and ethnic categories. This configuration's underpinning assumptions, narratives, and texts have powerful platforms in Iranian nationalist imagination. I propose that this arrangement attempts to carve out a space for Zoroastrians’ distinct identity by connecting the history of the Muslim Arab invasion of Persia to the Shiʿi hegemonic norms of Iranian culture today. It further invokes Zoroaster's indigeneity and teachings as the foundation of authentic Iranianness to establish Zoroastrians’ survival as a cultural system.

A migrant's journey is no linear trajectory from A to B. It is a fragmented and complex move over different regions with alternating periods of mobility and immobility. This article researches the complex dynamics of irregular migration from Iran to the Netherlands, and everywhere in between. Through a historical comparison of the life stories of Iranian asylum seekers in the Netherlands in two time periods (1988–1989 and 2009–2010), it studies the routes they took, their relations with human smugglers, and their interactions with immigration policies and border managements along the way. It shows migrants' and smugglers’ flexibility and capacity to adapt to ever-changing circumstances. Migration politics and border controls, along with their increasing limitations on legal migration channels, are indeed crucial in the understanding of irregular migration practices and the ever-growing involvement of facilitating services. Through a combination of this migration policy research and the migration trajectory research, the paper explores these dynamics and the interactions between migrants, smugglers, and state policies in every phase of their journey from Iran to the Netherlands, and everywhere in between.

As a practice and experience, ta'zieh lies at the crossroads between ritual and performance, collective lament and recollection, literature, and folklore. Focusing on the experience of the spectator, this paper discusses ta'zieh's liminal status and diverse functions in Iran today. This study is based on observations gathered during fieldwork in the fall of 2017 in Tehran (Grand Bazaar), Isfahan (Falāvarjān), and Kashan (Nushābād). By way of comparison, we further reflect on a video installation by Abbas Kiarostami presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2003, which challenges common assumptions about the aesthetic and religious effectiveness of ta'zieh. The contrast allows us to elucidate how, by renovating ancient narrative forms, contemporary Iranian performing arts partake in the shaping of individual affects as well as communal emotions.

Using Soviet foreign ministry documents found in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, this article seeks to shed a new light on the identity of those behind the assassination of Haj ʻAli Razmara in 1951, and the reasons for it. In seeking a power to back his aspirations to become the ruler of Iran, Razmara hopped between the USSR and the United States, finally gambling on USSR. In spite of this, the United States was not in a hurry to get rid of him; instead, they preferred to use the Shah's fear of Razmara to secure the former's cooperation and to extract from him what they wanted, especially oil concessions in Iran. However, by then Iran was already marching rapidly toward oil nationalization, which Razmara opposed on the grounds that the USSR should be the power that produced the oil for the Iranians. This was unacceptable to the Americans, who, according to Soviet sources, decided to get rid of Razmara during the early stages of the Cold War.

As part of the collective endeavor to explore the modalities and challenges of the narrative in the Persianate world, this article reconsiders Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), a film characterized by a special cinematographic feature. While accounting for what appears to be a story of swindling and identity theft, Kiarostami keeps the viewer in a state of uncertainty about the nature of what he sees, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, truth and lie, through particular narrative and cinematographic choices. Previous scholarship has focused mainly on the aesthetic implications of the staging and its effects on the viewer. The present study proposes a different type of analysis by discussing specific narrative devices from the perspective of cultural anthropology, with particular attention to the recurrence of the zāher/bāten paradigm, suggested as a cipher by Kiarostami himself early on in the film. The examination of the discursive and aesthetic mobilization of these notions brings to light a subtle game of back-and-forth between the desire to disclose deeper meanings and the will to preserve ambiguity and intimacy, allowing for “soft epiphanies” to arise.

The editorial decision to publish a roundtable on the 2022–23 protests in Iran has come with challenges and obvious limitations due to access and immediacy. The ambition of this intervention is to offer some initial reflections and some analytical instruments in the hope that they will be useful for future publications. We also want to write in this moment because we want to register its characteristics—emotions running high, the quick detours of power relations between the state and the protesters, the uncertainty, the changing political weight of the diaspora—along with the difficulty of doing analytical work in the midst of such processes.

This photo essay provides a visual archive of Parsi philanthropic efforts toward the Iranian Zoroastrian communities of Yazd, Kerman, and Tehran during the 1930s. The essay reproduces a collection of photographs from a photo album produced by the Iranian Zoroastrian Anjoman (est. 1918) for the benefit of Parsi audiences in Bombay. These photographs were taken and compiled by administrators of the Parsi-funded charities in order to demonstrate to Bombay-based Parsi benefactors how their charity efforts were being used inside Iran. The essay also discusses the importance of including visual archival material as part of the social and cultural history of modern Iran, as well as the unique sets of challenges that such archival preservation represents.

This paper studies the transformation of the worker-peasant to reluctant revolutionary industrial worker during the establishment of Iran's copper industry at the Sarcheshmeh copper mine from 1966 to 1979. It explores the procedural rules implemented by mine management, such as coercion and paternalism, and the nature of the employment relationship, including methods of control, bargaining, and dispute resolution. Consideration is given to engagement of different agents with welfare policy and industrial relations, including the nature of capital, the structure of ownership, the path of traditional labor relations, and international contributors on one side and workers’ agency and their structural power in the context of evolving domestic and international environments on the other. Also highlighted is the role played by the workers’ background and economic improvement and how these factors affected their political stance during the 1979 revolution.

Historians of Pahlavi Iran have demonstrated that physicians, pharmacists, dentists, and nurses were encouraged by early nation-builders to civilize patients and shepherd the masses into modernity. Medicine, however, was not only a top-down affair. Medical professionals maintained a dialogue with their patients, cognizant of the cultural mores of local communities and the threat of medical malpractice lawsuits. In fact, medicine, far from a universal science, was highly localized, inflected by traditional curatives (like herbs and spices), shortages of medical equipment and drugs, and local policing to safeguard patient rights. Through social history, scholars may examine the dialectic between patient and provider, which proved fundamental to the practice of modern medicine in Pahlavi Iran.

The tradition of writing in Iran has a long history, and its continuous development has, from time to time, led to new scripts. A most notable case is that of Perso-Arabic's replacement of Pahlavi script when New Persian replaced Middle Persian, resulting in Zoroastrian priests having difficulties reading and understanding their religious texts. The process of changing scripts is well attested by the tradition of Pāzand. Although Pāzand was considered one of the first types of transliteration in Iran, this tradition was also gradually abandoned due to its reliance on Avestan script, which was and continues to be uncommon. Avestan script is now found in Zoroastrian Middle Persian (Pahlavi) manuscripts, just as Pāzand was traditionally used for earlier texts. Pāzand–i.e., transcription of Middle Persian in the Avestan alphabet–was used for some time, but was eventually abandoned for scripts in common use, i.e., Persian in Persia and Gujarati and Devanagari in India. In this paper, the aim is to identify and categorize this tradition's characteristics in Pahlavi manuscripts, drawing on manuscripts from the fifty-three volumes published by the Asia Institute of the Pahlavi University of Shiraz, as listed in the Appendix.

Over the past four months, the brutal, extralegal, and violent repression of protestors during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran has taken observers and participants by devastating and sometimes fatal surprise. Although not a drastic departure from past practices, the large scale and seemingly random acts of violence, such as the beating of protestors to death on the streets, the shooting of passersby and nonviolent demonstrators point blank, and the fatal torturing of detained protestors and activists, have marked new levels and scales of violence. In what follows I analyze this brutal repression campaign in relation to the institutional history of the Islamic Republic's armed units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as the most controversial entity among all. I contend that the IRGC's historic endorsement of firing at will as an accepted practice among its ranks has enabled the decentralized radical instances of violence. I will discuss how, despite the continued reliance on decentralized forces, their firing at will is not unanimously endorsed this time around, due to the different nature of the current movement and the deepening uncertainties and schisms in both the forces on the ground and the ruling elite.

This paper aims to investigate the usage and frequency of what we refer to as K-suffixes in Classical New Persian of the ninth to thirteenth centuries, Contemporary Written Persian of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and Contemporary Spoken Persian. It shows that K-suffixes are most likely to be the reflexes of earlier evaluative morphemes, traditionally called “diminutives,” and are characterized by a high degree of multifunctionality. While evaluative functions continue to dominate in the Classical New Persian works, they have largely been lost in contemporary spoken Persian, and the suffix is now systematically used to express definiteness. The development of the K-suffix as a definiteness marker in contemporary colloquial Persian appears to be innovative, and is mainly dependent on genre, speaker, and speech situation.

Data for Classical New Persian is taken from critical editions of works from the ninth to thirteenth centuries. The data for Contemporary Written Persian comes from comprehensive books of fiction from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and for Contemporary Spoken Persian from an extensive corpus of spoken Persian narratives and a questionnaire answered by fifteen speakers. The results suggest that evaluative morphology can develop into definiteness marking, with the development passing through a stage of combination with a deictic marker.

This paper concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a new pathway that is different from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definite marking, though the endpoint may be similar. The study contributes the second detailed documentation of this process for any Iranian language, and one of the few well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking worldwide.

Afghanistan is one of the few places where the category of bachah—the beardless young male—has maintained its aesthetic and erotic aspects in the public imagination. This article provides an introduction to the history of the various arrangements of man-bachah relationships in Afghanistan from the rise of the Afghan kingdom in the late eighteenth century. By looking at both primary and secondary sources, alongside ethnographic materials gathered during fieldwork in Afghanistan between 2016 and 2021, this article shows how the content and implications of the category of bachah have been in constant flux and intimately connected to wider social, political, and economic developments both inside the country and beyond.

Authority in Islam is often understood to operate as a site of negotiation. Based on textual analysis and ethnographic research, this article examines three case studies of disparate Shi'i Sufi Orders where a willing deferral of certain types of authority exists. In the first case study, the Soltanalishahi Order refer their members to an outside mujtahid for all matters relating to the shariat, therein limiting the powers of their shaykhs and qotb. The second case study looks at debates concerning the nature of the qotb's authority within a single order, particularly as it pertains to the power of touch and transmissibility of blessing (barakat) from qotb to object to person, with the order's leadership refuting the idea of charismatic embodied authority despite some of their lay members’ beliefs. Finally, the third case study addresses a group who refute the need for any centralized leadership at all and instead recognize and read the works of multiple qotbs from disparate Iranian orders. By focusing on the deferral of authority, as a type of editing, as a type of shaping, I hope to show that the refuting of certain duties is just as formative as the amassing of powers.

While the functioning of the postal system in Iran before 1500 and after 1800 has been studied, this article analyzes, based entirely on primary sources, the operation and characteristics of the Iranian postal system between 1500 and 1800 for the very first time. Such a study enables scholars to better understand the functioning of communication between both government officials and private individuals in Safavid, Afshari, and Zand Iran. During this time, there were two types of messengers: express-mounted couriers (chapar) for official business and foot messengers (shaters) for both official and private mail. The designation of qased was rarely used to denote mail foot messengers.

In this intervention, we discuss the ongoing protest movement and the quasi-revolutionary situation in Iran with the goal of offering contextual as well as background analysis. Our objective is to examine the current wave of revolutionary politics in the frame of a longer history, that is, the one of the “unaccomplished” 1979 revolution. We do not argue that the current movement is in continuity with the so-called Islamic revolution; rather, we ask what afterlives of the 1979 revolution and successive waves of mobilizations reverberate within the current situation. We do so from a political transformative vantage point, which we understand as inherently feminist, in that we refuse to recognize any hierarchy between the struggles, the issues, and the demands as expressed by the protesters. Indeed, we understand liberation as a collective project resulting from the intersection of struggles, demands, and issues. Following this line of reasoning, we interrogate the current moment along three thematic axes: the social composition, the prospects for political convergence, and the genealogy, or the ideational connection, of the current struggle with those of the past.

Poetry readings are an intimate affair; they are not suitable for mobilizing the masses. But poems can capture moods and trigger emotions. They can create closeness and community, send messages and demand change. Indeed, in the case of Iran, a series of poetry reading sessions can be considered a milestone event on the country's path toward revolution.2 During ten nights of poetry reading, known as the dah shab, in October 1977 in Tehran, the country's most prominent poets and writers took advantage of a short window of opportunity that opened up for them when the Shah loosened somewhat the reins of dictatorship. Beginning on October 10, 1977, they presented their poems to thousands of listeners on ten consecutive evenings on the premises of the German-Iranian Cultural Association on Pahlavī Avenue. Poets of all political persuasions were present, united above all in their common interest of demanding an end to censorship and standing up for freedom of speech. The impressive list of participants includes such well-known names as Behazin, Simin Behbehani, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Houshang Golshiri, Saeed Soltanpour, and Siavosh Kasrai, along with many more.3

At the zenith of the Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) protests in October to December 2022, the call for (general) strikes became a rallying point for activists who were seeking to increase the protests’ social reach and political strength in the face of increasing state repression. Therefore labor provides an advantageous analytical lens for exploring some of the constraints and potentials of the social dynamics of the WLF protests.

This article considers three temporary and reversible penal shaming acts in nineteenth-century Iran: the shaving or cutting of hair, irrespective of gender; the shaving or cutting of men's facial hair; and the forcible removal of headgear or the coerced wearing of silly headgear. Drawing on anthropological, historical, and sociological studies of hair, this study argues that hair and hat punishments embodied elements of ritual, sexuality, social control, and marginalization. In order to understand the meaning of these penal acts, the article looks at general taboos around hair and head exposure alongside licit and voluntary forms of cutting or shaving hair. Illicit sex, heresy, and alcohol consumption were recurring moral crimes most often associated with such forms of humiliating punishment. Since restoration of honor was not the sole prerogative of the government, these punishments were often carried out by those acting on behalf of a religious authority or individually and collectively by ordinary subjects outraged by a moral violation.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is confronting a crisis. Thousands of Iranians, within and without Iran, have taken to the streets to call for an end to a regime that sanctions violence against its citizens and a future of dwindling opportunity for its youth. These ongoing protests, catalyzed by the killing of Mahsa Amini, seem at once to have nothing and everything to do with the question motivating this roundtable: How can capitalism help us understand Iran, past or present? Some might argue that capitalism can scarcely act as a cipher for understanding recent unrest in Iran; it has hardly entered the slogans and symbolism of the protests, which decry police violence, state corruption, forced gender segregation, arbitrary punishment, and the greed of ruling military and religious elites more than they do a worldwide web of capitalist relations sustained by no single political party, religion, or country.