Young and Defiant in Tehran. Shahram Khosravi
IT professionals) and the wealthiest easily find a relatively safe life in more developed countries, less privileged young men pay large amounts to human smugglers in the hope of seeking asylum in the West, joining the slavery-like underground labor market in Tokyo or Dubai.
Identifying themselves as victims of the Revolution and calling themselves a “burned generation” (nasl-e sokhte), they blame not only the official ideologies but also the cultural norms of their parental generation. “The Third Generation” is producing a social movement of change that permeates different layers of Iranian society. One way to approach the social world of young Tehranis is to focus on the local debate on “modernity.”
Tradition and Modernity
The generational conflict and the tension between young people and the Iranian state are articulated partly in terms of the dichotomy between sonat (tradition) and tajadud (modernity). This dichotomy is expressed both temporally, in terms of generational gaps, and spatially. Places are classified as traditional or modern, representing the dichotomy between local and global influences. Instances of this are Shahrak-e Gharb versus Javadieh (in Chapter 3) and the Golestan shopping center versus the bazaar (in Chapter 4). Before going further, I want to point out that this book is not about modernity per se but rather about the local “debates about modernity” (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995: 16).
Such discourses of “tradition” and “modernity” have played a crucial role in the configuration of contemporary social patterns in Iran, and have blueprinted two major social movements in the Iran of modern times, the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) and the Islamic Revolution (1979). A similar split is now characterizing the youth movement in Iran.
Explicit attempts to struggle both for “modernity” and for the revitalization of “tradition” have been made in Iranian political and social domains since the early twentieth century. Although these ideologies have precursors that can be traced back several centuries, they received an impetus in the mid-1920s, when the systematic modernization of Iran and the construction of a nation-state was started by Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925–1941). Following the kemalist model in Turkey, Reza Shah attempted to transform Iran rapidly into a secular, industrialized, modern country. His first steps were to replace the Islamic law, sharia, with the Swiss Civil Code, and to “emancipate” women by removing their veils by force. Modernization accelerated during his son’s rule (1941–1979), thanks to the oil boom and the dramatically increased revenues it brought for the government. Western lifestyles and culture became more noticeable among the urban-based upper and middle classes after the Shah’s modernization program. In other words, “modernization” became synonymous with accepting Western habits, which were seen to be based on mass consumption. Thus, the marketing and consumption of Western goods became salient features of “modern” Iran. Questions concerning the disjunction with the old patterns of life have been raised with increased intensity in the last few decades, due to the intensification and proliferation of transnational connections and the increased mobility of cultural products and meanings. The project of a rapid Westernization of Iran in the 1970s was followed by a wave of “Islamization” in the 1980s, a vast effort to revive “Islamic tradition.”
The collective life-changes are followed by the development of a “split loyalty,” on the one hand to Iranian “traditional” patterns of life and on the other hand to “Western modernity.” The difficulty Iranians have had in adapting to “modernity” has been diagnosed as “cultural schizophrenia” (Shayegan 1992) or the “social malady” of “Weststruckness” (gharbzadegi) (Al-e Ahmad 1982). Many analysts see the 1979 Revolution as a reaction to this “social malaise” represented in Iranian modernity, all emblems of “Western” and non-Islamic culture, popular culture, and the consumption of Western goods among young people.
The conceptual dichotomy between sonat and tajadud is heavily gendered. In Iran and other Islamic countries, the most characteristic distinction is the way it is reflected in the duality of veiling/unveiling and thus explicitly imprinted on women’s bodies and voices (Milani 1992: 32–39; see also Najmabadi 2005). Iranian women have been seen as the hallmark of efforts toward tajadud since the Constitutional Revolution in the early twentieth century. “Compulsory unveiling” (kashf-e hejab) in 1936 was the focal point of the modernization project, started by Reza Shah Pahlavi. Barely a half-century later the Islamic Republic’s search for “authentic” culture began with veiling the women and pushing them back into the patriarchal private spaces.
While veiled women have been seen as a touchstone of sonat, unveiled ones personify the tajadud. In this book, I shall use the dialectics of veiling and unveiling to approach questions on the disjunction or conjunction of “tradition” and “modernity” in Iran. The veil in its general meaning is not only an expression of sex segregation per se but also an indication of de-individualization, concealment, and a walled (untransparent) society (see Chapter 2). Societal veiledness negates the presence of voiced individuals. It connotes a normative modesty, the silence and absence mainly of women but also of men (as I develop in Chapter 2). Unveiledness indicates self-assertion and characterizes all who oppose normative modesty.
This book has two goals: to explore the contexts out of which the current cultural politics has emerged and to provide an ethnographical description of the practices of everyday life, with which young Tehranis demonstrate defiance against the official culture and construct their own culture. Hopefully I shall contribute also to a scanter but optimistically growing number of urban anthropologies of Iran and ethnographical works on contemporary Iranian urban life.
Fieldwork
Doing urban anthropology in general and studying youth in particular in Iran indeed meant starting from scratch. In Iran anthropology has preeminently been interpreted and practiced as nomadic studies.18 The handful of anthropological studies of urban life (here I refer only to works done in English) in Iran are based mainly on ethnographical inquiries prior to the Revolution.19 However, a few major academic works on the urban life of young people in Tehran have recently been published, Yaghmaian (2002), Shirali (2001), Varzi (2006), Amir-Ebrahimi (1999), and Adelkhah (2000).
In search of a suitable field location for my study, I was looking for centers of young defiance. Shortly after my arrival in Tehran I found that the young people I was looking for were those referred to as bidard, biarman, and gharbzadeh (Weststruck). As I discuss in Chaper 3, dard (pain) is a significant feature in how young people are represented. Dard is associated with inner purity (safa-ye baten), conscience, and responsibility. Bidard (without pain, painfree) is, accordingly, associated with ignorance and frivolity. They were concentrated in a modern middle-class affluent neighborhood called Shahrak-e Gharb, a center for production, reproduction, and spreading of Western youth culture in Iran. These young people were viewed by the authorities, the parental generation, and experts as “nonrepresentative” or “atypical” of Iranian youth (I elaborate in more detail in Chapter 3). The local construction of a Westernized youth identity opposed to the native youth identity attracted me to this neighborhood and its young people. Hence, persons in my study were selected not as being representative and typical middle-class young people, but as being part of a specific youth culture.
Although I conducted my fieldwork mainly in this “modern” middle-class neighborhood, my study also includes young Tehranis from other parts of Tehran, particularly from poor neighborhoods in South Tehran. Throughout the fieldwork I worked with 46 young Tehranis, 15 of them south Tehrani with a working-class background. Of the 46, only 11 were female. For the obvious reason of Iranian gender segregation, I had restricted access to female informants. In most cases, the young women I interacted with were girlfriends or sisters of my male informants. Moreover, the tacit ethical codes in Iran for communication between the sexes impeded talking with girls about a range of topics, particularly sexual ones. My informants were