Abstract
The totalitarian voice is the only one heard in a totalitarian world. Media are at its service; nongovernmental organizations are scarce; individuality and agency are hampered by fear and pressure. Opposition hardly exists, and rebels are either imprisoned or under house arrest and thus their social interaction is seriously curtailed. In this kind of world, archaeology is transformed into a tool for governmental propaganda. This chapter investigates the situation of archaeology in Iran in its sociopolitical context, where a dominant univocality permeates archaeological research, promoting conformity and eliminating individuality. This has forced archaeologists to adopt the role of either opponents or supporters of the system under conditions of generalized structural violence.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Yousef Madjidzadeh for his comments and for the great honor of letting us use his real name in the chapter. Furthermore, we thank Mariam Naeemi and Arman Masoudi and also La’ya Alinia for editing the chapter. Any errors in this chapter remain our own. We also are very grateful to the volume editors for their valuable suggestions that have helped improving the chapter.
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Dezhamkhooy, M., Yazdi, L.P., Garazhian, O. (2015). All Our Findings Are Under Their Boots! The Monologue of Violence in Iranian Archaeology. In: González-Ruibal, A., Moshenska, G. (eds) Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence. Ethical Archaeologies: The Politics of Social Justice, vol 2. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1643-6_4
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