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Camouflage, Conspiracy, and Collaborators: Rumors of the Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Karen L. Pliskin
Karen L. Pliskin*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
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Extract

A well-educated, wealthy, 35-year-old woman from Tehran reported the following: “Someone I know has a man working for him whose brother is a gravedigger. He dug graves for those murdered in Jaleh Square 40 days ago. He said they needed a bulldozer to dig the ground for all the dead. An entire tent was filled with chadors. Fifty thousand people were killed.”

The Jaleh Square incident of Tehran was a momentous event in the Iranian revolution, marking popular revolt against the shah's regime by the people, and retaliatory atrocities by the shah's army against the people. Although demonstrations and killings in other cities after Jaleh Square were no less dramatic, Jaleh Square remains in the minds of nearly everyone in Iran as the principal episode of innocent citizens slaughtered. Yet, details and facts pertaining to the event are undocumented. What is known is that thousands of people participated in a massive antishah demonstration on Thursday, September 7, 1978, to demand the resignation of the shah, defying a government ban on rallies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 1-4: Iranian Revolution in Perspective , 1980 , pp. 55 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1980

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References

Notes

1. The rumors illustrating this article were collected in Tehran during October 1978 and in Shiraz from November 1978 to February 1979. The sources were Iranian students, professionals, workers, children, housewives, professors, American wives of these professors, and foreigners living in Iran. The writer, as everyone in Iran during the crisis, was influenced by the events and rumors, oftentimes unable to differentiate fact from fiction. In this article, however, all conflicting, ambiguous, exaggerated, and bizarre stories are viewed as rumors.

2. Already by September 1978 there was a discrepancy in the reporting of the Jaleh Square incident by the foreign press. According to The New York Times of September 9, 1978, “unofficial reports said as many as 100 were killed.” The Times of London on the same day had as a major headline the following: “Protestors shot down as Iran imposes martial law in 12 cities…. Up to 250 killed in street riots.” A subsequent subheadline stated, “The capital's military governor said that 58 people had died in the rioting but unofficial sources put the toll at up to 250.” In a Janury 1979 Newsweek article, the death toll was placed at 122.

3. Rumor, as exemplified in this paper, is, as defined by Allport and Postman a “specific or topical proposition for belief, passed along from person to person, usually by word of mouth, without secure standards of evidence being presented.” Allport, G. W. and Postman, L., The Psychology of Rumor (New York, 1965), p. 4.Google Scholar Rumors passed on to the populace by mass media are also reviewed as elements of hearsay.

4. See, e.g., Festinger, L., et al., “A Study of a Rumor: Its Origin and Spread,” Human Relations 1 (1947), pp. 464–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shibutani, T., Improvised News (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Morin, E., Rumour in Orléans (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Anthony, A., “Anxiety and Rumor,” Journal of Social Psychology 89 (1973), pp. 91–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosnow, R. and Fine, G., Rumor and Gossip (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

5. Not only did most Iranians religiously listen to BBC's broadcasts, but most foreigners did also. The information in this paper concerning BBC reports was gathered nightly by the author, who kept a journal of local events witnessed or heard, and events as broadcast by BBC.

6. Turner, V., Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, 1974), pp. 37–42.Google Scholar Turner, in studying social processes, derives his analysis of social dramas from Arnold Van Gennep's study of ritual in Rites de Passage, rites associated with changes of status, place, and age, which are divided into a tripartite processual structure (1) separation or detachment from society; (2) margin or limen in which the person or persons separated are inwardly transformed; (3) reaggregation or reincorporation, as persons with new status, into the society. The crisis and redressive phases of social drama correspond to the margin or limen state of rites de passage.

7. Ibid., p. 15.

8. Ibid., p. 46.

9. Ibid., p. 47.

10. Other rumors pertaining to Israeli soldiers heard in Tehran in October 1978, were that Israelis practiced army maneuvers in Iran and collaborated with the Russians in an underground nuclear explosion, thus causing the Tabas earthquake in the summer of 1978.

11. A proshah demonstration took place in Isfahan on that day in which 30,000 people, mostly brought in from outlying villages, participated.

12. An article in Time, December 4, 1978, quotes the same number: “Government workers, their salaries ravaged by inflation officially estimated at more than 50% last year, went on strike. They were soon followed by 67,000 workers in the oilfields and employees in the post office, national airline, customs, telephone and steel companies, power stations and several other industries.”

13. Rumors reported as news may be considered to be the reporting of rumors themselves, the reporting of events second- or third-hand as seen by various “witnesses,” or attaching some sort of value judgment to a happening without acknowledging that what is said is being editorialized, commented upon, or interpreted.