The Margins of the Islamic Republic: An Interdisciplinary Quest

The field of Iranian studies is a multidisciplinary venue, yet interdisciplinary research has been scant with fragmented scholarly contributions. In the last decades, studies on Iranian society have struggled to go beyond the polarising dichotomies of ‘before and after the Islamic Republic’, ‘Islam versus secularism’, ‘modernity versus tradition’ or, for that matter, ‘state versus people’. In view of this, the panel brings together scholars from different disciplinary fields – anthropology, sociology and politics – in an attempt to foster interdisciplinary investigations within, and without, Iranian Studies. By locating the historical presence of margins, the panellists explore unseen, yet material, encounters of life in Iran. Although this endeavour bears scholarly value per se, it also effects the making of Iranian studies more broadly, potentially integrating otherwise isolated fields of engagement within the scholarship.
Thus, margins enter into the dialectics of state formation and the making of life in the city; surreptitiously, they cast light on the many faces of Iran, where the dynamics of the Islamic Republic cross the threshold, not simply of the realm of post-Islamism, as Asef Bayat holds, but of secular – in the sense that they belong to the material world – phenomena.
The panel reflects on ad hoc events and agents within Iranian society and history. These are putatively regarded as belonging to the margins of its ‘national’ life and the fringes of its politics. One objective of the panel is to unfold how these margins have actually been constitutive and critical to the making of contemporary Iran. In particular, panellists pay heed to different aspects such as (Adelkhah) ‘dirty money’ in contemporary Iran and its reverberations in the political combat; (Ghiabi) ‘addiction’ and pathology as expedients in managing policy change, disorder and crisis; (Asfari) the qorbati community’s relation to the normative community in the ecology of the city; (Harris) Iran’s capitalism and its institutional logics across the margins of public, semi-public and private sectors.
Detachment from the field, regardless of disciplinary perspectives, produces a scholarship that risks missing the silent, concealed and everyday products of life in Iran; hence, it reproduces an image of Iran through a selection of official discourses at odds with the scholarly sensitivity. By relocating the margins at the core, the panel pursues a heuristic and exploratory objective, building upon the instances of existing investigations on the margins of Iranian studies, with the ultimate aim at making these instances speak to each other.


Presentations

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‘Contamination’, ‘risk’, ‘prevention’, ‘cleansing, ‘quarantine’, ‘emergency’, ‘plague’ and, as I specifically illustrate, ‘pathology’ and ‘crisis’, have been brought in the everyday speeches of politicians and in the vocabulary of politics. Medicine has become a constituent part of ordinary politics as much in governing the population as in making the population govern itself. The state, hence, operates programmes on marginal and mainstream population, which qualify it with Andrew Polsky’s attribute of the ‘therapeutic state’.
Medicine, as a primary device for the management of life, has become the deus ex machina of politics. A case in point is that of the clergy in the Islamic Republic, which has adopted, increasingly in the last decades, the language and reasoning of medicine, technology and sciences, in order to legitimise controversial decisions vis à vis the populace. By doing so, the Iranian state has also adopted the frame of ‘pathology’ in relation to contentious issues, enabling or justifying reforms and changes.
This can be seen in the state interventions vis à vis homeless drug users, sex workers and, as in the work of Afsaneh Najmabadi, transgender individuals. The concept of ‘crisis’ is key in framing political initiatives in terms of policymaking as much as in terms of practical intervention. Indeed, crises operate in such a way that allow societal forces to push for change in certain fields, where governments have previously been unwilling or reluctant to intervene. How does the Iranian state diagnose a crisis? And how are marginal categories treated by state, or para-state, institutions, when they are under (invented or material) conditions of crisis?
These and other questions are investigated in this paper which has the ultimate aim of demonstrating how the Islamic Republic has witnessed the eclipse of Islamist and post-Islamist (pace Asef Bayat) nature, in favour of truly secular – in the sense that they belong to the material world – politics, one which is coterminous with global trends. By looking at the specific, yet quantitatively conspicuous, phenomenon of drug (ab)use as well as homelessness and HIV policies, I trace the making of a new milieu of Islamist politics based on a progressive medicalisation of ‘disorderly, problematic groups’. These can be qualified as the margins of contemporary Iran; margins that, nonetheless, remain central to the making of the country’s politics and political transformation.

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The study of internal social mechanisms of “marginal” groups has long been neglected by the Iranian social science tradition. Such omission brings us to a partial and narrow understanding of today’s Iranian society. The category “marginal groups”, as Iranian functionalists “labelled” them without further knowledge of their empirical social life, embraces, amongst others, all the “Gypsies of Persia” and itinerant or “peripatetic” ethnic groups. This article propounds an ethnological approach to one of these groups named Ġorbat. According to the small number of researchers who encountered this group, the ethnonym would stand for the strangeness of the group vis-à-vis the cultural and moral standards of the wider society.
Although this group has always lived in “symbiosis” (based on commercial, material and service exchange) with other populations, conflict seems to be the most important characteristic of all the interactions between Ġorbats and their settled neighbours. This has led to a despising and stereotype-based image of the latter towards the former. The fundamental assumption of this article, based on Fredrik Barth’s theory of “ethnic boundaries”, is that ethnic identity is partly constructed through a relational sphere that the group share with its neighbours. In this regard, each “marginalised” or “unwelcome” group entering the social structure of another population, is expected to discover certain categories, statuses and values within the host’s system of representations, in order to define its own identity and status. The study of cultural interstices through which Ġorbats can be seen as living in symbiosis with others -in spite of their conflicts- brings to light cultural categories, statuses and values proper of Iranian society which at the same time rejects this group, while accepting it in its social structure. Furthermore, it illustrates the process of identity construction of an integrated group of “strangers”.

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What sort of capitalism exists on the Islamic Republic? What are the criteria by which capital moves in and around the commanding heights of the economy? It depends where one looks and how one measures. This paper utilizes recent data from Tehran Stock Exchange for 2013-14 to measure sectoral concentration, institutional ownership, and relative shares of private versus semi-public capital in key economic sectors (steel, auto, mining, petrochemicals, etc) in Iran. By doing so, we can establish a realistic picture of Iran's corporate structure and link institutional investors with their associated socio-political positions -- particularly in military funds, paramilitary funds, endowed funds, pension funds, public and private holding funds and banks. In this manner, we can better assess and analyze the broad and growing swath of Iran’s economy that is shared between para-statal and private spheres, as well as operationalize these findings for comparison with other MENA and middle-income countries.