Les Afghans iraniens

Si l’émigration afghane est le fruit de la conjoncture sociopolitique – sècheresses, changements de régime, guerres – et de la structure économique – pastoralisme, cycles saisonniers des activités productives –, elle s’inscrit dans un continuum historique de mouvements récurrents de populations à l’échelle de la région. De nombreux Afghans, notamment mais non exclusivement hazara, ont fait souche en Iran depuis la fin du XIXe siècle. Leur présence dans ce pays s’est intensifiée dans les années 1970, à la suite du boom pétrolier iranien et de la sècheresse en Afghanistan, puis des bouleversements politiques que ce pays a connus depuis 1978. La politique de la République islamique à l’égard des Afghans a été à la fois changeante et incohérente ; elle s’est désormais donné pour but leur rapatriement, dans un climat de xénophobie à la fois officielle et populaire. Pourtant, la présence afghane sur le sol iranien semble irréversible : elle satisfait des besoins économiques, exprime l’intensité des échanges commerciaux entre les deux pays, constitue une réalité sociale transfrontalière complexe. Enfin, elle nourrit un débat public et juridique sur la définition de la citoyenneté et paraît inhérente à l’idée nationale iranienne elle-même..

The COVID-19 pandemic and the menstrual cycle: research gaps and opportunities

International audienceSince the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, discussions on social media and blogs have indicated that women have experienced menstrual changes, including altered menstrual duration, frequency, regularity, and volume (heavier bleeding and clotting), increased dysmenorrhea, and worsened premenstrual syndrome. There have been a small number of scientific studies of variable quality reporting on menstrual cycle features during the pandemic, but it is still unclear whether apparent changes are due to COVID-19 infection/illness itself, or other pandemic-related factors like increased psychological stress and changes in health behaviours. It is also unclear to what degree current findings are explained by reporting bias, recall bias, selection bias and confounding factors. Further research is urgently needed. We provide a list of outstanding research questions and potential approaches to address them. Findings can inform policies to mitigate against gender inequalities in health and society, allowing us to build back better post-COVID

Poertry and its Social Cotexts among Afghan Refugees in Iran

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Classy kids and down-at-heel intellectuals: status aspiration and blind spots in the contemporary ethnography of Iran

This article reviews the ways in which class, status, social mobility and their cultural ramifications have been considered (or failed to be considered) in recent ethnographic studies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It argues against the trend of privileging “resistance” to an oppressive state as a theoretical frame for documenting social phenomena in Iran: lifestyles and consumption patterns cannot be interpreted merely as signs of political rebellion because they are endowed with symbolic value as status attributes in a society whose class configurations are shifting. I present a number of sources and concepts that help to rethink these phenomena, and show how the experience of Afghan refugees living on the margins of Iranian cities illuminates both the opportunities and constraints created by the Islamic Republic's uneasy mix of political Islam, populism and neoliberalism. A focus on aspiration to upward mobility becomes a useful analytical lens that allows us to sidestep reductive dichotomies such as tradition/modernity or religion/secularism that are in practice blurred by its very pursuit

The poet’s melancholy

This article considers the relationship between depressed affect, a long-term refugee situation, and poetry among Afghan refugees in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the changing subjectivities of Afghan refugee poets, it explores the relationship between a perception of collective suffering, individual mental distress, and creativity in this community. Rather than establishing diagnostic criteria for depression among Afghans, the article is mostly concerned with the social and cultural ripples of psychological distress resulting from decades of war, displacement, and marginalization in the host country. It seeks to complicate biomedical understandings of depression by drawing on anthropological studies of dysphoria in Iran and on the collective experience of social suffering and structural violence. Through a discussion of four poets and their work, it explores the productive aspects of depression and the therapeutic, political, and transcendental potential of writing poetry