Bio: Lois Beck

Lois Beck is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. She has conducted anthropological research in Iran over a span of forty-two years, beginning with her studies at Shiraz University and continuing in the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods. Since 1979, she has engaged in anthropological research in Iran on twelve occasions, most recently in 2004, on political, economic, and social changes among Qashqa'i nomadic pastoralists. She is the author of The Qashqa'i of Iran (Yale University Press, 1986), Nomad: A Year in the Life of a Qashqa'i Tribesman in Iran (University of California Press, 1991), and Nomads Move On: Qashqa'i Tribespeople in Post-Revolutionary Iran (forthcoming). She is the editor of Women in the Muslim World (with Nikki Keddie, Harvard University Press, 1976), Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800 (with Guity Nashat, University of Illinois Press, 2003), and Women in Iran from 1800 to the Islamic Republic (with Guity Nashat, University of Illinois Press, 2004).

Abstract

Reconfiguring Private and Public: Examples from Qashqa'i Society

In this paper, I stress the importance of examining sectors of Iranian society that are often neglected in the scholarship on Iran: communities that are not Persian-speaking or Shi'i Muslim and those that lie outside of Tehran and the middle and upper classes. I offer examples drawn from Qashqa'i society in southwestern Iran, to demonstrate that the circumstances of life for many Qashqa'i, as expressed in both private and public spheres, are often different from those described for other societies in Iran. I examine the ways that the Qashqa'i create the space to live semi-autonomously within the Iranian state. I show how the state itself permits, even encourages, such circumstances, in part by its widespread dissemination of alluring images of Qashqa'i society through the modern media (especially television, films, and photographs). I also examine the ways that members of the wider Iranian society use Qashqa'i territory to escape the many social restrictions under which they fall in their cities and towns of residence. In order to find private domains where they can engage in behaviors that otherwise the government attempts to restrict, they seek refuge in Qashqa'i territory, thereby changing the notions that the Qashqa'i themselves have about their own private and public domains. For this paper, I draw on my anthropological research among the Qashqa'i over a span of thirty-five years. I suggest ways that anthropology can contribute to the study of modern Iran, especially because anthropologists have pursued, since the 1960s, many of the topics that are the themes of this conference.