Science and the Iranian Middle Class

Roughly a decade after the Constitutional Revolution of 1905/06, many Iranians were of the opinion that constitutionalism had failed to build a sound social and political order in their country, although they understood this situation in different ways in that period of accelerating processes of social diversification. One of several social groups was the nascent modern middle class, emerging since the late 1910s, which reacted to Iran's post-constitutional troubles with a turn of attention away from political revolution to sociocultural reform as the panacea for the creation of a modern individual, society, and state

Science and the Iranian Middle Class

Roughly a decade after the Constitutional Revolution of 1905/06, many Iranians were of the opinion that constitutionalism had failed to build a sound social and political order in their country, although they understood this situation in different ways in that period of accelerating processes of social diversification. One of several social groups was the nascent modern middle class, emerging since the late 1910s, which reacted to Iran's post-constitutional troubles with a turn of attention away from political revolution to sociocultural reform as the panacea for the creation of a modern individual, society, and state

The temporal politics of big dams in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia: by way of an introduction

Since the first connection of electric generators to dams, pioneered on sites in England and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, dams have steadily increased in size and importance as a source of electricity. They have also continued to fulfil their ageold functions such as facilitating controllable water reservoirs for irrigation or providing water power for mills. Hydropower now accounts for about 2.3 % of global electricity production, with the Asia–Pacific region today investing particularly heavily in new dam projects (IEA 2013:6). The building of large hydro-electric dams is often associated with the post-war high modernist moment. But such projects have in fact never ceased to proliferate, particularly in the global South. Rising concern for carbon-low forms of energy production, alongside the need to satisfy the increasing energy demand of growing populations have recently made large dam projects attractive (again) to governments as diverse as Turkey (Evren, this issue) or Tajikistan (Suyarkulova, this issue), in some instances realizing plans that were first drawn up in the 1920s (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan). Projects such as the Itaipu Dam on the Brazil/Paraguay border, the Guri Dam in Venezuela or the Chinese Three Gorges Dam (Le Mentec, this issue) stand out as particularly ambitious new projects. Dams have frequently been regarded as signs of human ingenuity, symbols of progress and ‘temples’ of the modern nation-state—as Nehru famously put it when inaugurating the Bhakra Nangal dam in 1954 (McCully 2001, pp. 1–2). On the other hand, displaced populations, environmental activists, tax payers and creditors have cast seriou

Writing Prozāk Diaries in Tehran: Generational Anomie and Psychiatric Subjectivities

I explore the historical and cultural shifts that underlie the normalization of the term de´pre´shen and the emergence of public psychiatric discourses in 1990s Iran. I do this by investigating the cultural sensibilities of a particular generation, the self-identified 1980s generation, and the ways they situate what is perceived as de´pre´shen in social anomie and the memories of the Iran–Iraq war. I argue that psychiatrization of psychological distress in Iran was not simply a de-politicizing hegemonic biomedical discourse, but that the contemporary Iranian discourses of psychological pathology and social loss evolved in public, hand-in-hand, through the medicalization of post-war loss. Psychiatric subjectivity describes conditions where individuals internalize psychiatry as a mode of thinking, and performatively articulate not only their desires, hopes, and anxieties, but also historical losses as embodied in individual and collective brains. I underscore my interlocutors’ simultaneous historicization and medicalization of their de´pre´shen, arguing that psychiatrically medicalized individuals are performative actors in the discursive formation of both biomedical and social truth. De´pre´shen, in the larger sense of the word, has become one way to navigate ruptured pasts, slippery presents, and uncertain futures