Abstract
Studies of marginalized youth in the Islamic Republic of Iran have focused almost exclusively on how structural constraints operate to thwart these young people’s transition to adulthood. There has been comparatively little work that has examined how disadvantaged youth actually cope with precarious structural conditions. The result has been unbalanced hypotheses that argue that youth become stuck in long stretches of time during which they wait with uncertainty for an autonomous life, all the while neglecting the productive micro quests that youth engage in to resolve this uncertainty. The pursuit of face by lower-class youth in Iran speaks to this gap in existing studies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two cities in Iran, this study finds that through their engagement in this face system, some young people create an alternative basis of social differentiation to improve their lives. By following the four moral criteria governing face behavior—self-sufficiency, hard work, purity and appearance—these youth are able to accrue moral capital, which subsequently enables them to win incremental gains in the social and economic spheres. These findings have important implications for research on youth mobility in the Middle East.
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Notes
Herrera (2009) argues that the participation of youth in the Arab Spring coupled with their extensive use of technology has enabled them to create “horizonal forms of participation” that they can subsequently use to construct their own path toward adulthood (369).
Goffman (1955) first used the term “face-work” to describe the work that individual actors must undertake in social interactions in order to present an image of themselves and to protect their face.
Using Fischer’s (1982) definition, I refer to personal social networks as the people that individuals are directly involved with in a relation of interaction and exchange, for example, neighbor/neighbor, employer, employee, and friend/friend. As Fischer describes, “A person is involved with people with whom he or she shares activities, who provide material and emotional assistance, or both, and who receives the same in return” (Fischer 1982, 35).
Olzewska (2013) addresses this issue by examining the status aspirations and mobility experiences of lower income youth groups in Iran. However, her focus is on young Afghan men and women, whose experiences often diverge from their Iranian counterparts due to the legal denial of citizenship and other social rights to the former.
Kazemi (1980) shared the personal narratives of a couple of poor, migrant youth in Iran in his seminal work on poverty in pre-revolutionary Iran. However, these accounts were anecdotal and he conducted no qualitative, systematic research into their coping strategies. Further still, post-revolutionary qualitative research into the lives of poor youth in Iran is sorely missing.
It is only when the poor are mobilized by leaders under extraordinary circumstances do they engage in collective acts of radicalism (Kazemi 1980).
In her study of low-income, young black men and women from Michigan, Smith finds that a strong work history and work ethic is a decisive factor in determining whether or not community members provide job placement assistance to young people.
Many of the youth in this study came from households whose median monthly income was around 400,000 tomans/month (approximately 150 USD/month) at the time of fieldwork.
In this particular seaside resort, one has to pay fees (approximately 7 USD) in order to go to the seaside or to rent out bikes.
This corroborates Sanchez-Jankowski’s (1991) finding that low-income individuals in the United States believe that it is who a person knows, rather than what they know, that will help them get ahead in life.
Leila was referring to the other girls who worked in the salon.
Recent ethnographic studies (e.g., Khosravi 2007; Mahdavi 2008; Varzi 2006) of upper class youth in Iran have granted power and agency to youth by analyzing the ways in which their everyday cultural practices constitute sites of resistance to the established moral and social order. However, in relying too heavily on the discourse of resistance and in generalizing the actions of Iran’s young elite, these studies overlook the fact that not all youth engage in cultural practices in order to “resist” the established moral order (Olzewska 2013).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, Teresa Gonzales, Florence Muwana, members of UC Berkeley’s Center for Ethnographic Research, David Smilde, the reviewers of Qualitative Sociology, and the many youth who participated in this study.
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Hashemi, M. Waithood and Face: Morality and Mobility Among Lower-Class Youth in Iran. Qual Sociol 38, 261–283 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-015-9306-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-015-9306-3