John Borneman asserts that generational disposition refers to the objective conditions and environment in which a generation lives and to which it reacts: “a generation is determined not only by the shared problems of the time, but by the responses to these shared problems” (Borneman 1992: 48). Each generation’s experiences are categorized and periodized by the aesthetic and ideational frameworks set in relation to the policies of the state and other historical contingencies (285). Social and historical events and objective conditions become articulated in terms of generational consciousness. Furthermore, the social organization of any generation is built on the members’ place in the social division of labor, their differential access to information, and their local, national, and transnational connections.
Generational consciousness is often seen as articulated in terms of youth culture and symbolism. By the creativity in social and symbolic practices and the selective use of global youth culture, Iranian young people construct individual as well as generational identity. In the influential youth studies of the “Birmingham School” of the 1970s and 1980s, youth culture has been approached as a class culture within the framework of hegemony and resistance (see Willis 1977; Hall and Jefferson 1983).5 Youth culture, however, is both generational and class-based. It is generational in the sense that youth is a life stage within which a certain youth culture exists and in some way challenges the adult generation (Pais 2000), but also in the sense that each cohort of youth faces new circumstances. Youth culture in Tehran varies more with generation than with class. The authorities in Iran suppress young people whether they are from the upper middle or working class. The hegemonic order created by the parental generation has somehow caused a homogenization of the young people’s demands. Youth culture does not idealize classlessness but puts the class background in the shadows. It can be defined as knowledge learned outside the established curricula of school or family (Thornton 1995). Heterotopias, like the Golestan shopping center and Tehran’s many coffee shops, provide central spaces where this extra-curriculum is rehearsed, as we shall see further in Chapter 4.
Since 2001 a new emic generational classification has emerged in the public debates. The basis of this classification is the Revolution of 1979, and it does not match the analytical classification of generations. However, the young generation labels itself “the Third Generation” (nasl-e sevoum). The concept (elaborated in Chapter 5) refers to those who were born after the Revolution. They were what the clergy hoped would be “children of the Revolution,” whom Ayatollah Khomeini called “an army of twenty million.”
The First Generation made the Revolution. At the time of the Revolution they were in their twenties and older. They had spent their youth under the Shah’s rule and had experience of pre-Revolutionary Iran. In the 1970s, thanks to the oil boom, they witnessed a relatively expansive economy and Westernizing urban life. They lived their youth in an Iran that was connected to the global village and aimed to be one of the most modern countries in the world. But what unites them as a generation is, perhaps, their experience of the Revolution. The Second Generation (to which I belong) was in its early teens at the time of the Revolution, born between 1965 and 1970. It has vague memories of the time prior to the Revolution. What unites them as a generation is spending their formative years during the eight-year war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988. This generation makes up a large part of the expatriates who left Iran in the 1980s. The Third Generation, who have just come of age, make up more than half the present population and have no memory of the Revolution. Unlike the First and Second Generations, the Third Generation has been totally formed under the rule of the Islamic regime. In their own words: “We are the product of the Islamic Republic.”
Iran is one of the most youthful nations in the world. Iran’s population increased drastically from almost 33 million in 1976 to more than 70 million in 2006. According to the 1996 national census, 68 percent of the total population are twenty-nine years old or younger. In other words, 68 percent were born after the Revolution (1979)—the Third Generation (see Table 1). The youth population in Iran is categorized as between fifteen and twenty-four. In 2006 this category made up almost 20 percent of the total population (Statistical Center of Iran 1385/2006). The huge demographic change over only two decades has caused huge social difficulties. Incapable of meeting the demands of young people and fueled by “moral panic” (Cohen 1972), the Islamic Republic views them as “a threat to the health and security” of the society. The young, associated with an “ethical crisis” (bouhran-e akhlaqi) in the society, are depicted as self-alienated, unauthentic, bidard (without pain), and biarman (without ideology). Utilizing a discourse corresponding to what Foucault would call “pastoral power” (Foucault 1983), the “caring” religious order characterizes young people as being particularly vulnerable to cultural threats from both within and without. As we shall see, much of the focus of the Islamic regime has been on how to protect them from moral hazards and to prevent them from becoming gateways for “cultural invasion” from the West. Accordingly, a large part of the youth culture has been redefined as crime. However, the Third Generation carry on their shoulders the social and economic burden of the Revolution for which their parental generation is responsible. As the statistics below show, it is within this generation that one finds a majority of the unemployed, the delinquents, and the mentally ill.
TABLE 1. POPULATION OF IRAN BY TEN-YEAR AGE GROUP, 1996 CENSUS
Source: Statistical Center of Iran, 1375/1996.
On the eve of the Revolution and during the war, the theocrats forbade contraceptives as well as abortion and encouraged people to have more children. The Revolution needed children. In the mid-1980s, the rate of population growth in Iran had reached 4 percent. With pragmatic new politicians after the war and after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the state launched a nationwide program to control the growth of the population. Accordingly, in the mid-1990s the rate fell to 1.5 percent. The earlier expansion has caused social crises, such as increasing unemployment, poverty, and criminality.
According to official sources, the unemployment rate in 2002 was 14.2 percent. In numbers, about 3.5 million of the active population—between fifteen and sixty-four—are currently out of a job. The official sources indicated that between 50 and 60 percent of the job-seeking unemployed were young people between fifteen and twenty-four.6 The same sources warned that in the mid-2000s at least 5.5 million high-school graduates will join the jobless population. The unemployment rate will subsequently rise to 24 percent.7 Unofficial financial experts suggested that the real rate of unemployment in the country in 2002 was 20.2 percent and would reach 27 percent by 2004.8 A study of the country’s manpower indicates that an average of about 760,000 persons enter the labor market annually. To keep this already high average of unemployment static, there is a need for 760,000 new job opportunities per year. However, between 1991 and 1996 the Ministry of Cooperatives established only around 72,000 employment opportunities per year, not even 10 percent of what is needed.9
The need to contain the ever-increasing growth of unemployment has been a prime concern of the state since the mid-1990s. To control unemployment the country needs an annual economic growth rate of 6 percent, a remote possibility in the current situation. According to official sources inflation was 17 percent in 2002, and according to independent sources as high as 25 percent.10 The petroleum-based economy of Iran, where the state still gets more than 80 percent of its revenue from petroleum, restricts the scope for development of the non-oil sectors. Moreover, the lack of foreign investment, as a result of political insecurity, the U.S. embargo since the Revolution, and the UN sanction for nuclear activities in 2006, leaves no hope of any improvement in the near future. Traditionally, higher education has always been seen as a way to make a career. For many young persons, however, higher education is an unrealizable dream. The annual number of applicants taking university entrance exams (konkour) is around 1.2 million, only 15 percent of whom
