Chapter 5 considers Iran’s many ethnic, ethnolinguistic, and ethnoreligious communities. Ethnicity is the most amorphous and abstract of the five categories. Scholars have yet to produce a comprehensive account of its expressions in Iran. Ethnicity for Iran’s dominating sector is elusive, perhaps because of the potential vulnerability of those who currently control the country’s power and wealth. Iranians express contradictions and complexities in their societies and cultures by way of symbolic polarities, which they deploy in daily life and popular culture. Iran’s regions demonstrate how diverse peoples relate to one another, especially in peripheral, border, and marginalized territories. Large concentrations of minority peoples reside in most of Iran’s thirty-one provinces. Cohesive villages and urban neighborhoods offer benefits to minority and other residents as they organize their lives and create meaning at the local level. Changing social and socioeconomic cleavages in Iran relate to transformations brought about by the monarchy’s end and the theocracy’s emergence.