Referring to the mid-19th-century beginnings of “folklore studies” in France, Michel de Certeau explores how this “form of literature” was removed from “the people's reach” and reserved “for the use of scholars and amateurs.”Footnote ² The genesis of folklore studies and ethnography in Iran was similarly fraught with ambivalences for nationalists across the political spectrum.Footnote ³ This paper focuses on the early Pahlavi era (1921–41) as the crucial formative period of Iranian folklore studies and ethnography.Footnote ⁴ It examines the social background and nationalist objectives of pioneering Iranians engaged in folklore studies. These figures were often prominent left-leaning constitutionalists who took a special interest in representing the “masses” both politically and culturally. Their quest for authenticity led many of them to categorize folkloric materials—popular songs, proverbs, stories, customs, and rituals—as either “authentically” Iranian, and therefore compatible with modernity, or “inauthentic” superstition, with associations of foreign and cultural pollution. Their romantic project of uncovering the authentic and organically unified nation was often coupled paradoxically with the positivistic aim of “scientifically” collecting and presenting their findings. As Frank Korom has noted in his study of folklore and nationalism in Bengal, “the boundaries between positivism and romanticism-cum-nationalism were often obscured and permeable, allowing a constant exchange of ideas between the two. Positivism was imbued with romantic tendencies and vice versa.”Footnote ⁵

Alongside the efforts of left-leaning intellectuals, the Iranian state in this period increasingly established cultural institutions with the mission of collecting, studying, and displaying folkloric and ethnographic materials. The appropriation of popular culture signaled the state's attempt to bolster its legitimacy by claiming to care for and promote the interests of the “masses.” It only did so, however, after extended campaigns to repress tribal uprisings, forcibly settle nomadic communities, and implement other reforms aimed at homogenizing a regionally and ethnically diverse population. The state's engagement with folklore and ethnography, like that of the intellectuals, was filled with ambivalence. Given the leftist sympathies of many of these intellectuals, the early Pahlavi state may have feared the subversive potential of the discipline, especially because some popular stories collected by folklorists encoded strategies for resistance against authority figures.Footnote ⁶

The interest of the state and individual nationalist figures in folklore and ethnography intensified in the aftermath of the failure of constitutionalism to serve as a panacea to the “ills” of the nation. Iranian constitutionalism rested on the principle that democratic institutions could represent the “masses” politically; its perceived failure motivated many nationalists in the interwar period to seek cultural over political (i.e., parliamentary-democratic) forms of representation.

FOLKLORE STUDIES AND THE MARGINS OF THE NATION: REVOLUTION AND WAR IN THE MAKING OF A DISCIPLINE

Although there had been isolated attempts by individual Iranians to collect folkloric materials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the publication of such materials began in earnest in the 1920s and became a flood in the 1930s. The biographies of pioneering Iranian folklorists, who usually collected their materials outside the purview of the state, tell a shared story of alienation. Their motivations for embracing the new discipline reflect their social backgrounds and the multiple layers of their marginalization. Most were from provincial origins and had traveled extensively throughout Iran, both of which perhaps heightened their awareness of cultural difference and of variations in language, stories, and dialects among the regional populations of the country. As we will see, however, this heightened awareness did not necessarily translate into championing difference as a political principle; rather, these same folklorists often glossed over diversity in the name of a unified nation.

The timing of the formation of Iranian folklore studies was far from coincidental. It was the shared experience of the Constitutional Revolution, its perceived failure, and the subsequent rise of the Pahlavi regime that drove the crystallization of folklore studies in interwar Iran. Most of those writing on folklore in the 1930s had been left-leaning constitutionalist poets, journalists, and writers in the period from 1906 to 1926. During these twenty years, constitutionalism suffered several setbacks, including a counterrevolution in 1908 and 1909, a Russian ultimatum forcing the closure of the parliament in 1911, a series of short-lived and semifunctioning parliaments during World War I, Riza Khan's 1921 coup, and his encroaching authority over democratic procedures in the following years.Footnote ⁷ Many future folklorists were active in the revolutionary press before abandoning their activities in the face of state censorship and opposition, and the formation of folklore studies as a discipline occurred precisely at the moment that constitutionalists more broadly were turning from politics and critical journalism toward educational, cultural, and scholarly activities. Skepticism over the prospects of genuine parliamentary democracy and a free press facilitated a collective intellectual pursuit of nondemocratic cultural articulations of nationalism—articulations that pursued the romantic ideal of authenticity through the apparatus of scientific methodologies.

These intellectuals expressed both romantic nostalgia and contempt for the “masses” they studied. In order to resolve this paradox, many resorted to a xenophobic nationalist logic. Popular customs, rituals, folk tales, and proverbs that they deemed incompatible with modernity were categorized as “superstitions” traceable to “foreign” Semitic or Turkic sources; “authentic” folklore, by contrast, was not only compatible with modernity but also homogeneous across provincial boundaries. The tensions, ambivalences, and contradictions underlying the formation of folklore as a discipline are illustrated in the lives of six pioneering figures: ʿAli Akbar Dihkhuda, Muhammad Taqi Bahar, Ahmad Kasravi, Husayn Kuhi-Kirmani, Amir Quli Amini, and Sadiq Hidayat.

The Qazvini writer ʿAli Akbar Dihkhuda is a prime example of an Iranian constitutionalist who abandoned a life of political activism for scholarship during the interwar period. Educated in Tehran's prestigious School of Political Science (Madrasah-i ʿUlum-i Siyasi), Dihkhuda made a name for himself during the 1906 Constitutional Revolution as a satirist for the radical journal Sur-i Israfil.Footnote ⁸ In his regular column “Charand Parand” (Nonsense), he employed colloquial speech—a rarity in newspapers before this time—in order to speak against despotism on behalf of the “common man.”Footnote ⁹ Exiled in the wake of the 1908 coup against the constitutional government, Dihkhuda returned to Iran the following year after the overthrow of Muhammad ʿAli Shah to serve as a representative in the Iranian parliament. During World War I, in the context of the British and Russian occupations of Iran and renewed perilous conditions for anti-imperialist activists, he took refuge with the Bakhtiyari tribes. After the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country and the restoration of a degree of political independence, Dihkhuda served briefly as minister of education and as justice minister. He abandoned his political career for educational and scholarly pursuits with the rise of Riza Shah and the increasing suppression of political opposition.Footnote ¹⁰

It was during his stay with the Bakhtiyaris in the early years of the war—when he witnessed the collapse of parliamentary democracy in the face of foreign occupation—that Dihkhuda began compiling materials for his multivolume comprehensive Persian dictionary, the first volume of which was published in 1939.Footnote ¹¹ Aided by the young literary figure Sadiq Hidayat, Dihkhuda produced a separate four-volume compendium to the dictionary, titled Amsal va Hikam (Proverbs and Sayings), which included both written and popular oral materials.Footnote ¹²Proverbs and Sayings could be viewed as the scholarly and “scientific” analogue to Dihkhuda's political and satirical engagement with popular culture in “Nonsense.”

Muhammad Taqi Bahar, a contemporary of Dihkhuda, similarly abandoned political activism for scholarship. Born and raised in Mashhad in the northeastern province of Khurasan, Bahar was steeped in the classical tradition of Persian poetry. Upon his father's death in 1904, Bahar was named the poet laureate (malik al-shuʿarāʾ) of Mashhad by Muzaffar al-Din Shah. Like Dihkhuda, Bahar quickly became a prominent voice of the Constitutional Revolution, though in his case it was not through incisive satirical prose but rather through moving revolutionary verse. Throughout the 1910s and the early 1920s, he was a member of the left-leaning Social Democrat Party (Hizb-i Dimukrat). In his work as a journalist, editor, and poet, he fiercely opposed British and Russian occupation during World War I and retained a critical stance toward Riza Khan after the fateful 1921 coup. As a member of parliament in the mid-1920s, he sided with the opposition to Riza Khan; following a failed assassination attempt against him in 1925, Bahar turned away from politics but was nevertheless imprisoned in 1929 and again in 1933.Footnote ¹³

Chastened by the Pahlavi state, Bahar retreated into scholarly and educational activities, much as Dikhuda had done. In addition to publishing numerous articles, Bahar's contributions to literary criticism were famously articulated in his three-volume Sabkshinasi (Stylistics).Footnote ¹⁴ A proponent of “modernizing” the content of Persian poetry to include matters of contemporary political, social, and economic significance, Bahar was also insistent on preserving the form of classical Persian poetry based on Arabic meters (ʿarūż).Footnote ¹⁵ Reimagining ʿarūż within a nationalist framework, he sought to indigenize some of these meters by emphasizing their pre-Islamic Iranian provenance. He traced two such classical forms, the rubāʿī (quatrain) and fahlavīyāt (Persian dialect verse), to pre-Islamic Sasanian origins, possibly in the hopes of shielding ʿarūż from the claim of being merely a “foreign” Arab import into Persian. Bahar associated these forms with popular poetry (rarely recorded but widespread in oral form) known commonly as dubaytī or chahārbaytī, both meaning “quatrains.” Motivated by romantic populist sentiments, Bahar preferred employing the “pure” Persian category of dubaytī over the Arabic terms rubāʿī and fahlavīyāt, stating that “what the illiterate people say about this [form of poetry] . . . has more validity [than the classical categories].”Footnote ¹⁶

Bahar praised not only the relative infrequency of Arabic words in the rural quatrains but also their ability to express raw emotion and compact meaning. He contrasted this “authentic” Iranian rural poetry with Persian poetry written according to Arabic meters, which in his view were characterized by ornamentation, artificiality, and an excess of form. He defined “authentic” (aṣl) quatrains as those

Bahar associated authenticity with the countryside, which he assumed was somehow untouched by the Arabic-dominated literary culture of the city.

The judge and scholar Ahmad Kasravi made a similar urban/rural and artificial/authentic distinction in his assessment of popular Persian poetry while taking an even more hostile stance toward the classical Persian canon. Kasravi belonged to a slightly younger generation of constitutionalists who abandoned their clerical garb for the robes of secular judges under the early Pahlavi regime. A renowned iconoclast, he wrote polemical tracts against all sources of perceived superstition and backwardness in society, which he located not only in religious groups (Sufis, Shiʿa, Babis, Bahaʾis) but also in Persian poetry. His attack on classical Persian poetry for being nonsensical, frivolous, and devoid of “useful” content dovetailed with his project of seeking an alternative canon of Persian poetry that was simple, direct, and free of excessive ornamentation and embellishment.Footnote ¹⁸

Kasravi, like Bahar, made a sharp distinction between the “pure” and “authentic” popular poetry of Azerbaijan and Mazandaran and the dry, emotionless, urban poetry of the Persian canon. He traced a direct correlation between the “purity of the air of the desert” and the “unpolluted” quality of “the sentiments and emotions of rural people,” which were manifested in “rural poetry.”

By identifying oral poetry in dialect form as the locus of affect, Kasravi implied that “authentic” Iranian national poetry must look to the provinces and to nonurban centers for revival. An alternative Persian canon consisting of syllabic poetry (such as rural quatrains) instead of conventional meters (ʿarūż), however, never gained widespread popularity in Iran.

The search for a literary canon rooted in popular poetry, and capable of replacing official literary canons historically patronized by the imperial court, is a common strategy in many forms of nationalism. In neighboring Turkey, for instance, Ziya Gökalp and his followers elevated syllabic Turkish poetry at the expense of Ottoman court poetry.Footnote ²⁰ They articulated many of the same objections to classical Turkish poetry that Iranian nationalist intellectuals raised against classical Persian poetry: it was ornate and artificial, lacking the direct simplicity of the “national” poetry of the “masses.”Footnote ²¹

In Iran, Husayn Kuhi-Kirmani was another nationalist seeking an alternative canon based on folk poetry. Of humble socioeconomic origins, Kuhi-Kirmani entered the circle of proconstitutional activists in the late 1910s and early 1920s. He collected materials during his many peregrinations, starting in this period when he traversed the long road from his native Kirman to the capital Tehran on foot, later continuing on to Shiraz, all the time making note of popular songs and stories.Footnote ²² Kuhi-Kirmani's initial motivation for traveling to Tehran appears to have been political; he quickly established himself there as a journalist for Nasim-i Saba and befriended Muhammad Taqi Bahar.Footnote ²³ According to his near contemporary Habib Yaghmaʾi, Kuhi-Kirmani did not have a scholarly temperament to match his enthusiasm for collecting oral poetry and tales. It was only through the prodding and support of his learned friends, including Bahar, Saʿid Nafisi, and Muhammad Hashimi, that Kuhi-Kirmani was able to publish his collections.Footnote ²⁴ Like Bahar, Kuhi-Kirmani published criticisms of the government that landed him in trouble with the early Pahlavi regime.Footnote ²⁵ After his release from a Kirmani prison in 1930 and 1931, Kuhi-Kirmani abandoned his journalistic activities (perhaps fearing further censorship) and joined the burgeoning cadre of early Pahlavi teachers.Footnote ²⁶

In his preface to a collection of fourteen popular stories, Kuhi-Kirmani illustrated the intersections between the romantic and the positivist strands of Iranian folklore studies.Footnote ²⁷ Ruminating on the romantic essence of the peasant, he considered the “songs and tales” of Iranian “villagers and shepherds” to represent “the natural taste, the simple expression of thought and the delicate and pure sentiments of Iran.” In the same breath, however, he emphasized the scientific utility of these songs and tales: “Besides their spiritual beauties, they provide a large number of genuinely Iranian words and expressions, with the manner and place of their use.”Footnote ²⁸

Despite his earlier opposition to the government, the state offered Kuhi-Kirmani support for his folkloric activities by the early 1930s. Minister of Education ʿAli Asghar Hikmat approached him personally, promising to have his materials published.Footnote ²⁹ Yet the collection Kuhi-Kirmani submitted proved too subversive for the state censors. One story, “The Hunter's Son” (Pisar-i Sayyad), told the tale of a hunter wronged by a monarch and his chief minister. The censors refused to approve the publication of this and similar stories, deeming them an affront to the king; adding insult to injury, they had Kuhi-Kirmani arrested for trying to publish them. He was released shortly thereafter and his collection published but only after he agreed to change all of the kings and ministers in the tales to chief merchants and rulers.Footnote ³⁰ Kuhi-Kirmani's encounters with the state, at the level of both political activism and cultural production, capture how differentiated and at times contradictory the state's treatment of left-leaning intellectuals could be: he was approached by state representatives to publish his work, then thrown into prison for submitting the collection, then released only after agreeing to distort the stories in print.

The Isfahani Amir Quli Amini, Kuhi-Kirmani's contemporary, also encountered a state that simultaneously encouraged and censored his activities. Amini was a provincial educator, journalist, and amateur folklorist. Paralyzed by an early childhood accident, his disability did not hinder him from becoming the editor of the Isfahani newspaper Akhgar in the early 1920s. Beyond his print activities, he successfully ran and raised funds for a privately owned orphanage.Footnote ³¹ Amini's interest in folklore began in the early 1920s, when he published Hizar va Yik Sukhan (A Thousand and One Proverbs), a compilation of proverbs commonly used by Iranians of his time.Footnote ³² He later expanded the compilation to include oral materials collected from a wide range of non-elite sources including tradesmen, craftsmen, servants, farmers, and muleteers.Footnote ³³

Like those of Kuhi-Kirmani, Amini's talents were recognized by Minister of Education ʿAli Asghar Hikmat. At an opening ceremony for the 1935/36 school year for Saʿdi High School in Isfahan, Hikmat offered Amini a fifteen-month contract to collect popular tales. Three years later, Amini dutifully submitted two monographs to the Ministry of Education and patiently awaited their publication. By this time, however, Hikmat's tenure at the Ministry of Education had ended, and the new minister apparently had little interest in supporting the two works.Footnote ³⁴ It was only in 1946, after seven years of languishing in the ministry, that they were published.Footnote ³⁵ The reluctance may have been related to Amini's inclusion of popular tales with sexually explicit and antiauthoritarian content. In his introduction to one of the collections, written after the fall of Riza Shah in 1941, Amini affirmed that these popular tales had an underlying subversive message against “hypocritical and unjust governors and judges.”Footnote ³⁶ He referred to the stories as “promoters of nationalism” in an age of “despotism.”Footnote ³⁷ In his introduction to the second delayed publication, Dastanha-yi Amsal (The Stories behind Proverbs), Amini asserted that folklore was the literature of the masses and deserved a place in the pantheon of canonical Persian literature:

Yet many of Amini's contemporaries were far more equivocal in their assessment of such materials. The most prolific and well-known writer on folklore of the interwar period was the short-story author Sadiq Hidayat. Hailing from a prominent Qajar bureaucratic background, he was somewhat of a black sheep in his family despite having enjoyed an elite European education; rather than following a professional or bureaucratic career path, he turned toward literary pursuits.Footnote ³⁹ His short stories were replete with references to popular practices, customs, and colloquial speech, suggesting a close connection between his literary and folkloristic sympathies.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although he moved in leftist literary circles, Hidayat was not an outspoken political activist, and his leftist sympathies did not translate into an uncritical celebration of the “masses.” In fact, he was capable of demonstrating utter disdain for the “folk” as the embodiment of superstition. He believed “such rotten thoughts [superstition] would not disappear by themselves” and therefore needed to be actively studied and, more important, printed: “In order to destroy such superstitions nothing is better than having them published so as to lessen their importance and credibility and lay bare their weakness.”Footnote ⁴¹ His faith in the talismanic power of print to transform popular practices and beliefs into relics of the past paralleled the state's efforts to similarly categorize certain practices as backward through cultural institutions such as the museum of ethnography, as we will see. Hidayat resolved the tension between seeking the authentic and destroying the superstitious by articulating a cultural geography: he mapped “authentic” folklore and customs onto Iran while castigating “superstitions” as foreign accretions emanating from Semitic and Turanian lands.

At the heart of Hidayat's cultural geography was an anxiety about the nation's “purity” being compromised through mixture with “polluted” nations:

Elaborating this chauvinistic genealogy of “pure” Iranian folk traditions, Hidayat portrayed Zoroastrianism as a national reaction against the predominance of “Turanian” (i.e., Turkish) superstition and sorcery. Jews and Arabs were denounced for having spread superstition, mainly through prophetic traditions (ḥadīs) that purportedly had a negative effect on gender relations, nourished fatalistic ideas, and spread an overly melancholic attitude toward life. For Hidayat, this was far from an innocent process: the ideas spread by ḥadīs composers, sorcerers, and others were a means of mass social deception.Footnote ⁴³

Meanwhile, Hidayat praised ancient Iranian festivals such as Mihrgan, Nawruz, and Chaharshanbah Suri as valuable and pleasing and as “reminders of Iran's glory days.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Folkloric material emphasizing happiness, cleanliness, and harmless humor were considered beneficial, while those encouraging belief in propitious times and dates, blood sacrifice, and the influence of stars and fatalism were categorized as “superstitious” and foreign.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hidayat blamed Islam and Semitic culture in general for attempting to erase Iranian cultural memory. He, like other nationalists of his era, feared the potential threat that regional differences in Iran posed to the myth of national homogeneity. By situating Iran in an Indo-European or Aryan context, Iranian nationalists attempted to sidestep Arabo-Islamic and Turco-Mongolian influences. Hidayat, for example, tended to be suspicious of Europeans who focused on Islamic folk practices and ideas because he felt this cast Iranians as superstitious and backwards.Footnote ⁴⁶ These suspicions may help explain why there were no Iranian studies of contemporary taʿzīyah during this period—Iranian nationalists showed relatively little interest in this indigenous form of theater despite the enthusiasm of foreign scholars and travelers for it.Footnote ⁴⁷

Iranians writing on folklore often approached the topic with trepidation: wanting to demonstrate the authenticity of the “masses” through the collection of popular tales and proverbs, they also expressed disdain for the masses’ “backwardness.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Their ambivalence was only compounded by the Janus-faced attitude of the state, which both approached them to collect and publish their findings and censored their works or left them to languish unpublished. In order to understand why the state treated Iranian intellectuals in this manner, we must understand the dilemmas it faced in appropriating folklore and ethnography for its own ideological purposes.

THE STATE, CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS, AND THE MASSES

In contrast to the motivations of individual Iranian folklorists, the state's support of folkloristic and ethnographic activities was driven by a distinctive set of preoccupations with nation building. Riza Khan's rise to power in 1921 was followed by a series of measures designed to create a homogenous, united, and centralized state. By 1926, Riza Shah had completed his military campaigns to suppress regionalist and autonomist movements. Despite the relative success of these campaigns, the specter of autonomist movements continued to shape the centralizing reforms of the early Pahlavi state during the late 1920s and 1930s, including the attempted transformation of Iranian peasants and tribesmen into modern citizens through mandatory conscription, the expansion of a secular educational system, and dress reforms intended to erase traces of regional distinctiveness.Footnote ⁴⁹

The emergence of cultural institutions concerned with the collection, publication, and physical display of ethnographic materials should be read against the backdrop of the state's violent suppression of regions populated by peasants and tribes and of its attempts to inculcate a homogenizing nationalist ideology. The timing of the state's appropriation of folklore studies and ethnography is significant: only after the threat of the “masses”—particularly the tribes—had been neutralized did the state create institutions for the study of folklore and ethnography. In order to demonstrate that the culture of the masses was “dead,” a mere relic of the past, the state-sponsored ethnographic museum displayed objects such as regionally specific clothing that were banned for daily use by contemporaries.

By the 1930s, several Iranian cultural institutions promoted ethnography, folklore collection, and a general engagement with popular culture, each with its own distinctive set of institutional logics. These included the Language Academy (Farhangistan), the Organization for Public Instruction (Sazman-i Parvarish-i Afkar), and the Ethnography Museum. Despite the state's creation of institutions concerned with the collection of folkloric and ethnographic materials, it proceeded cautiously and in seemingly self-contradictory ways. We have already seen how the state's suspicion of leftist amateur folklorists may have led to censorship, because the collected oral stories could prove to be powerful counter-scripts to the ideology of obedience to authority, as the case of the “The Hunter's Son” demonstrates. At the same time, the state shared the folklorists’ lingering apprehension about the diversity and heterogeneity of collected materials and the threat they might pose to the myth of national homogeneity.Footnote ⁵⁰

Established in 1935, the Language Academy's main objective was to coin modern technical terms in Persian; a second objective was to “purify” Persian of “foreign” accretions.Footnote ⁵¹ Among the twelve duties of the Language Academy articulated in its constitution was the collection of folklore and proverbs in Persian regional dialects.Footnote ⁵² This betrayed a certain utilitarian logic: local culture was cast as a repository of “authentic” Persian words that could be redeployed in the service of reforming and “modernizing” Persian. Ahmad Kasravi, dissatisfied with the Language Academy's progress in this respect, reiterated the potential of dialects as a reservoir of “pure” Persian in a letter to the statesman Mahmud Jam: “In studying Pahlavi and [Persian] dialects [nīmahzabān] I realized that one could use Persian words instead of foreign words.”Footnote ⁵³ Hasan Vusuq responded to Kasravi's call for the inclusion of such words by claiming that it would only lead to further linguistic incomprehensibility.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Language Academy's ultimate neglect of stories and poetry in Iranian dialects meant that it did not become a major institutional channel for the state's appropriation of folklore.

THE ORGANIZATION FOR PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

Far more important to the state project of appropriating folklore was the Organization for Public Instruction, a late Pahlavi cultural institution modeled on contemporary European fascist propaganda organizations that had a similar goal of “enlightening” the masses.Footnote ⁵⁵ It produced publications that attempted to distinguish between “good” folklore and legends and “bad” superstitions beyond the pale of modern life.

One such publication, a lengthy speech by Rizazadah Shafaq, a university professor of history and literature, tackled the issue of “superstition” directly.Footnote ⁵⁶ The speech, provocatively titled “Mubarazah ba Khurafat” (The Struggle against Superstition), expressed the desire of Iranian nationalists to define modernity in relation to its “dark Other.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Superstition, in this discourse, was connected to concepts such as popular culture, magic, and religion in opposition to science, modernity, and rationality.Footnote ⁵⁸ In discussing literature, language, and history in their relation to superstition, Shafaq stressed the difference between the “real” and the “imaginary” or “mythical.” His distinction between literature and superstition hinged on reception: the medieval Persian epic the Shahnamah was great literature so long as it was understood as legend; if it was received as historical fact, then it became superstition.Footnote ⁵⁹

Shafaq was also suspicious of Iranian nationalists who created folk etymologies or glorified pre-Islamic Iranian legends, often with anti-Islamic implications.Footnote ⁶⁰ Like Hidayat, Shafaq was concerned with mapping popular culture as either authentic or superstitious; unlike the former, however, he did not appeal to the xenophobic logic of purity and pollution to do so. Taking a less dichotomous view of Iranian and Semitic religions than Hidayat had, Shafaq contrasted “true” religions—Zoroastrianism and Islam—with “false” superstitions. According to Shafaq, religion and superstition were locked in an epic battle: Zoroastrianism was the world's first rational and philosophical religion, as its goal was to oppose superstition, while Islam, through the Prophet Muhammad, engaged in a similar struggle against “Jewish, Christian and Arab superstitions.”Footnote ⁶¹ In light of this purportedly original antisuperstitious impulse of Zoroastrianism and Islam, Shafaq believed certain clerics in both religions were guilty of violating the precepts of their own religions by spreading ignorance among the masses.Footnote ⁶² He called on Iranians to continue the antisuperstitious mission of the Prophet Muhammad by insisting on rationalist and scientific readings of the Qurʾan, which, for example, required denying the existence of jinn as ghostlike spirits.Footnote ⁶³ Shafaq therefore proposed that “men of religion” (ahl-i dīn) be re-educated to understand that “the reality of religion is not superstition.”Footnote ⁶⁴

In a European context, Steve Smith has pointed to the transformation of the concept of “superstition” from a pre-Enlightenment category describing “bad religion,” namely, the “impure or excessive” or the “manipulation of occult—usually, demonic—powers,” to an Enlightenment understanding of superstition as “bad science.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In Iran, Shafaq attempted to reconcile “authentic” religion with modern science by categorizing superstition as simultaneously “bad religion” and “bad science.” He also proposed “solutions” to the “problem” of superstition that could be implemented through institutional channels such as schools and public health regimes. For example, he called on the Ministry of Education to produce films exposing the absurdity of superstitious beliefs.Footnote ⁶⁶ Shafaq blamed the demographic decline of the Iranian population in part on folk medicine and beliefs that led to unnecessary deaths.Footnote ⁶⁷ According to him, these deaths could be prevented through municipal public health regimes and the spread of modern medical knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁸ Such sentiments echoed those of modern Iranian health officials who cast popular medical practices, beliefs, and rituals as superstition.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Organization for Public Instruction's activities went beyond publishing speeches on superstition and folklore; by the late 1930s, it had become the main institution responsible for organizing radio programming in anticipation of Iranian radio's inauguration in April 1940. The organization established a commission to plan radio news and economic reports, Western and Persian music broadcasts, and cultural programs intended for “public enlightenment.”

The mobilization of individuals in the provinces to collect oral children's tales occurred alongside these institutional and technological developments. Through the Iranian Music Administration (Idarah-i Musiqi-yi Iran), Hidayat requested that people in the provinces submit local legends (afsānahha).Footnote ⁷⁰ In the closing years of the 1930s, Fazlullah Muhtadi-Subhi, who had been working for the Advanced Institute of Music (Hunaristan-i ʿAli-yi Musiqi), began broadcasting his successful children's story program.Footnote ⁷¹ As a technological medium, radio differed substantially from print when it came to orally circulating tales—it preserved the orality of conventional storytelling but eliminated its face to face and dialogical components. There was still a strong element of interaction and dialogue, however, because letters sent by listeners who collected popular stories in their particular region were sometimes read over the airwaves. If, as Benedict Anderson has suggested, print culture created the potential for the simultaneous reading of newspapers and thus for imagining the nation, radio produced a similar feeling of simultaneity through the broadcast of supposedly “national” tales.Footnote ⁷²

Hidayat and Subhi employed a comparative method that stressed the similarities of stories across provincial boundaries in order to prove their truly “national” character. For instance, Hidayat believed popular stories throughout Iran were repeated “with only minor variations,” citing three manuscripts in his possession that all included the story “Davidam u Davidam” (I Ran and Ran).Footnote ⁷³ He claimed that such stories were “the same” (yik jur) whether told in Tehran, Kashan, Isfahan, Yazd, Abadan, Kirmanshah, Ahvaz, Simnan, Saqqiz, Qazvin, or Shahi.Footnote ⁷⁴ Muhtadi-Subhi would eventually publish the stories that he had collected for broadcast on his radio program.Footnote ⁷⁵ Like Hidayat, he stressed the similarities of popular stories collected across provincial borders—such as the popular tale “Yiki Bud Yiki Nabud” (Once Upon a Time), as it was found in Tehran, Isfahan, Najafabad, Shiraz, Ahvaz, Simnan, Damghan, Kashan, and other towns—thus impressing upon his readers their truly national character.Footnote ⁷⁶ Muhtadi-Subhi's quest for mapping similar stories was not limited to Iran: for example, he found variants of the story “Buz-i Zangulah bih Pah” (The Hawk-belled Footed Billy Goat) in published collections of stories from other “Aryan” regions such as Tajikistan, Afghanistan, India, Armenia, and Samarqand.Footnote ⁷⁷

Through the use of a comparative method, Muhtadi-Subhi thus analyzed regional variants of the same story to reinforce the “authentically” homogenous essence of the nation across provincial boundaries. When making comparisons across national borders, he emphasized parallels with “Aryan” tales while often ignoring similarities with “non-Aryan” tales found in Turkey and neighboring Arab countries such as Iraq.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM

Museums promote certain assumptions about the relationship between space and time: walking through a museum is meant to simulate the experience of walking backward through time in order to visit objects out of sync with the modern. Zeynep Kezer has argued that the Turkish Ethnography Museum, built in the 1930s, served as a “didactic space” in which living “local religious allegiances,” such as adherence to Sufi orders, were represented as obsolete through the exhibition of their material objects. According to Kezer, the ethnography museum's preservation of religious objects—those associated with shrines, lodges, and mausoleums—rendered them as relics of Turkey's past and therefore as out of sync with its present march toward “modern” civilization. The Turkish Ethnography Museum also served as a medium of cultural integration: items associated with diverse experiences, locations, and regions within Turkey were arranged in the same physical space in a nationalist effort to gloss over differences and contradictions that might challenge the myth of homogeneity.Footnote ⁷⁸ Both functions of the Turkish Ethnography Museum posited by Kezer—associating certain objects irreversibly with the past and erasing regional diversity—were also evident in the Iranian Ethnography Museum (Muzah-i Mardumshinasi).Footnote ⁷⁹ Given Riza Shah's 1934 visit to Turkey, during which he toured the ethnography museum, it is quite possible that he was inspired by Turkey's example.Footnote ⁸⁰

The creation of such cultural institutions was often meant to demonstrate civilizational equivalence to Europe.Footnote ⁸¹ In countries that experienced direct colonial rule, anthropology and ethnography were intertwined with the colonialist project. For many parts of the colonized world, the history of anthropology and ethnography was thus seen as part and parcel of European colonial knowledge production concerning the colonized Other.Footnote ⁸² This was not the case, however, with countries like Iran and Turkey, which did not experience direct colonial rule; the institutional foundation of anthropology and ethnography in these countries instead served nationalist projects. By establishing an ethnographic museum, the Iranian state hoped to demonstrate that, like its European counterparts, it was capable of representing its “internal” Other.Footnote ⁸³

Although the Society for National Heritage (Anjuman-i Asar-i Milli) had been instrumental in preserving Iranian monuments and creating national museums since its founding in 1921, the impetus for an ethnographic museum came later.Footnote ⁸⁴ According to Minister of Education ʿAli Asghar Hikmat, the idea came to him during his visit to Europe from 1931 to 1933, where he had a chance to observe European ethnographic museums. Feeling a sense of shame that Iranians had neglected to study its diverse peoples, including the Baluch and the Turkmen, Hikmat approached Dr. Wilhelm Hass, a German employee of the Iranian Ministry of Education, for advice on how to establish an ethnographic museum in Iran.Footnote ⁸⁵

Hikmat enlisted Hass as someone who could externally validate Iranian civilizational claims. During the course of a public speech at a conference dedicated to the establishment of an ethnographic museum in 1936, Hass made concrete suggestions for the development of anthropological and race studies and for the methods of gathering the required materials for a museum.Footnote ⁸⁶ Beyond offering his technical expertise, he framed the emergence of Iranian ethnography as a means of asserting Iran's right to national independence:

Hass' Europeanness functioned as a means of external scholarly authentication of nationalist claims that Iran was an independent civilization. Unlike in many colonial contexts where ethnographic studies could serve as the handmaiden of an occupying European force, in a politically independent Iran Europeans could be brought in to buttress the case for civilizational equivalence.

Fazlullah Haqiq, in a speech at the same conference, echoed Hass' sentiments by claiming that ethnography in Iran was a means of joining European circles of “learning and civilization,” predicting that “just as today Paris is one of the great centers of ethnography, the city of Tehran will soon also have an ethnography museum.”Footnote ⁸⁸ He praised the Iranian Ministry of Education for paying greater attention to ethnography in this “august age” (ʿaṣr-i humāyūn) and for demonstrating how the “racially Aryan and civilized people of this country . . . have sought to spread learning and civilization to various corners of the world.”Footnote ⁸⁹

If Hass and Haqiq intended to demonstrate the civilizational import of the Iranian Ethnographic Museum, the historian Rashid Yasami emphasized the value of popular culture over book learning and archeological sites. Betraying a certain romanticization of the masses, he claimed that “the learning of the peoples” (maʿārif-i aqvām) was not confined to stone inscriptions of ancient kings or the “deceptions” of the Egyptian and Babylonian priests. Instead, he viewed “the hearts of contemporary people” as historical sources on par with “ancient monuments” (āsār-i qadīm) in their ability to illuminate the past.Footnote ⁹⁰ In making a case for such equivalency, Yasami assumed the masses were merely vessels for historical knowledge rather than agents capable of adapting such knowledge according to their changing contexts. He also subscribed to the idea that the folk were embodiments of antiquity, living monuments from a distant past.Footnote ⁹¹ Although as a historian, he turned conventional textual wisdom on its head by entertaining the possibility that “legends are more accurate than many recorded histories,” he ignored the backdrop of violence, force, and discipline involved in settling, educating, and conscripting tribes and peasants into modern state institutions during the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁹²

While Yasami treated the masses as living historical sources, the statesman Muhammad ʿAli Furughi was more interested in ethnography as a mode of understanding societal evolution.Footnote ⁹³ In a talk entitled “What is Ethnography?” Furughi defined ethnography as a project of charting “the changes, development, and progress of human societies”—a task he saw as paralleling Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.Footnote ⁹⁴ For instance, he believed that “the learning of the masses,” as expressed in “songs, stories, [and] superstitions,” became increasingly “elevated and specialized learning” (maʿārif-i ʿālīyah va khāṣṣah) and finally took “the form of science, philosophy, literature, and refined poetry, music, painting, stonemasonry, and architecture.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Furughi had an ambivalent attitude toward the racial dimension of ethnographic studies, arguing that there were “differences between the races of men” but conceding that “unfortunately prejudices and political considerations” had compromised “scientific research and neutrality.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Furughi's interest in mapping out the evolutionary stages of society was not merely an intellectual exercise; he believed it had practical application in the realm of statecraft. Like Shafaq, Furughi distinguished authentic and useful popular customs and mores from “superstitious” and “harmful” ones. He believed that “leaders and politicians of every nation can benefit greatly from ethnography” because it could help determine which “customs, rituals, practices, morals, beliefs, and conditions are beneficial and harmful among each people.” He went even further in claiming that ethnography could not only diagnose social problems but also provide solutions for them, because through it the government would know “which customs should be strengthened and which should be eliminated” and gain insight into how “the masses and the nation could be pulled towards progress and development in the most efficient manner.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Furughi's understanding of ethnography's function highlighted its utility: through it, politicians could gain a blueprint for “pulling” the masses toward progress by promoting “beneficial” elements within popular culture while destroying the “harmful” ones. The state's ambivalence about ethnography was therefore rooted in its desire to celebrate the masses while simultaneously reforming them. Furughi's approach to ethnography as useful state knowledge rested on developmentalist narratives that claimed the state could transform the “common man” into a docile body capable of being governed.Footnote ⁹⁸

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF DASHT-I GURGAN: ʿABBAS SHAWQI AND THE TURKMEN

Although the ethnographic museum provided a space for the collection and display of ethnographic materials, very few Iranians appear to have produced scholarly ethnographies during the interwar period. The absence of formal ethnographies might have been a function of the lack of Iranian institutions of higher learning capable of training anthropologists in these years. The one clear exception was ʿAbbas Shawqi's 1935 ethnography of the Turkmen, a generally nomadic population living in the northeastern region of Iran, Dasht-i Gurgan. Shawqi's approach to regional diversity, tribal identity, and modernization mirrored those of the Organization of Public Instruction and the Ethnographic Museum.

Shawqi's ethnography dealt directly with two key challenges that the existence of Turkmen posed to Iranian nationalism. First, the Turkmen, as their name suggests, were “Turkic” and therefore could not easily be categorized as “ethnically” Iranian. Inscribing the Turkmen with an Iranian pedigree would require historical, linguistic, and archeological evidence. Second, the Turkmen were a tribal population that was seen as a potential source of opposition to the centralizing efforts of the state. Much of the early Pahlavi state's political and cultural reforms attempted to incorporate tribes into the nationalist narrative. An ethnographic study of segments of the population that had retained a great deal of independence under the previous Qajar dynasty therefore posed significant problems. Given these two glaring sources of potential incongruity with a homogeneous nationalist narrative, how did Shawqi devise strategies to incorporate the Turkmen into a national frame?

Through the course of his ethnography, Shawqi sought philological, ethnic, and archeological evidence to Iranianize the Turkmen. He denied their Turkish ethnicity by appealing to philology: because Turkmen literally meant “Turk-like,” he suggested they were not actually Turks but merely resembled them.Footnote ⁹⁹ Shawqi pointed to the use of Persian by Dasht-i Gurgan's ʿulamaʾ, who were trained in the madrasas of the predominantly Persian-speaking city of Bukhara, as further evidence of Turkmen Iranian-ness.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In so doing, he conflated speaking Persian with being Iranian. The widespread use of Russian in Dasht-i Gurgan was cast as an inauthentic remnant of Russian imperial domination in the area prior to the rise of Riza Shah.Footnote ¹⁰¹ While using linguistic and ethnic arguments to Iranianize the Turkmen, Shawqi employed archeological evidence to demonstrate that Dasht-i Gurgan was an integral part of the Iranian geo-body.Footnote ¹⁰² Invoking pre-Islamic Iranian history, he described how the Sasanian shah Firuz constructed a wall to keep out the Hephtalites, a central Asian and presumably Turkic people who repeatedly attacked Iran and Rum. He likewise cited the castle of Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar, the founder of the Qajar dynasty, as proof of Iranian imperial presence in the region throughout history.Footnote ¹⁰³

Beyond his effort to Iranianize the Turkmen, Shawqi wanted to demonstrate how they could be transformed through the Pahlavi reformist program. Like many other Iranian authors engaged in folklore studies and ethnography, Shawqi held simultaneously romantic and positivist views of the objects of his study. Celebrating the Turkmen as noble savages, he spoke glowingly of their poetry, stating that even among “barbarous” and “nomadic” peoples poetry was a sign of civilization.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His overall assessment was clearly negative: he described Turkmen as rude, lacking in hospitality, and generally unwilling to follow the “principles of good manners and respect” (rusūm-i ādāb va iḥtirām).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ He praised female Turkmen as industrious but primarily as a way to contrast them with male Turkmen, whom he characterized as lazy.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

This emphasis on the supposed laziness, crudeness, and inhospitality of the Turkmen, however, did not entail assumptions of their static and eternal nature. Shawqi believed the Turkmen could be and were being reformed through the Pahlavi state's modernizing projects. In fact, the author divided his narrative of Turkmen history into events occurring before and after the rise of Riza Khan in 1921. In a section entitled “Diruz-Imruz” (Yesterday-Today), he highlighted changes in the region since the start of the Pahlavi era as marking a pivotal moment in the history of Iran more generally.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He described Riza Shah in near messianic terms: “All people were waiting for God to show some mercy and give a special mission to a savior-angel [firishtah-yi nijātī] for the end of this black and terrible century [i.e., the 13th century in the Iranian solar calendar].”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Through his division of time by the rise of Riza Shah, Shawqi sought to demonstrate how the state fundamentally transformed the territory from a backwater to a modern province. On the most basic level, he praised the state for having restored order after a lengthy period of pillage, chaos, and the kidnapping of women. According to him, the state also introduced children's schools, railroad stations, customhouses, modern agricultural knowledge and institutions, and improved commerce, all visible and tangible effects of its reformist agenda.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Shawqi's ethnography sought to preserve knowledge of the Turkmen but ultimately for the purpose of laying bare their “backward” dimensions that would have to be eliminated. The desired death of these dimensions required developmentalist projects that ironically became occasions for the appreciation of the “beauty” of previously “unruly” Iranian tribes.