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Public Space and Modern Iranian Society

This panel was compiled by the Conference Program Team from independently submitted paper proposals

Presentations

The Transformation of Social Life and Public Spaces in Tehran, 1850 to 1950
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The two episodes of the contention during the Constitutional Revolution of the early 20th century and Mossadegh era in the mid-20th century depicted two different modes of public spaces in Tehran. From the courtyards of the mosques and shrines and the British Embassy Garden in the former case to Baharistan and Tupkhanih Squares in the latter case, the protestors used two different sets of spaces to oppose the hegemonic power. This essay investigates the reasons for this transformation and provides answers to why, how, when, and in response to which socio-cultural context such a shift happened. It shows that the transformation of the public spaces, in their political essence, was the byproduct of the grand transformations of social life and social spaces of the city and urban society. By investigating the traditional social spaces in the 19th century, such as mosques, takīyihs (spaces for taʿziyih passion play), bathhouses, zūrkhanihs (traditional gymnasiums), and coffeehouses, this essay demonstrates how the social life gradually transferred into new spaces such as theaters, parks, restaurants, cafes, museums, and the like towards the mid-twentieth century. It argues that the slow and gradual changes of the urban society and social life, sponsored by the state and desired by certain sections of the society, along with the changes in the physicality of the city, generated different manifestations of public spaces in the early and mid-20th century Tehran.

The Face Game: Moral Capital in Contemporary Iran
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Studies of marginalized youth in Iran have focused almost exclusively on how structural constraints operate to thwart these young people’s transition to adulthood. They become stuck in what scholars have termed “waithood”, a period in time during which young people wait with uncertainty for productive employment, housing and marriage – socioeconomic benchmarks that have traditionally defined adult status in the Middle East. Nevertheless, there has been little work that has examined how these youth actually cope with such precarious structural conditions. Scholars who have analyzed the cultural practices of marginalized youth have focused their analysis on youth in the upper and upper-middle classes of Iranian society. The emphasis here has largely been on the various oppositional subcultures that have arisen among these youth that undergird their exclusion from formalized institutions of power. Given the attention that scholars have placed on understanding the factors that give rise to youth exclusion in Iran and the ways in which this exclusion is reaffirmed by the practices of privileged youth in the country, there are practically no qualitative studies that address the experiences of lower income youth groups in Iran. The pursuit of face by lower-class youth in Iran speaks to this gap in existing studies. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among low-income youth in Iran, this study finds that through their engagement in this face system, some young people in Iran create an alternative basis of social differentiation to improve their lives. By following four moral criteria governing face behavior– self-sufficiency, hard work, purity, and appearance – these youth are able to save face and to distinguish themselves from each other. Members of their communities subsequently provide those youth who abide by these criteria or “face rules” with certain social and economic opportunities that youth can use to incrementally improve their lot in life. Subjective measures of worth – as judged by these rules – thus enables young face-savers to acquire moral capital, which they can subsequently exchange for social and economic opportunities. Through their pursuit of socially acceptable moral standards, face-savers reveal how structural conditions of marginalization do not always result in passivity or resistance to dominant social norms, but to increased effort to embrace them, a finding that has important implications for research on youth mobility in Iran.

Governing Place of Refuge: A Boulevard Around the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad-Iran (1912-1935)
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This article examines the urban modernization in the first half of 20th century (from 1928 to 1941), in the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, exploring its impacts on the social function of asylum seeking in the shrine. The Shrine of Imam Reza is a pilgrimage site since 9th century and the resting place of the eighth Imam of the Shi’a Muslims in Iran. Due to its significance, the trusteeship of this shrine during the reign of Pahlavi had always been by the Shah himself. With the beginning of modern developments and master plans of Iranian cities, a round-boulevard had been created surrounding the Shrine in 1932, which can be considered the first attempt to reshape the form and practice of pilgrimage for the years to come. This article opens with an act of asylum seeking in the Shrine of Imam Reza following a rebellion in 1912 and ends with another asylum seeking and upheaval in the same shrine on the same day only twenty-three years later in 1935. The urban impact of the newly constructed round boulevard during these twenty-three years is being explored.
By looking at the practices of three actors: the architect, the state, and the client, I analyze the power relations, professional discourses, and rhetoric, which direct me to demonstrate the representation of their participation in this religiously and nationally sensitive project, and to illustrate how their positions and interactions on different problems, as experts, influenced greatly the outcome of which they sometimes intriguingly question. The study attempts to go beyond the normative framework of analyzing spatiality in sacred sites, and focuses on the subtle social strategies and technologies of power used by the actors in different occasions, which make a building complex, religiously vindicated. This article will contribute to a social understanding of spatial alterations in the ritual of pilgrimage and asylum seeking to the Shrine. It examines the process of modern development by the developers in a traditional building complex under the supervision of a secular state and explores how the sacredness of this site and consequently the pilgrimage and asylum seeking is concretely fashioned by the politics of modernization in Iran.