{"id":5,"date":"2018-09-12T18:34:55","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T22:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/?p=5"},"modified":"2018-09-18T10:39:06","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T14:39:06","slug":"brief-notes-on-shah-of-shahs-and-a-consideration-of-theories-of-change-and-the-unreliability-of-the-native-informant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/uncategorized\/brief-notes-on-shah-of-shahs-and-a-consideration-of-theories-of-change-and-the-unreliability-of-the-native-informant\/","title":{"rendered":"Brief notes on Shah of Shahs, and a consideration of theories of change and the unreliability of “the native informant”"},"content":{"rendered":"

On this reading of , what stayed with me was voice. The verisimilitude of\u00a0Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski’s narrative in\u00a0Shah of Shahs<\/em>\u00a0makes the text authoritative. It\u2019s his voice that wins the reader over, to the point of confusion: A non-Iranian wrote this? But it sounds right and reads right. He gets it, he gets Iran.<\/em><\/p>\n

But what is that “Iran?” \u00a0Does the official project of producing the \u201cgood Muslim\u201d align with Islam as it is lived Iran in its emptying villages or along Tehran\u2019s alleyways, in the day to day lives and experiences of ordinary Iranians? What is Iran as it is made and remade, by the Shah and his father, and now by the IRI, determined to redeem Iran\u2019s lost culture, to bring about a \u201creturn to the self.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the text we learn that Iran is a country crippled by fear (pg. 43) and overwhelmed by self-loathing (pp. 38-40, 45-46, and especially 95-97) each citizen both a victim and an agent of an implacable state.<\/p>\n

From that same text we also learn that Iran is a Shiite country, filled with \u201crabid oppositionists\u201d incapable of standing down in the face of injustice, partisans in a constant crouch of defiance and dissembling before authority (pp. 67, 71, 74).\u00a0 We are told that it is not by accident that Iran\u2019s recent history is lined with once-powerful rulers who were sent off to exile or met an untimely death by their own people.<\/p>\n

I asked you in class to consider \u201chow this happened,\u201d why there was a revolution in Iran. I\u2019m not sure that Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski adequately answers that question, or that he\u2019s even capable of addressing it.<\/p>\n

You might ask yourself: What is Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski’s theory of change? \u00a0 The author gives us the Shah\u2019s version of change, what James C. Scott describes as \u201chigh authoritarianism,\u201d its goals described on pg. 53, its limitations explained in painful detail on pp. 56-57.<\/p>\n

You might also ask yourself: What was Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski’s method and why does it matter? The charm of the narrative voice contains most of the books flaws. Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski’s clearly relies on the native informant, that this uncanny ability to\u00a0reproduce voices relies on caricature and inconsistency provided by “real” Iranians (see above all the ridiculous scene on pg. 39).<\/p>\n

Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski, however, is all over the place with his own explanations, presenting in places a particularly intense local account of revolt that is uniquely Iranian (they were Shiites!, and in other places he turns to a more generalized and psychological accounts (it was the dissipation of fear!). \u00a0 But why did the fear go away? Why did the Shiites not rebel for so long? \u00a0Why were Iranians so resigned, even willing participants (\u201cboth victim and agent\u201d), in their fate? \u00a0There are no answers for these questions, the revolution remains the same mystery that it was in 1979.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski offers an array of perfectly reasonable, and perfectly irreconcilable, explanations for what happened in Iran between 1978 and 1979.<\/p>\n

There is, of course, another \u201cwhy\u201d question, one less concerned with the mechanisms of revolution and more with the philosophy, of first principles.\u00a0 Why \u201crevolution?\u201d Why revolt in the first place?\u00a0 What comes of an overthrow, of the “exuberance” that it produces and that Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski described so movingly in Shah of Shahs<\/em>. What of, especially, the \u201cand afterwards?\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a real experience of melancholy that comes when the grand adventure is over. The gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts becomes catharsis, a way to restore one\u2019s dignity (we\u2019ll come back, over and over again, to dignity) but did it produce better lives, a better future? Was the revolution, any revolution, worth it? If not, what were the alternatives?<\/p>\n

This question of the limitations of Iran\u2019s latest, and perhaps last, revolution, matters because it is, I suspect, why many if not most Iranians seek humility in their politics. Revealed in the fullness of time the quest to remake the world has been shown to maybe, just maybe, not be worth it. What needs to be done is to work within what is already there, to tend, like Hamid and Ali, one\u2019s garden\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"

Babur\u2019s garden, Baburnama, 16th c. British Library<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On this reading of , what stayed with me was voice. The verisimilitude of\u00a0Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski’s narrative in\u00a0Shah of Shahs\u00a0makes the text authoritative. It\u2019s his voice that wins the reader over, to the point of confusion: A non-Iranian wrote this? But it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1690,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1690"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions\/7"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}