Abstracts of papers presented during the conference:
1. Memoirs from the Left in Iran
Ervand Abrahamian (City University of New York)
Since the l979 revolution reams of political memoirs have emerged from Iran. Although most are written by members of the ruling elite, both from the previous and the present regimes, some have come from the subaltern--especially from activists from leftwing parties and the labour movement. The focus of the paper will be to examine four major memoirs from former Tudeh leaders and activists: Anvar Khamehei's three volume Pajah va Seh Nafar, Forsat Bozorg-e az Dast Rafteh, and Az Enshe`ab ta Koudeta; Nosratollah Jahanshalour's two volume Ma va Biganegan; Khalik Maleki's Khaterat-e Siyasi; and Manoucher Kaymaram's Rofaqa-ye Bala.
The paper will evaluate these works in terms of their usefulness for the historian, trying to recapture the discourse, the mentality, the world outlook, and the mood of a bygone age--especially the intelligentsia of the l930s and the l940s. Although these works are useful in counterbalancing the dominant elite perceptions, the paper will argue along the lines of Jacques Le Goff (History and Memory) that history and memory are not necessarily the same, that the two often conflict, that memoirs are subject to the censorship of memory, and that what they leave out is invariably as important as what they describe in depth.
2. Writing Alternative Histories
Shahid Amin (University of Delhi)
I propose to address two issues within the perspective of development of subaltern history writing in India over the past twenty years. One of these issues is historiographical, and the other has to do with the practice of writing history. I shall be making a connection between the concerns of historians, Indian historians, with the major questions they have asked about India's colonial past, and newer ways of writing history that this historiography has now engendered. New History requires not just new sources, but newer ways of narrating 'recalcitrant events', events whose very telling calls into question the terms on which the big story has been told. This very narrative challenge to mainstream Indian historiography creates the conditions for the writing and reading of not quintessentially 'Indian' Peoples' History, but histories that have India for their location. This creates the possibility of informed reading of histories from different areas of the South in other areas of the South and in the West as non-ghettoised histories, and not simply as raw material for the fabrication of post-colonial theory. And in as much as the writing of such alternative histories is produced by a refashioning of the relationship between the evidence of the archive and the language of the historian, this opens up the possibility for histories from India contributing to a more general disciplinary discussion about ways of writing history.
3. Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subaltern on the Margins of Tsarist Empire
Touraj Atabaki (Utrecht University / International Institute of Social History)
Since the late nineteenth-century, with the Iranian economy in decline, the flourishing economy of the Caucasus and Tsarist Turkistan had been attracting many Iranian subaltern. The mass migration of Iranian subaltern to the north began in the early 1890, and by the Russian Revolution of 1917, hundreds of thousands Iranians had settled throughout the margins of the Tsarist Empire. In the Baku oilfields and other industries in the Caucasus and Turkistan, Iranian workers composed 30% of the total number of labourers and formed the majority of the foreign groups residing there.
In the southern Caucasus, these Iranian subaltern were subjected to stunning discrimination. Earning less than 25% of the average standard wage, they lived largely in the ghettoes on the outskirts of the big cities. The majority of them being rural Azerbaijanis or Azerbaijani-speakers from the north of Iran. Although living in a region where the local people spoke the same language as them, nevertheless, they did not readily assimilate. Throughout the Caucasus region they were known as hamshahri (fellow countryman) and they maintained a sense of separate identity, which marked them as different from the local population to the north of the Iranian frontiers. The political upheavals, which were followed by the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, had also altered the political environment of the Iranian migrant subaltern. The Southern Caucasus which was connected to the Russian Social Democrats network, hosted a leading community of Iranian political activists and offered an exceptional shelter to the Iranian political groups for their headquarters.
The paper, by exploiting the newly released documents from the archives in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Russia, will argue along the lines of Chakrabarty (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, Bengal 1890-1940), that the migrant subaltern in the towns into which they migrated, reconstruct a culture 'marked by strong primordial loyalties of community, language, religion, cast and kinship'. Accordingly, it intends to throw further light on the life and times of the Iranian immigrant subaltern in the Caucasus and Tsarist Turkistan during the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century.
4. Dislocating Poor People's Histories: Urban Subaltern, the Iranian Revolution and Egypt's Islamism
Asef Bayat (American University of Cairo, St. Antony's College, Oxford University)
Dominant historiographies on the Iranian Revolution (and Egypt's Islamist movement) tend to make the assumption that the appeal of political Islam is to the masses, especially the recent poor migrants to cities. A deep religiosity along with shared language and institutions are said to bring masses and the clergy or Islamists together rendering them close allies. In these countries then the histories of the urban poor have been subsumed under and dissolved within the narrative of Islamist politics in general.
By looking at the histories of the urban marginals in Iran during and after the revolution (and in Egypt during the 1990s) I like to discard the prevailing assumption, which assumes the unity of the urban poor and the Islamist politics. By doing so, I like to open a space for an independent history of urban subaltern in Iran (and Egypt).
5. Involution and De-involution: Changes in the Iranian Labour Force, 1976-1996
Sohrab Behdad (Denison University, American University of Paris)
In the past two decades the post-revolutionary Iranian economy has experienced two distinct periods adjustment. The first decade (1979-1989) is characterized by adjustment to the political disturbances, leading to what may be called 'structural involution.' That is, in these years, political instability and turmoil resulted in retrenchment of capital and capitalist relations of production, and expansion of petty commodity production. 'Structural involution' is a degenerative process, creating tangles within the economy, obstructing the accumulation process, leading to peasantization of agriculture and de-proletarianization of the labour force, huge expansion of the service sector, and an overall decline in productivity in the economy.
The second post revolutionary decade, which began with the death of Ayatollah Khomeyni, is characterized by a liberalization attempt (albeit interrupted and retarded) aiming to reconstruct the capitalist relations of production. Implementation of policies for protection and security of capital and liberalization of the market relations promoted rejuvenation of the capitalist relations of production. It is expected that the capitalist reconstruction and liberalization policy to reverse the involution process of the previous decade. This reversal process may be called de-involution.
This paper is a study of the changes in the structure of the Iranian labour force in these two post-revolutionary decades in the context of the involution, de-involution processes in the Iranian economy. The early results suggest that while the reversal process has begun in the early years of the second revolutionary decade, the impacts of the involution on the structure of the labour force is not been yet reversed. This study relies on the Census of Population and Housing of Iran for 1976, 1986 and 1996, and the statistical data of the Central Bank of Iran and the Statistical Centre of Iran.
6. Labour and petty functionaries in the making the city of Abadan
Kaveh Ehsani (University of Tehran)
This paper will look at the role of labour, migrants, women, and petty functionaries in the making and shaping of the city of Abadan, in the course of the twentieth century.
In the urban history of Iran Abadan occupies a unique place. The country's first designed modern city, it was an oil company town built by the Anglo Persian Oil Company (later National Iranian Oil Company) when oil was first discovered in the Middle East in 1908. From the onset the urban design of Abadan by the Company had a dual purpose: to house and to train its necessary workforce; and to socialize them in a modern industrial setting while keeping them docile. Built around the largest refinery in the World, and situated in the midst of an ethnically diverse and geographically remote region the City's population of half a million (by 1979, when the Islamic Revolution took place) were all migrants. The architectural details and urban design of the city, as well as the labour market and labour discipline controlled by the Oil Company turned Abadan into the first instance of top down social engineering by both multi national capital, as well as the national state in Iran. This project of social engineering was focused on the migrant urban population, and its instrument was the urban space of Abadan itself.
Based on previous fieldwork and historical research, as well as planned oral and archival histories, this article intends to unearth the resistance and the struggle of Abadanis to redefine the urban space of the company town, and make it their own. The paper will research and analyse the acts of subaltern resistance to this project of social engineering, as it has been etched into the city space itself. It will analyse the untamed and spontaneous spaces created outside the control of the company, by urban residents, and show how they subverted a rigid discipline of control and industrial ethos. The paper will also look at the post -revolution period, when Abadan was badly damaged during the war, and worse yet during reconstruction.
The continued struggle of an urban population to turn its urban space into a sight of contention and agency, and how this struggle unfolds over a period of a century, how it intertwines with the nation's own attempt to define its modernity, is the subject of this paper.
7. The workers of Khatunabad: working and living conditions (1950-1980)
Willem Floor (World Bank)
The paper will present an analysis of the working and living conditions of the unskilled labourers in South Tehran with particular attention to the workers of the brick-kiln factories. These workers, partly urbanized, partly transient rural, workers belonged to the poorest of the Iranian labour class. At the same time, in sheer numbers, they represented 5% of the population of Tehran in 1960. They lived and worked under appalling conditions, but despite these conditions (which will be detailed) they only seldom went on strike. The three known strikes by the brick-kiln workers (July 1953, January 1955, and June 1959) will be highlighted and used to discuss the context in which all Iranian workers had to operate. Finally, the equally deplorable living conditions of these workers and their families will be discussed.
8. On Civilisation-Theoretical Aspects of 'History from Below' as Democratisation and De-Democratisation processes in Iran
Dawud Gholamasad (University of Hanover)
Discussing the problem of 'history from below' is usually related to a heteronymous evaluation of the agents of social movements, whereby they are from the very beginning idealized as the agents of social progress in sense of democratisation of society. Without doubt does the emergence of social movements from below, i.e. of ascending-orientated groups, indicate a shift in the balance of power between the established and the outsiders of society in favour of the latter, meaning processes of latent democratisation. Consequently these processes of functional democratisation - in the sense of a shifting in the balance of power in society as a whole in favour of the former outsiders - are not recognized as the inevitable preconditions of institutional democratisation as well as of de-democratisation.
On the other hand, the term 'democratisation' usually reduced to one of the institutionalised forms of control of those who govern by those who are governed. Hence 'democratisation' - in this meaning - only refers to the establishing of institutionalised forms of democratisation, namely Parliamentary Democracies Western-type. Therefore not only other potential institutional forms of democratisation are neglected, but also the institutional democratisation of further social relationships such as the relations of genders, generations, ethnic and confessional groups, economical classes etc.
Furthermore civilising processes of the social habitués of the agents involved in these power-struggles contributing to institutional democratisation or de-democratisation according to their different levels of civilisation, are not taken into account. Hence problems of democratisation, respectively developments towards institutional de-democratisation as they occurred most recently in Iran, cannot be explained sufficiently. Therefore, a lack of 'democratic culture' is usually given in a tautological manner as the key-explanation for problems of democratisation, without tracing the preconditions of the development of more democratic cultures.
In order to understand not only the current problems of democratisation in Iran, but also the emergence and development of more democratic cultures, I should like to focus on the relation between democratisation and the civilisation of the social habitués of the people involved in these power-struggles. This is supposed to contribute to the development of a theoretical framework of different empirical analysis of democratisation or problems of democratisation; witch cannot just be reduced to the relations between those who govern and those who are governed.
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9. Rural labour in contemporary Iran
Eric Hoogland
This paper will examine the situation of rural labour in contemporary Iran, based on field research in Iranian villages in successive summers since 1995. An introduction will address the state of the field in Iranian rural studies for the entire twentieth century, focusing on such problems as the paucity of empirical studies and the tendency of both 'Left' and 'Right' academics to dismiss the role and value of rural groups in Iran' s history. Next the paper will review briefly the main characteristics of rural labour in the 1970s, based on the author's previous research and publications. This section is intended to set the stage for understanding the changes in rural work patterns that have emerged in the past 20 years. The discussion of these changes will begin with an assessment of the main factors that have contributed to them. These factors include (among others) the rural infrastructure projects of the Jehad-e Sazandegi, the government's agricultural credit and price support programs, a major rural-to-urban migration that has reduced the rural percentage of Iran's total population from 55 percent in 1976 to just 35 percent in 2000, and declining fertility rates/family size of the rural population. Several 'typical' villages will be described in order to provide insight into rural social stratification and its relationship to land ownership and labour diversity. These examples will include a large village within commuting distance of a major urban centre; a small village near urban markets; a remote village with adequate water for irrigated agriculture; and a remote village that depends on rain-fed farming. In addition, the paper will address the organization of work among pastoral nomads, based on the author's migration with a tribal group during part of the summer of 1996.
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10. The Left and City Migration and Marginalization in Iran
Azam Khatam (University of Tehran)
During recent 3 decades rural-urban migration in Iran has decreased constantly while spatial marginalization or 'informal settlements' has grown widely. The share of population living in informal settlements in total Tehran Metropolitan Region population has increased from 5% to 19% during 1976 to 1996.
In 1970s the Left researchers explained growing squatter settlements through 'Economic Dependency and Social Marginalization 'theory. Further researches and case studies have shown the informal settlements dwellers are not socially marginalized and they include mostly industrial workers. In this paper I will argue that government-housing policy is among the main factors led to excluding low-income families and informal workers from cities' house market. I will focuses on the changes of informal settlements in Tehran Metropolitan Region after Islamic Revolution.
11. The Youth and the Islamic Revolution
Farhad Khosrokhavar (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Within the Iranian revolution, the place of the youth has been of great import. After the revolution and during the eight-year war with Iraq, the Iranian youth fought within the regular army and the Pasdaran, within which the Bassidj played a very important role. The subjectivity of this youth, its social origin, its relationship to the revolution, to Islam and particularly, to the charismatic figure of Khomeyni are analysed in this article.
The main fact is that Bassidji youth were mostly from lower or lower middle class but their mental outlook was not uniform. There were at least three groups with different subjective frameworks within it. On the other hand, within Bassidj were two minority groups, the old people and the very young (less than sixteen years) that had different motivations from the youth between 17 and 30.
One particular group within the Bassidjis are the children of the uprooted peasants, the offspring of the 'depeseantised peasants'. They deserve a close scrutiny. The analysis of these groups within Bassidj, the capacity of this organization to unify them under a 'mortiferous ideology' and their attitude towards the Islamic revolution, the Leader Khomeyni and the society at large are the main topics of this article. It will be shown that the revolutionary utopia and the confrontation of it with the daily reality in the Iranian society played a significant role in the radicalisation of this youth who were instrumentalised to fight not only the Iraqi enemy, but also the other radical groups (the extreme left) within the society.
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12. The Labour History's Global Growth
Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History)
'Labour history' has a double meaning. In a narrow sense it denotes the history of social movements of wage earners, including their leaders, their organizations (e.g., mutual aid societies, trade unions, consumer and producer cooperatives, and working-class parties), and their collective actions (petitions, strikes, boycotts, electoral campaigns, etc.). In a broad sense, 'labour history' comprises the history of the working classes at large, including the history of family life, demography, everyday culture, leisure activities, housing, religion, migration, and so on.
This paper will attempt to do two things. First, it will present a very rough and preliminary reconstruction of both 'narrow' and 'broad' labour history since its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, with special attention to the 'de-Europeanisation' that started in the 1960s and 1970s. Secondly, it will discuss a number of major substantive problems facing the gradually growing new global labour history. These problems include conceptual matters (e.g. what exactly do we mean when we speak of 'workers' and 'working classes'?) and methodological issues (how can we study transnational processes of class formation?)
13. Hidden from History? Women Workers in Modern Iran
Valentine Moghadam ( Illinois State University)
A generation ago, British feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham asked why women were "hidden from history" - and helped to found the field of women's history. Some years later, Gayatri Spivak asked, "Can the subaltern speak?" - and added a new dimension to the field of subaltern studies. Throughout, Marxists have inquired into the relationship between the sexual division of labor and the mode of production, although Engels' cogent commentary about the state, the family and reproduction was subsequently eclipsed by analyses that focused on capital and (the male working-) class. These questions are used to frame my proposed paper, which examines the history and historiography of working-class women in Iran.
I begin by noting the paucity of studies on working-class women, the dearth of data on women workers, and the absence of working women's voices in the major historical texts (e.g., Issawi, Abrahamian, Ladjevardi). Subaltern women (as distinct from elite women) barely speak, and are indeed hidden from history. It is possible that archives in Iran could shed light on the history of women workers, but I am not aware of any such archival research. In order to place the state of Iranian studies in a comparative perspective, my paper will mention developments in Middle East social history (e.g., Quataert, Clancy-Smith, Tucker and Meriwether on Ottoman Anatolia, Colonial Algeria, Egypt, and Syria, respectively).
I then discuss the demographic and social-structural features of Iran during three (possibly four) distinct periods in the 20th century, linking the emergence and structure of a female working class to changes in the mode of production and the state, and to the reproduction of patriarchy. In order to keep the focus on subaltern women, I highlight the lives of factory workers, home-based workers, domestics, and prostitutes. I also raise questions about methodological difficulties and inconsistencies entailed in the study of the female labor force in Iran. Finally, I examine the Iranian feminist literature that is beginning to recover women workers from historical obscurity (e.g., Afary, Friedl, Moghadam, Najmabadi, Paidar, Poya). This emergent literature gives working- class women a voice and contributes to a deeper understanding of the economic and social history of twentieth century Iran.
14. The Nature of the Marginalization of Women's Workforce in Iran: 1976-96
Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad (American University of Paris, Denison University)
In 1980's, the debate on Iran's women's position under the Islamic state was dominated by two opposing views: the secular feminists outside of Iran (see e.g., Afshar 1982, 1987; Tabari 1982; Azari 1983; Moghadam 1988) and the Muslim feminists inside of Iran( see e.g., Hashemi 1980; Tabatabaii1980). The secular orientation asserted that the islamization of the Iranian state had led to economic, social and political suppression and marginalization of women's activities. The Muslim feminists, in contrast, believed that Islamization of the society had freed women from the dictatorship of the market commoditization of women as sex objects. However, these two positions had one thing in common. They both focused on the role of religious ideology, mainly textual analysis in repressing and/or liberating women's position inside and outside of home, ignoring the socio-economic contexts of the gender problem in Iran.
The change in economic and social policies of the Islamic Republic in the 1990's, i.e. economic liberalization, modification of family law and women's employment policies, led to the revision of the views of certain secular feminists. As a result, two important trends prevailed among the feminists outside of Iran. One orientation changed its position with respect to the economic and non-economic marginalization of women in Iran and entered into a dialogue with the Muslim feminists (e.g., Najmabadi 1991; Mir-hosseini 1996; Kian 1997; Afshar 1998). Certain other secular feminists outside of Iran, however, introduced a critical discourse against the revisionist trend (e.g., Moghissi 1999) or challenged the 1980's dominant trend that gender ideology determines women's employment in Iran. The latter tendency emphasizes the economic context in the relationship between state, capital and gender ideology, and despite its assertion about the persistence of the subordination of women in the male dominated society of Iran, avoides the explicit treatment of the marginaliztion thesis (see e.g., Poya 1999).
In our study, however, we reorient and extend the economic marginalization thesis theoretically and test it empirically by focusing on the nature of women's exclusion (1980's) and incorporation (1990's) into the work force. First, we argue that the nature of economic margionalization, and not the marginalization per se, has changed in 1976-86 and 1986-96 periods. Yet, both tendencies have occurred within the interaction between patriarchal and capitalist forces under an Islamic state. Secondly, we provide a comparative empirical analysis of the economic marginalization process, comparing historically women and men's occupation status at the national and sectoral levels. We find that previous research has been less sensitive to these issues, and apparently conflicting theoretical and empirical results have led some feminists to question the validity of the marginalization thesis.