Suchergebnisse

Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity. Herbert L. Bodman and Nayereh Tohidi. eds. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998. 310 pp.

Erika Friedl, Folk Tales from a Persian Tribe: Forty-Five Tales from Sisakht in Luri and English, Collected, Transcribed, Translated and Commented on by Erika Friedl (Dortmund, Germany:Verlag für Orientkunde, 2007); Folktales and Storytellers of Iran: Culture, Ethos, and Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Warm Hearts and Sharp Tongues: Life in 555 Proverbs from the Zagros Mountains of Iran (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2015); and Folksongs from the Mountains of Iran: Culture, Poetics and Everyday Philosophies (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

People at the popular level often hold religious perceptions and engage in
religious practices that make sense to them within their own existential situations,
even if they fall outside orthodoxy. Although political leaders and religious
authorities may attempt to mould people's religious perceptions and practices
according to their own ideas and interpretations of religion, people frequently
find ways to evade or ignore such pressures, to rationalise their deviations or
to continue to live and think according to their own self-generated religious
frameworks. The authors of the articles in this special issue provide examples of
how people's actual practices and religious beliefs arise out of their own personal
situations and histories though at odds with the pronouncements of religious
specialists.

Zahra Tizro, Domestic Violence in Iran: Women, Marriage and Islam (New
York: Routledge, 2012)

Bridget Blomfield, The Language of Tears, My Journey into the World of Shi'i
Muslim Women (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 2015)
Diane D'Souza, Partners of Zaynab: A Gendered Perspective of Shia Muslim
Faith (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014)
Karen G. Ruffle, Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian
Shi'ism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press)

Outside of Shiraz in the Fars Province of southwestern Iran lies "Aliabad." Mary Hegland arrived in this then-small agricultural village of several thousand people in the summer of 1978, unaware of the momentous changes that would sweep this town and this country in the months ahead. She became the only American researcher to witness the Islamic Revolution firsthand over her eighteen-month stay. Days of Revolution offers an insider's view of how regular people were drawn into, experienced, and influenced the 1979 Revolution and its aftermath. Conventional wisdom assumes Shi'a religious ideology fueled the revolutionary movement. But Hegland counters that the Revolution spread through much more pragmatic concerns: growing inequality, lack of development and employment opportunities, government corruption. Local expectations of leaders and the political process―expectations developed from their experience with traditional kinship-based factions―guided local villagers' attitudes and decision-making, and they often adopted the religious justifications for Revolution only after joining the uprising. Sharing stories of conflict and revolution alongside in-depth interviews, the book sheds new light on this critical historical moment. Returning to Aliabad decades later, Days of Revolution closes with a view of the village and revolution thirty years on. Over the course of several visits between 2003 and 2008, Mary Hegland investigates the lasting effects of the Revolution on the local political factions and in individual lives. As Iran remains front-page news, this intimate look at the country's recent history and its people has never been more timely or critical for understanding the critical interplay of local and global politics in Iran. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1310/thumbnail.jpg

Anthropological participant observation during two different periods (1978–79 and 2003–08) documents dramatic change in gender identity and expectations in an Iranian village. While patriarchal definitions of females and their places and on-the-ground social conditions restricted female agency and kept women and girls under the authority of male supervisors 30 years ago, recent years have witnessed growing opportunities for females. Now most girls complete high school before marriage, and may even travel to other cities for higher education. In "Aliabad," however, for the great majority, more education for females has not led to participation in the labor market. Ethnographic research focuses on how young females negotiate between the more traditional expectations and cultural constraints and the new opportunities to serve their own interests as best as possible. Although work outside of the home presents too many difficulties for the great majority of Aliabad females, who must marry in order to obtain financial support, females have used their education and the increased self-confidence, experience, status, and literacy to develop more influential positions within the marriage relationship, among kin and in-laws, and in the community. Young village women have been involved in constructing their evolving identities in an environment of social change and modernization.

Since going to Iran in 1966 to teach high school English as a Peace Corps volunteer, I have been speaking Persian and conducting anthropological research about Persian culture and social dynamics. Because of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, I had not been able to return to Iran for some 25 years. Therefore, I began working with Iranians in the Bay Area just south of San Francisco, California. I focused on aging and the elderly and worked with the older Iranians who had moved to Northern California to be with their adult children working here and/or to get away from the Islamic Republic of Iran. After several years of working among the Iranian American elderly in the Santa Clara Valley or the "Silicon Valley," as this computer centered area has been nicknamed, I was delighted with the opportunity to look into issues of aging and the elderly in Turkey, Iran, and Tajikistan. In summer 2003, I was able to spend two months in Tajikistan.1 In order to conduct research for my project about "Iranian, Turkish, and Tajik Elderly: Finding Meaning in a Transforming World", I lived in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, and traveled to surrounding areas as well as to the cities of Panjikand and Khojand.