The Thousand and One Borders of Iran

The Thousand and One Borders of Iran PDF Author: Fariba Adelkhah
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317418972
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
A country marked by controversy, Iran’s social, cultural and political dynamics are too often reduced to a few misleading clichés. Islamism is widely considered to shape all social relations in Iranian society and, while Iranian society is indeed Islamic, this term’s multiple meanings in everyday life and practices go far beyond the naïve and monolithic idea we are used to. The Thousand and One Borders of Iran analyses travel as a social practice, exploring how diasporas, margins and so-called peripheries are central in the construction of a national identity and thus revealing the complexities of Iranian history and society. Written by a leading anthropologist, it draws upon fieldwork carried out in Iran and Iranian migrant communities across Dubai, Tokyo and Los Angeles from 1998 to 2015. While casting new perspectives on the place of transnational relations in an increasingly globalized world, this work also sheds new light on the evolution of Iranian society, countering the explanation furnished by nationalist ideology that has been reproduced by the Islamic Republic itself. Its unique approach to the analysis of Iranian society through the theme of travel and borders considers the links and even the quarrels between the centre of Iranian society and the periphery, and the foreign elements that have contributed to society’s development. Travel is key to these interactions and, following the travels of merchants and workers, students or the faithful, elected officials and experts, or exiles and refugees, this book offers an anthropological study of travel that re-thinks Iranian history and national identity. This book would be of interest to students and scholars of Iranian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology.

The Thousand and One Borders of Iran

The Thousand and One Borders of Iran PDF Author: Fariba Adelkhah
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317418972
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
A country marked by controversy, Iran’s social, cultural and political dynamics are too often reduced to a few misleading clichés. Islamism is widely considered to shape all social relations in Iranian society and, while Iranian society is indeed Islamic, this term’s multiple meanings in everyday life and practices go far beyond the naïve and monolithic idea we are used to. The Thousand and One Borders of Iran analyses travel as a social practice, exploring how diasporas, margins and so-called peripheries are central in the construction of a national identity and thus revealing the complexities of Iranian history and society. Written by a leading anthropologist, it draws upon fieldwork carried out in Iran and Iranian migrant communities across Dubai, Tokyo and Los Angeles from 1998 to 2015. While casting new perspectives on the place of transnational relations in an increasingly globalized world, this work also sheds new light on the evolution of Iranian society, countering the explanation furnished by nationalist ideology that has been reproduced by the Islamic Republic itself. Its unique approach to the analysis of Iranian society through the theme of travel and borders considers the links and even the quarrels between the centre of Iranian society and the periphery, and the foreign elements that have contributed to society’s development. Travel is key to these interactions and, following the travels of merchants and workers, students or the faithful, elected officials and experts, or exiles and refugees, this book offers an anthropological study of travel that re-thinks Iranian history and national identity. This book would be of interest to students and scholars of Iranian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology.

Iranian Hospitality, Afghan Marginality

Iranian Hospitality, Afghan Marginality PDF Author: Elisabeth Yarbakhsh
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793624755
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In Iranian Hospitality, Afghan Marginality, Elisabeth Yarbakhsh unpacks ideas around culture, identity, and the relationship between Iranian citizens and Afghan refugees living in Shiraz, Iran, and surrounding areas. Yarbakhsh highlights the ways in which shifting policies and practices toward refugees over the past forty years have run parallel to the transitive notions of what it means to be Iranian. Yarbakhsh exposes the complex interplay of identity and hospitality as it emerges out of variously competing and intersecting Islamic, historical, and literary narratives of Iranian identity, carefully illustrating how these factors circumscribe Afghan refugee life in the city of Shiraz.

Emerging Scholarship on the Middle East and Central Asia

Emerging Scholarship on the Middle East and Central Asia PDF Author: Katlyn Quenzer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498558437
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Emerging Scholarship on the Middle East and Central Asia: Moving from the Periphery provides fresh analysis and cutting-edge critique of phenomena and events across the region. Working out of diverse disciplinary traditions, the authors call on varied theoretical frameworks in order to challenge entrenched stereotypes and long-standing perspectives. This volume explores emerging directions in scholarship across a range of issues, including: the Gulf; Saudi strategizing; Afghan refugees in the Islamic Republic of Iran; contemporary Turkish politics; the current Syrian conflict; Middle Eastern and Central Asian art; perceptions of security threats from Afghanistan; and the potential future role of China in the region. The authors in this volume have given wide-berth to dominant approaches to scholarship on the region, while grappling with overlooked issues and marginal populations in order to advance new frameworks. On the Periphery deserves a central place in future scholarly engagement with the Middle East and Central Asia.

Iran in Motion

Iran in Motion PDF Author: Mikiya Koyagi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503627675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility. Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals.

Iran and Russian Imperialism

Iran and Russian Imperialism PDF Author: Moritz Deutschmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317385314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Rather than a centralized state, Iran in the nineteenth century was a delicate balance between tribal groups, urban merchant communities, religious elites, and an autocratic monarchy. While Russia gained an increasingly dominant political role in Iran over the course of this century, Russian influence was often challenged by banditry on the roads, riots in the cities, and the seeming arbitrariness of the Shah. Iran and Russian Imperialism develops a comprehensive picture of Russia’s historical entanglements with one of its most important neighbours in Asia. It recounts how the Russian Empire strived to gain political influence at the Persian court, promote Russian trade, and secure the enormous southern borders of the empire. Using hitherto often neglected documents from archives in Russia and Georgia and reading them against the grain, this book reveals the complex reactions of different groups in Iranian society to Russian imperialism. As it turns out, the Iranians were, in the words of the Russian orientalist Konstantin Smirnov, "ideal anarchists," whose resistance to imperial domination, as well as to centralized state institutions more generally, impacted developments in the region in the century to come. Iran’s troubled relationship with the wider world continues to be a topic of considerable interest to historians, yet little focus has been given to Russia’s historical connections to Iran. This book thus represents a valuable contribution to Iranian and Russian History, as well as International Relations.

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran PDF Author: Ida Meftahi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317620623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage investigates the ways dancing bodies have been providing evidence for competing representations of modernity, urbanism, and religiosity across the twentieth century. Focusing on the transformation of the staged dancing body, its space of performance, and spectatorial cultural ideology, this book traces the dancing body in multiple milieus of performance, including the Pahlavi era’s national artistic scene and the popular café and cabaret stages, as well as the commercial cinematic screen and the post-revolutionary Islamized theatrical stage. It links the socio-political discourses on performance with the staged public dancer, in order to interrogate the formation of dominant categories of "modern," "high," and "artistic," and the subsequent "othering" of cultural realms that were discursively peripheralized from the "national" stage. Through the study of archival and ethnographic research as well as a diverse literature pertaining to music, theater, cinema, and popular culture, it combines a close reading of primary sources such as official documents, press materials, and program notes with visual analysis of filmic materials and imageries, as well as interviews with practitioners. It offers an original and informed exploration into the ways performing bodies and their public have been associated with binary notions of vice and virtue, morality and immorality, commitment and degeneration, chastity and eroticism, and veiled-ness and nakedness. Engaging with a range of methodological and historiographical methods, including postcolonial, performance, and feminist studies, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Middle East history and Iranian studies, as well as gender studies and dance and performance studies.

Iranian Culture

Iranian Culture PDF Author: Nasrin Rahimieh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317429354
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Throughout modern Iranian history, culture has served as a means of imposing unity and cohesion onto society. The Pahlavi monarchs used it to project an image of Iran as an ancient civilisation, re-emerging as an equal to Western nations, while the revolutionaries deployed it to remake the country into an Islamic nation. Just as Iranian culture has been continually re-interpreted, the representations and avocations of Iranian identity vary amongst Iranians across the world. Iranian Culture: Representation and Identity demonstrates these fissures and the incompatibilities that refuse to be written out of national culture, analysing works of literature, popular music, graphic art and film, as well as oral narratives. Using works produced before and after the 1979 revolution, created both inside and outside of Iran, this study reveals neglected complexities and contradictions in the field of Iranian cultural production. It considers how contested claims to culture, whether they originated in Iran or the Iranian diaspora, shape our understanding of this culture and what spaces they create for new articulations of it, and in doing so offers an important re-examination of our collective concept of culture. This book would be an excellent resource for students and scholars of Middle East Studies and Iranian Studies, specifically Iranian culture including film and contemporary literature and the Iranian diaspora.

Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment

Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment PDF Author: GJ Breyley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317336801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The word motreb finds its roots in the Arabic verb taraba, meaning ‘to make happy.’ Originally denoting all musicians in Iran, motrebi came to be associated, pejoratively, with the cheerful vulgarity of the lowbrow entertainer. In Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment, GJ Breyley and Sasan Fatemi examine the historically overlooked motrebi milieu, with its marginalized characters, from luti to gardan koloft and mashti, as well as the tenacity of motreb who continued their careers against all odds. They then turn to losanjelesi, the most pervasive form of Iranian popular music that developed as motrebi declined, and related musical forms in Iran and its diasporic popular cultural centre, Los Angeles. For the first time in English, the book makes available musical transcriptions, analysis and lyrics that illustrate the complexities of this history. As it presents the findings of the authors’ years of ethnographic work with the history’s protagonists, from senior motreb to pop-rock stars, the book reveals parallels between the decline of motrebi and the rise of ‘modernity.’ In the twentieth century, the fate of Tehran’s motrebi music was shaped by the social and urban polarization that ensued from the modern market economy, and losanjelesi would be similarly affected by transnational relations, revolution, war and migration. Through its detailed and informed examination of Iranian popular music, this study reveals much about the values and anxieties of Iranian society, and is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Iranian society and history.

The Sacred Republic

The Sacred Republic PDF Author: Mehran Kamrava
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019774771X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This book presents a comprehensive, detailed analysis of the establishment, evolution and current significance of different institutions in today's Islamic Republic of Iran. The volume draws on the insights of a number of Iran experts to examine their establishment, functions and evolution, as a means of understanding Iranian politics and society. The Sacred Republic's specific focus is on the key formal institutions of the state through which the Islamic Republic exercises power, namely the velayat-e faqih: the judiciary, the presidency, the parliament, elections, the Revolutionary Guards, and the foreign policy establishment. Despite significant work on Iranian politics in recent decades, few studies have focused on state institutions, their resilience, or the reasons for and manner of institutional change. Through historical institutionalism and comparative historical analysis, the contributors to this book together fill a glaring gap in the study of Iran's political institutions, offering significant insights for the theoretical literature on comparative politics, Middle Eastern politics, and Iranian Studies.

Triumph and Despair

Triumph and Despair PDF Author: Mehran Kamrava
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1805260103
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Triumph and Despair tells the dramatic story of post-revolutionary Iran’s first four decades, from its establishment in 1979 until today. The revolutionary coalition that overthrew the monarchy was at once democratic, populist and Islamic. The Islamists, and the Khomeinists in particular, were able to capitalise effectively on prevailing conditions on the ground; to frame the new republic’s constitution, capture nascent institutions, and consolidate their power by eliminating opponents through a reign of terror. Once the war with Iraq was over and after the death of the new order’s charismatic founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic was consolidated: first by tweaking its institutional arrangements, and then by fostering economic development and post-war reconstruction. A reformist interlude then followed, reversed unceremoniously by a return of populism and a broader authoritarian retrenchment. Today Iran remains at odds with itself, its economy too deeply political to yield meaningful developmental results, its foreign relations too conflicted to allow it a productive place in the community of nations. As Iran’s nationalities and its women and youth carve out spaces for themselves in the broader narrative, competing identities–religious, national and otherwise–abound. After forty years, the Islamic Republic remains a country in search of itself.