Download or read book Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology written by Shahnaz R. Nadjmabadi and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During recent years, attempts have been made to move beyond the Eurocentric perspective that characterized the social sciences, especially anthropology, for over 150 years. A debate on the “anthropology of anthropology” was needed, one that would consider other forms of knowledge, modalities of writing, and political and intellectual practices. This volume undertakes that challenge: it is the result of discussions held at the first organized encounter between Iranian, American, and European anthropologists since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It is considered an important first step in overcoming the dichotomy between “peripheral anthropologies” versus “central anthropologies.” The contributors examine, from a critical perspective, the historical, cultural, and political field in which anthropological research emerged in Iran at the beginning of the twentieth century and in which it continues to develop today.
Download or read book Nomads in Postrevolutionary Iran written by Lois Beck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the rapid transition in Iran from a modernizing, westernizing, secularizing monarchy (1941-79) to a hard-line, conservative, clergy-run Islamic republic (1979-), this book focuses on the ways this process has impacted the Qashqa’i—a rural, nomadic, tribally organized, Turkish-speaking, ethnic minority of a million and a half people who are dispersed across the southern Zagros Mountains. Analysing the relationship between the tribal polity and each of the two regimes, the book goes on to explain the resilience of the people’s tribal organizations, kinship networks, and politicized ethnolinguistic identities to demonstrate how these structures and ideologies offered the Qashqa’i a way to confront the pressures emanating from the two central governments. Existing scholarly works on politics in Iran rarely consider Iranian society outside the capital of Tehran and beyond the reach of the details of national politics. Local-level studies on Iran—accounts of the ways people actually lived—are now rare, especially after the revolution. Based on long-term anthropological research, Nomads in Postrevolutionary Iran provides a unique insight into how national-level issues relate to the local level and will be of interest to scholars and researchers in Anthropolgy, Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.
Download or read book Nomadism in Iran written by Daniel T. Potts and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Potts examines the development of nomadism in Iran over the course of three millennia. Evidence of nomadism in prehistory is examined and found insufficient to justify claims of its great antiquity. The background of the earliest nomadic groups, identified as Persian tribes by Herodotus, is examined within the context of the migration of Iranian speakers onto the Iranian plateau in the late second or early first millennium B.C. Thereafter, evidence of nomadic groups in Late Antiquity and early Islamic times is reviewed.
Download or read book Minorities in Iran written by R. Elling and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-02-18 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the premise that nationalism is a dominant factor in Iranian identity politics despite the significant changes brought about by the Islamic Revolution, this cross-disciplinary work investigates the languages of nationalism in contemporary Iran through the prism of the minority issue.
Download or read book Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery written by Parisa Vaziri and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2023-12-26 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Download or read book Ethnic Religious Minorities in Iran written by S. Behnaz Hosseini and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the experiences of the ethnic and religious minorities of Iran, such as Jews, Yarsani, Christian, Sabean Mandaean, Bahai, Zoroastrian, Baluch, Kurd, and others and provides a historical overview of their position in society before and after the 1979 Islamic revolution and highlights their contribution to the country's history, diversity, and development. It also focuses on the historical, sociopolitical, and economic factors that affected the minorities' development during the last century. Author Behnaz Hosseini has shaped this book with authentic material and has assembled the experiences and opinions of academics of diverse backgrounds who approach the minorities’ issues in Iran in a constructive and ingenious way: from debating their efforts to preserve their identity and cultural heritage and ensure their survival to discussing their relations with the majority and other minorities, the role of religion in everyday life, and their contribution to the rich cultural history of Iran.
Download or read book Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf written by Lawrence G. Potter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long a taboo topic, as well as one that has alarmed outside powers, sectarian conflict in the Middle East is on the rise. The contributors to this book examine sectarian politics in the Persian Gulf, including the GCC states, Yemen, Iran and Iraq, and consider the origins and con- sequences of sectarianism broadly construed, as it affects ethnic, tribal and religious groups. They also present a theoretical and comparative framework for understanding sectarianism, as well as country-specific chapters based on recent research in the area. Key issues that are scrutinised include the nature of sectarianism, how identity moves from a passive to an active state, and the mechanisms that trigger conflict. The strategies of governments such as rentier economies and the 'invention' of partisan national histories that encourage or manage sectarian differences are also highlighted, as is the role of outside powers in fostering sectarian strife. The volume also seeks to clarify whether movements such as the Islamic revival or the Arab Spring obscure the continued salience of religious and ethnic cleavages.
Download or read book Doing Research In and On the Digital written by Cristina Costa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a social space, the web provides researchers both with a tool and an environment to explore the intricacies of everyday life. As a site of mediated interactions and interrelationships, the ‘digital’ has evolved from being a space of information to a space of creation, thus providing new opportunities regarding how, where and, why to conduct social research. Doing Research In and On the Digital aims to deliver on two fronts: first, by detailing how researchers are devising and applying innovative research methods for and within the digital sphere, and, secondly, by discussing the ethical challenges and issues implied and encountered in such approaches. In two core Parts, this collection explores: content collection: methods for harvesting digital data engaging research informants: digital participatory methods and data stories . With contributions from a diverse range of fields such as anthropology, sociology, education, healthcare and psychology, this volume will particularly appeal to post-graduate students and early career researchers who are navigating through new terrain in their digital-mediated research endeavours.
Download or read book Prozak Diaries written by Orkideh Behrouzan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-26 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prozak Diaries is an analysis of emerging psychiatric discourses in post-1980s Iran. It examines a cultural shift in how people interpret and express their feeling states, by adopting the language of psychiatry, and shows how experiences that were once articulated in the richly layered poetics of the Persian language became, by the 1990s, part of a clinical discourse on mood and affect. In asking how psychiatric dialect becomes a language of everyday, the book analyzes cultural forms created by this clinical discourse, exploring individual, professional, and generational cultures of medicalization in various sites from clinical encounters and psychiatric training, to intimate interviews, works of art and media, and Persian blogs. Through the lens of psychiatry, the book reveals how historical experiences are negotiated and how generations are formed. Orkideh Behrouzan traces the historical circumstances that prompted the development of psychiatric discourses in Iran and reveals the ways in which they both reflect and actively shape Iranians' cultural sensibilities. A physician and an anthropologist, she combines clinical and anthropological perspectives in order to investigate the gray areas between memory and everyday life, between individual symptoms and generational remembering. Prozak Diaries offers an exploration of language as experience. In interpreting clinical and generational narratives, Behrouzan writes not only a history of psychiatry in contemporary Iran, but a story of how stories are told.
Download or read book The Pearl of Dari written by Zuzanna Olszewska and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnographic study of poetry and its place among young Afghan refugees living in urban regions of Iran. The Pearl of Dari takes us into the heart of Afghan refugee life in the Islamic Republic of Iran through a rich ethnographic portrait of the circle of poets and intellectuals who make up the “Pearl of Dari” cultural organization. Dari is the name by which the Persian language is known in Afghanistan. Afghan immigrants in Iran, refugees from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, are marginalized and restricted to menial jobs and lower-income neighborhoods. Ambitious and creative refugee youth have taken to writing poetry to tell their story as a group and to improve their prospects for a better life. At the same time, they are altering the ancient tradition of Persian love poetry by promoting greater individualism in realms such as gender and marriage. Zuzanna Olszewska offers compelling insights into the social life of poetry in an urban, Middle Eastern setting largely unknown in the West. Praise for The Pearl of Dari “The Pearl of Dari offers the reader the precious pearl of a genuine reading and learning experience. Zuzanna Olszewska combines solid scholarship with uplifting sensitivity to create a lively narrative replete with joyful discoveries of genuine personhood, agency, and humanity in the midst of multiple marginalities, an account of growing up amid layer upon layer of tension, bravely defying overwhelming odds.” —Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, University of Maryland “Olszewska’s virtuoso study explores how young progressive Afghan intellectuals use the writing and performance of poetry as a prestigious discourse, to sustain community and claim dignity in exile. Her work makes an essential new contribution in Persian literary studies, ethnolinguistics, and refugee cultural studies worldwide.” —Margaret A. Mills, Professor Emerita of Persian and Folklore, Ohio State University
Download or read book Sites of Pluralism written by Firat Oruc and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars and policymakers, struggling to make sense of the ongoing chaos in the Middle East, have been focusing on the possible causes of the escalation in both inter-state and intra-state conflict. But the Arab Spring has shown the urgent need for new ways to frame difference, both practically and theoretically. Within some policy circles, at the heart of these conflicts lies a fundamental incompatibility between different ethno-linguistic and religious communities; it is held that these divisions impede any form of political resolution or social cohesion. Yet, despite this galvanized public focus on pluralism and 'minorities' within the turbulent Middle East, there has been limited scholarship exploring these tensions. Sites of Pluralism fills this significant gap, going beyond a narrow focus on minority politics to examine the larger canvas of community spheres in the Middle East. Through eight case studies from esteemed experts in law, education, history, architecture, anthropology and political science, this multi-disciplinary volume offers a critical view of the Middle East's diverse, pluralistic fabric: how it has evolved throughout history; how it influences current political, economic and social dynamics; and what possibilities it offers for the future.
Download or read book Methodologies of Mobility written by Alice Elliot and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research into mobility is an exciting challenge for the social sciences that raises novel social, cultural, spatial and ethical questions. At the heart of these empirical and theoretical complexities lies the question of methodology: how can we best capture and understand a planet in flux? Methodologies of Mobility speaks beyond disciplinary boundaries to the methodological challenges and possibilities of engaging with a world on the move. With scholars continuing to face different forms and scales of mobility, this volume strategically traces innovative ways of designing, applying and reflecting on both established and cutting-edge methodologies of mobility.
Download or read book Forgiveness Work written by Arzoo Osanloo and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legal foundations : victim's rights and retribution -- Codifying mercy : judicial reform, affective process, and judge's knowledge -- Seeking reconciliation : sentimental reasoning and reconciled duties -- Judicial forbearance advocacy : motivations, potentialities, and the interstices of time -- Forgiveness sanctioned : affective faith in healing -- Mediating Mercy : the affective lifeworlds of forgiveness activists -- The art of forgiveness -- Cause lawyers : advocating mercy's law.
Download or read book Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies written by Timothy Carroll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises a curated conversation between members of the Material Culture Section of University College London Anthropology. In laying out the state of play in the field, it challenges how the anthropology of material culture is being done and argues for new directions of enquiry and new methods of investigation. The contributors consider the ramifications of specific research methods and explore new methodological frameworks to address areas of human experience that require a new analytical approach. The case studies draw from a range of contexts, including digital objects, infrastructure, data, extraterrestriality, ethnographic curation, and medical materiality. They include timely reappraisals of now-classical analytical models that have shaped the way we understand the object, the discipline, knowledge formation, and the artefact.
Download or read book Internal Diversity written by Sonja Moghaddari and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interrelation between diversity in migrants’ internal relations and their experience of inequality in local and global contexts. Taking the case of Hamburg-based Iranians, it traces evaluation processes in ties between professionals – artists and entrepreneurs – since the 1930s, examining migrants’ potential to act upon hierarchical structures. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and archival work, the book centers on differentiation, combining a diversity study with a focus on locality, with a transnational migration study, analysing strategies of capital creation and anthropological value theory. The analysis of migrants’ agency tackles questions of independence and cooperation in kinship, associations, transnational entrepreneurship and cultural events within the context of the position of Germany and Iran in the global politico-economic landscape. This material will be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, migration, urbanism and Iranian studies, as well as Iranian-Germans and those interested in the entanglement of global and local power relations.
Download or read book Journeys Toward Gender Equality in Islam written by Ziba Mir-Hosseini and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If justice is an intrinsic value in Islam, why have women been treated as second-class citizens in Islamic legal tradition? Today, the idea of gender equality, inherent to contemporary conceptions of justice, presents a challenge to established, patriarchal interpretations of Shari‘a. In thought-provoking discussions with six influential Muslim intellectuals – Abdullahi An-Na’im, Amina Wadud, Asma Lamrabet, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Mohsen Kadivar and Sedigheh Vasmaghi – Ziba Mir-Hosseini explores how egalitarian gender laws might be constructed from within the Islamic legal framework.
Download or read book Freedom in Captivity written by Radhika Gupta and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do borderland dwellers living along militarised frontiers negotiate regimes of state security and their geopolitical location in everyday life? What might 'freedom' mean to those who do not resist captivity engendered by borders? Focusing on the predicaments of a double-minority, Freedom in Captivity examines the affective attachments, political imaginaries, and ethical claims-making among the Shia Muslims of Kargil. In contrast to calls for freedom in the Kashmir Valley, Shias on the frontiers of Kashmir have sought belonging to India. Yet they do not entirely succumb to its hegemonic ideological boundaries. Departing from the dominant focus on physical cross-border mobility, this book is an invitation to reimagine borderlands as cartographies of ideas, cutting across spatial scales. Based on original ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2021, this monograph offers a unique long durée insight into the lives of people residing at the intersections of the biggest states in Asia.
