Young and Defiant in Tehran. Shahram Khosravi
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older people around, usually their siblings or parents. I was curious to know what non-Tehrani young people in the periphery thought about their Tehrani contemporaries, and generally wanted to explore Iranian youth culture. So, in addition to the first group, I interviewed 12 young men and women in Isfahan. I came to know many of my informants quite well, others not so well. I interviewed some only once, others several times. Although I met the majority of them regularly, only two turned into what could be called “key informants.” Simon and Dara became good friends from an early stage of my fieldwork.
There is a strong emphasis on “locale-centered ethnography” in this book. My choice is based on ethical and political considerations—to protect people involved in the study. The ethnography, therefore, moves through a spatial arrangement of power in the first two chapters; spaces in Shahrak-e Gharb in Chapter 3; the Golestan shopping center in Chapter 4; cinematic spaces in Chapter 5; heterotopias of everyday life in Chapter 6.
The fieldwork was a combination of “appointment” anthropology (Luhrmann 1996: vii) and conventional participant observation. There was not a fixed group of young people for me to join. Therefore I met my informants individually. I spent many mornings meeting officials or interviewing film-makers, musicians, and journalists. Other days I used the mornings reading through documents and publications in libraries or visiting “Houses of Culture” to make a note of their activities. In the afternoon and early evening I hung around with my informants in the Golestan shopping center or elsewhere in Shahrak-e Gharb. In the late evening I socialized with Dara or Simon, who did not like each other, so it had to be with one at a time. We met in more intimate milieus, usually in their homes but also at my apartment. Sometimes we went to the cinema or a concert. Only four of the Tehrani young people in my study belonged to the basij (volunteer militia). As I explore in more detail later on, several reasons contributed to makeing the presence of young basijis so small in my study. It was preeminently a matter of access. As guardians of Islamic values and norms, basijis stood opposed to the majority of young people in this study. My Iranian background robbed me of the chance to position myself in the field as an anthropologist first and an Iranian second.20 Furthermore, regular contact with basijis would definitely damage my other informants’ confidence in me.
Despite my background as an Iranian, this book is not “anthropology at home,” either spatially or temporally. Both Tehran and the Third Generation were unfamiliar for me. Writing about Tehrani young people and their cultural identity after more than a decade of being outside Iran put me in relation to a different generation from my own as well as in a city I never had visited before. However, as an Iranian, I enjoyed privileged access to certain kinds of knowledge, though I had an in-and-out experience during the fieldwork.
The fact that I grew up in Iran often faced me with the question as to when exactly my fieldwork began. Did I really start my fieldwork in May 1999? If I include all the knowledge, experiences, and emotions of the first two decades of my life before I left Iran, my fieldwork started long before I became an anthropologist. However, since the official start of my fieldwork in May 1999 I have spent eight months in Tehran, followed by regular visits once or twice a year, usually lasting not more than a month. Although my most recent research visit was in Summer 2006, I have followed, or rather been followed by, information and new data through all the links that connect me to Tehran, not least through digital networks. In Stockholm, the Internet offered a way for me to refresh my information, to get access to public debates (newspapers, youth radio channels, youth magazines) and public as well as private homepages and blogs written by young people. My cyber-ethnography even included long talks with young Tehranis in chat rooms. Sometimes I had access to more information about things happening in Tehran through the Internet than Dara, who was living in Tehran.
The Structure of the Book
The first two chapters provide an anthropology of societal order; the rest of the book is concerned with the anthropology of change. Chapter 1 explores the structure of authority and social control. I analyze the processes used by the “caring” Islamic state in order to guard the “health and purity” of the society. I shall argue that, alongside the overt modes of disciplining—the metaphoric “panopticon,” education, media, and punishment—the social order is based on the “pastoral modality of power,” paternalistic care. As has been mentioned, in the Iranian case this is formulated as the principle of mutual discipline, amr-e be ma´rouf va nahi az monkar (the promotion of virtue and the rejection of vice. The anxieties felt by the Iranian authorities are expressed through campaigns that mainly target the younger generation and their lifestyle and have led to the criminalization of a large part of youth culture, under the label jorm-e farhangi (cultural crime).
Chapter 2 examines the ways the religious authorities have sought to anchor an Islamic order of things in the bodies and subjectivities of individuals. While Chapter 1 deals with the structure of authority, Chapter 2 examines its aesthetics. I look at the aesthetic notions of the authorities themselves and how they are implemented by the practices of social control. “The aestheticization of modesty,” as I call it, is manipulated through three schemes: a Revolutionary romanticization of poverty; the practice of veiling; and the emotionalization of politics. I show how theocratic aesthetics view “pain” (dard) and “suffering” (ranj) as hallmarks of dignity and purity. Accordingly, “bidard-ness” is seen as a sign of immorality and an anti-Revolutionary stance.
Chapter 3 provides the reader with a sense of the spatial layout of the setting of my fieldwork, Shahrak-e Gharb. The chapter begins with a brief illustration of the urban milieu of Tehran. It continues with a presentation of how people in Tehran perceive the city, how it is structured by the dichotomies of poor/rich, modern/traditional, and local/global. With reference to a “distinct” mentality, social organization, and neighborhood identity, the young people of Shahrak-e Gharb try to dissociate themselves from the wider society, through claims on culturalized lifestyle choices, such as “being modern,” individual autonomy, secularism, and globalism. This chapter shows how geographic indications reveal a status hierarchy in the city as a whole (north versus south Tehran), but also inside the Shahrak-e Gharb neighborhood.
Chapter 4 takes us to the Golestan shopping center. I argue that the center is, above all, a space of “imagination.” It is also a site where the knowledge of “how to be modern” is communicated. I demonstrate that the production of modern identity in the Golestan shopping center is formed in opposition to the “traditional” marketplace, the bazaar. For young people, the bazaar is synonymous with a traditional lifestyle that is seen as reactionary and allied with the Islamic regime. Chapter 5 takes as its subject the Third Generation and the generational conflict that characterizes Iranian society today. The chapter also examines the parental generation’s views on the Third Generation. Chapter 6 is a collection of narratives of defiance. It illustrates the tactical ploys used by youths to negotiate hegemonic social order. Rarely planning and organizing “resistance” in a collectively structured and reflected way, young people utilize any opportunity that arises to assert their autonomy.
In the Conclusion I discuss how the predicament of young people is related to imagination and modernity. I underscore the significance of access to the means of imagination (read means of modernity) for young Tehranis’ struggle for subjectivity.
Chapter 1
Cultural Crimes
There is not a single topic in human life for which Islam