¹ Varzi, Roxanne, Warring Souls: Media, Youth and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran (Durham and London, 2006)Google Scholar; Khosravi, Shahram, Young and Defiant in Tehran (Philadelphia, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mahdavi, Pardis, Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution (Stanford, CA, 2009).Google Scholar

² See e.g. Yaghmaian, Behzad, Social Change in Iran: An Eyewitness Account of Dissent, Defiance and New Movements (Albany, NY, 2002)Google Scholar; Nooshin, L., “Tomorrow is Ours: Re-imagining Nation, Performing Youth in the New Iranian Pop Music,” Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, ed. Nooshin, Laudan (Farnham, 2009), 245–68Google Scholar, and Nooshin, L., “Underground, Overground: Rock Music and Youth Discourses in Iran,” Iranian Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 463–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Scholars in other disciplines have also explicitly privileged resistance as an analytical framework, e.g. in historical accounts of Iran: “[T]o me the story of modern Iran is one of defiance and rebellion against both domestic tyranny and globalized colonialism.” Dabashi, Hamid, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York, 2007), 7.Google Scholar

³ Khosravi, Young and Defiant, 1, 3.

⁴ Mahdavi, Passionate Uprisings, 3.

⁵ Varzi, Warring Souls, 130.

⁶ Khosravi, Young and Defiant, 16; Varzi, Warring Souls, 2.

⁷ The first group includes the most popular such works: Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (London and New York, 2004)Google Scholar and Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York, 2003)Google Scholar and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (New York, 2004)Google Scholar. Typical of the second is Moaveni, Azadeh, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran (New York, 2005)Google Scholar, along with numerous others described in Motlagh, A., “Autobiography and Authority in the Writings of the Iranian Diaspora,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no 2 (2011): 411–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ See e.g. N. Mottahedeh, “Off the Grid: Reading Iranian Memoirs in Our Time of Total War,” Middle East Report (September 2004), http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/grid; Keshavarz, Fatemeh, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007)Google Scholar, who calls such writing a “New Orientalist narrative”; and, most scathingly, H. Dabashi, “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 797 (June 1–7, 2006), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm.

⁹ See Motlagh, “Autobiography and Authority”; and Whitlock, Gillian, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Iranian diasporic blogosphere is similarly politicized: Sima Shakhsari, for example, found that negative portrayals of Iran and claims to authenticity and representativeness by diasporic Iranian bloggers arose because they were responding as entrepreneurs, eager to benefit from the ready audiences such narratives have found in the shadow of the war on terror. Shakhsari, S., “Weblogistan Goes to War: Representational Practices, Gendered Soldiers and Neoliberal Entrepreneurship in Diaspora,” Feminist Review 99 (2011): 6–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Motlagh, “Autobiography and Authority,” 415. Motlagh notes the overlap between scholarly work and memoirs in this period, including a strong autobiographical element in some ethnographies, and covers and titles which hint at editorial intervention and a target audience that is not limited to the academic. Cf. her analysis of the cover art and jacket reviews of Mahdavi's Passionate Uprisings (ibid.).

¹¹ Behdad, S. and Nomani, F., “What a Revolution! Thirty Years of Social Class Reshuffling in Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, no. 1 (2009): 84–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² Adelkhah, F., “Islamophobia and Malaise in Anthropology,” in Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology: Past and Present Perspectives, ed. Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz R. (New York and Oxford, 2009), 207.Google Scholar

¹³ Ibid., 209.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Adelkhah, Fariba, Being Modern in Iran (London, 1999), 3–4.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Such a combined approach has proved useful in the anthropology of development, for example; see e.g. Li, Tania Murray, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC and London, 2007).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Allen, John, Lost Geographies of Power (Oxford, 2003), 195–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Abrahamian, E., “Why the Islamic Republic has Survived,” Middle East Report 250 (2009): 10–16.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Marjan's blog, Kavir-e Semnān [The Semnan Desert] is at http://kavir-semnan.blogsky.com; the text was dated 19 khordad 1388 (June 9, 2009), but is no longer available on the blog. A copy was accessed from http://www.akhbar-rooz.com/news.jsp?essayId=21396 on February 11, 2010.

²⁰ For a fascinating micro- and macro-level study of the 2009 protests and the class basis of their mobilization, see Harris, K., “The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class: An Ethnographic Analysis of Iran's 2009 Green Movement,” Mobilization: An International Journal 17, no. 4 (2012): 435–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ Abu-Lughod, L., “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (February 1990): 53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid., 52.

²⁴ Ortner, S., “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (January 1995): 175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁵ Nomani, Farhad and Behdad, Sohrab, Class and Labor in Iran: Did the Revolution Matter? (Syracuse, NY, 2006), 87.Google Scholar The authors examine only three dimensions of class: (1) property relations, (2) possession of scarce skills/credentials, and (3) organizational assets/authority and autonomy at work, and compare census statistics from 1976, 1986, and 1996.

²⁶ Ibid., 196.

²⁷ Ibid., 196–7.

²⁸ Ibid., 199.

²⁹ Ibid., 202, 209.

³⁰ Behdad and Nomani, “What a Revolution!”

³¹ The Islamic Republic achieved startling success in the field of education, building schools in poor and rural areas, enforcing single-sex primary and secondary schooling which made it easier for girls to attend, and reaching near-universal literacy among youth of both sexes. See Higgins, P. and Shoar-Ghaffari, P., “Women's Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran, ed. Afkhami, Mahnaz and Friedl, Erika (London, 2004), 19–43Google Scholar; and Abrahamian, “Why the Islamic Republic has Survived,” 13.

³² Nomani and Behdad, Class and Labor in Iran, 214.

³³ Harris, “The Brokered Exuberance,” 436.

³⁴ Ibid., 451.

³⁵ Beeman, William O., Language, Status, and Power in Iran (Bloomington, IN, 1986), 35.Google Scholar

³⁶ Bayat, A., “Tehran: Paradox City,” New Left Review II, no. 66 (2010): 104.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ibid., 109–11.

³⁸ There is a similar division in Mashhad, where I carried out most of my research with Afghan refugees, despite the fact that the old city radiated out from the centrally located shrine of Imam Reza. Of the newly built suburbs, the wealthiest extend westwards on either side of a long boulevard that leads gently uphill towards a series of mountain pleasure spots and orchard villages, while the poorest are now well-established former squatter neighborhoods eating up more and more agricultural land on the plain to the northeast. In Mashhad, too, people talk of a bālā-ye shahr and pā‘in-e shahr and their inhabitants as bālā-ye shahri and pā‘in-e shahri. When I traveled to the poor areas of Mashhad where most Afghan refugees lived, I saw parts of town in which my upper-middle-class Iranian friends told me they had never dreamed of setting foot.

³⁹ Bayat, “Tehran,” 116–17. Nomani and Behdad note that members of the paramilitary organizations and other “political functionaries of the state” are an “ambiguous class category” (Class and Labor, 23).

⁴⁰ Afary, Janet, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge, 2009), 295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴¹ Sadeghi, F., “Foot Soldiers of the Islamic Republic's ‘Culture of Modesty’,” Middle East Report 250 (2009): 50–5.Google Scholar

⁴² Ibid., 51.

⁴³ Khosravi, Young and Defiant, 76–8.

⁴⁴ Hoodfar, H., “Activism Under the Radar: Volunteer Women Health Workers in Iran,” Middle East Report 250 (2009), 56–60.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Ibid., 57.

⁴⁶ Adelkhah, Fariba, Being Modern in Iran (London, 1999).Google Scholar For an interesting comparison with Shi‘is in Lebanon who similarly reconcile piety and modernity, see Deeb, Lara, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton and Oxford, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁷ Mahdavi, Passionate Uprisings, 3.

⁴⁸ Cf. the rich data on this subject in Afary, Sexual Politics.

⁴⁹ Afary, Sexual Politics, 62–5.

⁵⁰ Mahdavi, Passionate Uprisings, 98–101.

⁵¹ Ibid., 117.

⁵² Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, Melbourne and Henley, 1984), 6.Google Scholar

⁵³ Harris, “The Brokered Exuberance,” 438.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ Cf. the work of Nicholas de Genova on a similar situation among Latino immigrants in the United States, e.g. in Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (Durham, NC and London, 2005).Google Scholar

⁵⁷ For background on Afghan refugees in Iran, see Adelkhah, F. and Olszewska, Z., “The Iranian Afghans,” Iranian Studies 40, no. 2 (2007): 137–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the other contributors to the April 2007 issue of Iranian Studies; and Z. Olszewska, “Afghan Refugees in Iran,” Encyclopedia Iranica Online, 2008, http://www.iranica.com/articles/afghanistan-xiv-afghan-refugees-in-iran-2. On literary and intellectual developments in this population, see Olszewska, Z., “‘A Desolate Voice’: Poetry and Identity Among Young Afghan Refugees in Iran,” Iranian Studies 40, no. 2 (2007): 203–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁸ Lenski, Gerhard E., Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification (New York, 1966), 87Google Scholar; cf. Dogan, M., “From Social Class and Religious Identity to Status Incongruence in Post-Industrial Societies,” Comparative Sociology 3, no. 2 (2004): 163–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁹ Barber, K., “Hidden Innovators in Africa,” in Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Barber, Karin (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 1.

⁶⁰ All names are pseudonyms.

⁶¹ A much more common form of “passing” among Afghan refugees is avoiding discrimination by simply never admitting one is not Iranian (at least in situations where proof of identity is not demanded). This is easier for young people who have been brought up in Iran and already speak with an Iranian accent, and for those who are not visibly different from most Iranians. One Afghan friend told me how he went to tortuous lengths to avoid being exposed as Afghan when he traveled to another city in Iran: he preferred to say he was from Georgia and to invent an elaborate back-story, as well as giving impromptu answers to all manner of questions about the people and customs of Georgia. He later regretted the glaring dishonesty that had arisen between him and his admiring new friends, but was reluctant to undo it. Some take the ultimate step to overcome all legal hurdles by purchasing Iranian identity documents on the black market, necessary e.g. for owning a business; Hamideh had told me that her mother had been able to open her salon in this way.

⁶² Scott, James, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT and London, 1985).Google Scholar

⁶³ Bayat, Asef, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar