of my field of study. Like this book, the scene is about power relations, control over space, bodies, desires, and sexuality. The scene yields a glimpse of life in contemporary Iran, a glance at power and defiance. This is the story of a faceless generation whose voice is silenced. That is how I look at Tehran at the turn of the millennium.
I have nothing to say, only to show.
—Walter Benjamin
Introduction
This is a book about the situation of young people in Iran at the beginning of the third millennium. The book concerns the battle over the right to identity. On one side, there is the state’s effort to construct a hegemonic identity for young people. On the other, there is the pervasive struggle by the young people to resist a subject position imposed on them from above. The book examines how young Tehranis struggle for subjectivity—in the sense of individual autonomy. It also deals with the generational divide in Iran between those who made the Revolution and those who reject it.
I intend to examine how transnational connections have been the catalysts for generation-based structured changes of lifestyle. How has the power built its social order? How do Iranian young people struggle to make sense of their lives? Concerned with such issues, the core of the book is the continuous struggle over power between the Iranian authorities and young people, and especially how this struggle manifests itself in spatial relations.
Spaces of Defiance
Domination is realized through arrangements of space. Space is fundamental in any exercise of power. Michel Foucault (1977) borrowed the model of the “Panopticon” as a metaphor for the spatial arrangements of surveillance that he saw as central to the way deviant individuals were disciplined.1 Faced with the possibility that they are under constant surveillance and the threat of immediate punishment for wrongdoings, the observed discipline themselves.
But while spatial relations contribute to the creation of “docile subjects,” space can also provide opportunities to contest power. Michel de Certeau (1984) describes two opposed forms of power in relation to spatial practices: “strategies” and “tactics.” Strategies create and control specifically marked “places” by putting them under the control of the powerful state. Opposed to these are tactics that appear in situations which are not completely under control. Tactics produce spaces. Tactics rely on the use of time. Those who employ tactics are “always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing’ ” (de Certeau 1984: xix). Resistance builds on catching the elusive moment when it is possible to realize individual preferences, when individuals can challenge the rigid organization of place and turn it into a space for defiance. De Certeau argues that the oppressed cannot escape the system that has dominated them, but can continually manipulate events within the system in order to precipitate “fragmentary and fragile victories of the weak” (1984). These tactics are not necessarily political in the sense of organized and institutionalized political goals and actions, but are usually tricks and distortions that subvert the repressive order at an individual level. These “everyday practices” enable people to survive the oppressive structure of society and achieve limited practical kinds of autonomy. People create alternative spaces for social actions and ideas. In the context of this book, these include shopping malls in Tehran, basements (playing rock), coffee shops as meeting places for the young, the mountain retreats north of Tehran—all places that act as sites for the expression of alternative ideas, opinions, and even moralities.
Although this book is about resistance, it tries to go beyond what Scott (1985) calls the “everyday forms of resistance” to look at the pervasive dissatisfaction among Tehrani young people, who not only defy the authorities but also oppose the parental generation and question the very basis of the hegemonic social order. Individual acts of defiance and cultural escape are dominant aspects of young people’s social life. Not necessarily part of organized acts of resistance, they can be seen as simple acts intended to challenge and provoke the representatives of the authorities. Given the long history of despotism, a culture of mistrust and hostility has developed between the central power and the Iranian people. A large part of what a scholar might classify as the “glorious resistance” of Iranians against the regime is a national habitus that goes back a long way in history. These forms of everyday “resistance” “require little or no coordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority” (Scott 1985: 29).2 This is seen ubiquitously among Iranians but is rarely referred to as moqavemat (resistance). Since many everyday activities among young people are classed as criminal by the Islamic state, even trivial acts such as dancing or wearing a T-shirt can be seen as “resistance.” When Tehrani young people dance or mingle with the opposite sex at a party, they presumably do not consider whether they are resisting, doing moqavemat. Yet in acting as they do, they in effect reject the subject position the regime attempts to impose upon them, whether they intend to or not. I would like to make a distinction between resistance as a deliberate and organized response to state oppression (e.g., student movements) and the practice of defiance as a spontaneous, uncoordinated everyday challenging of the social order.
The ubiquity of resistance studies in anthropological research in the 1980s (see Brown 1996) has been criticized because of its failure to provide sufficiently detailed ethnography (Ortner 1995). Thin ethnography allows a homogenization and romanticization of the resisters and disregards aspects of gender, age, and class.3 Moreover, as Ortner puts it, resisters “have their own politics” (Ortner: 1995: 177, emphasis original). Within resistance there are power relations based on class, gender, age, and ethnicity, which make relations between the dominant and the dominated more ambivalent and ambiguous.
Based on ethnography, this study looks at the cultural defiance of young Tehranis as constituting creative and transformative projects rather than merely being actions of opposition. How do oppressed young people create their own culture? How do gender, class, and age shape the framework of power along both a vertical axis (authorities versus youth; parents versus children) and a horizontal one (men versus women; poor versus rich; Tehranis versus non-Tehranis)? Young people defy the dominant order by, for example, engaging in global youth culture, but defiance is not solely restricted to this “new” arena of modernity. Youth’s defiance has also grown out of tradition (Dirks et al. 1994: 20; 1994: 483). As I show in Chapter 6, along with taking part in “global youth cultures,” young Tehranis utilize Sufism, and pre-Islamic Persian cultural forms to shape their defiance. Paradoxically, under the theocratic rule, a pre-Islamic Persian renaissance has emerged among young people, who use both the religious visions of the romanticized mysticism of Sufism and Zoroastrianism and the rituals of these movements (e.g., Chaharshanbeh souri) in order to reject the identity imposed from above.
The first two chapters of this study examine the efforts by the authorities to set up a social order based on a “caring” discourse, as well as on the social organization of power which produces the kinds of bodies, souls, and sexualities the regime desires.4
Generation
In anthropology, generation is a form of social identity alongside class, ethnicity, and gender. Rather than defining generation in relation to kinship or descent structures, anthropologists see generations as cohorts of people born in the same time period who have experienced the impact of common historical events and cultural forces (Lamb 2001). Generational identity is produced by common experience, which provides the stuff of a symbolic culture and leads disparate individuals to feel bonded to one another (Newman 1996: 376). Karl Mannheim in his classic essay “The Problem of Generations” (1952) asserts that a generation is a group of people who confront the same historical events. Not all members of a generation react to an event in the same way, but what makes a group a generation is its connection to that event and to shared historical and social experiences. Each generation
