A young woman from a low-income family in urban Sari can't afford the cosmetic rhinoplasty she desires to achieve the reputation befitting of her much wealthier friends. When her mother takes a loan to build a house in their village, she refuses her share of the property and asks for cash to cover the plastic surgery instead. Analysts of Iran are too eager to frame stories like this in terms of the failures of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary promise and the youth's defiance in the face of state ideological overreach. Likewise, for many Iranians of the middle and upper-class, such seemingly absonant behaviors of the poor are understood as inevitable “contradictions” in a state that imposes moral strictures ostensibly misaligned with the desires and values of its citizens. In Coming of Age in Iran, Manata Hashemi offers a welcome, nuanced corrective to such explanations, eloquently charting the moral economy animating the behaviors of poor urban youth as they vie for status-recognition and aspire to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. As Hashemi shows, far from resisting social norms, these youth willingly conform with social expectations of propriety to strategically improve their lot in life in a post-war environment that has made the middle-class lifestyle ever more tantalizing.
This book is the product of multiple years of ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2019 in Tehran and Sari (in northern Iran) and informal interviews with forty-four low-income youth. Hashemi identifies the discursive and behavioral patterns in her interlocutors’ everyday practices, showing that when mustering the essential wealth for class mobility is out of reach, the youth, whom she calls “face-savers,” opt for keeping up appearances or preserving “face” (aberu) according to the rules of what she calls the “face-system.”
Face-savers participate in a “face-game” where the rules not only concern appearances and the symbolic markers of wealth, but also include being perceived as upholding the moral qualities of hard work, self-sufficiency, and purity. Such “face-work” in the search for dignity can engender “accentuated conformism” like the young woman above's drastic attempts at surgically acquiring the right appearance. But far from being last-ditch efforts at accruing temporary social capital, Hashemi convincingly argues that compliance with rules of the face-system are often pathways to inhabiting middle-class spaces, networking, securing better jobs and marriage prospects, and thereby making incremental micro-capital gains that bring them one step closer to achieving their economic and lifestyle goals, without necessarily lifting them from poverty.
One of the significant contributions of Hashemi's sociological analysis is her positioning of the everyday actions, aspirations, and moral reasoning of low-income urban youth within the context of important political-economic and social transformations in the last forty-odd years since the Islamic Revolution. In doing so, she demonstrates that contrary to common assumptions about the exclusion of poor youth and their resistance to state authority, the aspirations of low-income urban youth are in fact productively constituted vis-a-vis the state in multiple ways.
Building on the previous scholarship of Iran scholars such as Zuzanna Olszewska, Kevan Harris, Kaveh Ehsani, and Asef Bayat, Hashemi demonstrates that the persistence of wartime developmentalist policies and pro-poor state measures, such as subsidizing energy and healthcare, have not only empowered the poor and raised their expectations, but have also diminished strict spatial segregation along class lines. This has occurred less in locations of residence than in educational and recreational spaces like universities, malls, and cafes where low-income youth can compete for attention with their more affluent peers. Free public education, the proliferation of programs aimed at advancing technological literacy among the poor, and the construction of accessible and inexpensive transportation infrastructure between the poor peripheral and southern parts of urban cities and the more affluent central and northern sections have facilitated poor youths’ access to the same spaces, communities, and networks as those from upper socio-economic classes. This desegregation of urban space has made it possible for the youth to share aesthetic conventions and material desires across class lines. As Hashemi shows, the norms with which face-savers comply are also inspired by images disseminated by the state since the economic liberalization policies of the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the polished and glamorous images of state television shows and state-sponsored advertisements and billboards. Coming of Age in Iran shows that these models not only shape the desires and fantasies of low-income youth, but also structure the rules of the face-system, a “micro-system of stratification” that offers poor youth a path for “incrementally moving up the proverbial ladder” (p. 32).
One of the central arguments of this book is that young and poor Iranian face-savers are far from passive in conforming to the rules of the face-game. Instead, they are agents of their own socioeconomic mobility, however incremental and miniscule that may be (the usage of “game” perhaps alludes to the agentic and playful nature of their participation). To conceptually frame the analysis of her interlocutors’ decisions as at once docile and agentic, Hashemi turns to Saba Mahmood's theoretical critiques of liberal-feminist conceptions of agency as resistance to power and authority (p. 5, 54, 162, 172n14). But this application of Mahmood's framework is for the most part unconvincing. For Mahmood, agency has an internal relationship with docility: one becomes a pious subject through subjecting oneself to pious norms and pious practice. But Hashemi's interlocutors are calculating, means-end rational actors who perform docility to achieve social capital. The face-savers, that is, are agents who use docility for their own worldly ends.
The first four chapters of the book emphasize the importance of outward presentations of social compliance within one's social network, such that one can ostensibly claim victories at the face-game regardless of one's inner goodness. It is not until the final chapter of the book that Hashemi addresses how the repetitive compliance with the face-rules, in the struggle to live dignified lives, can also lead to the internalization of sanctioned codes of conduct (p. 156). With repeated work, some face-savers become hardworking, and with compliance to rules of chastity they may internalize its values. However, there is a significant difference between conforming to these moral codes of conduct and managing appearances through hyper-consumerism and expensive cosmetic surgeries to gain social capital and mobility. Subsuming moral virtue and consumerist appearance-management under a single rubric of agentic conformism glosses over the fact that these are entirely different social orientations that presume different models of selfhood, only one of which has parallels in the women's mosque movement.
Moreover, as Hashemi's rich and detailed descriptions indicate, the rules of social propriety espoused by certain state apparatuses are hegemonic among the local communities of Hashemi's interlocutors, such that the face-rules around family, chastity, and public etiquette are aligned with what many of the youth consider to be good, dignified conduct. What does not find its way into her analytic of the face-system, however, is how the face-rules are an amalgamation of standards and values that result from multiple coimbricating discursive formations. Some of these are the product of a revolutionary emphasis on community, sacrifice, and virtue, while others are oriented toward the neoliberal values of consumerism, entrepreneurship, and self-sufficiency. Attending to the multiplicity of discursive formations within which state policies and subjects are formed may have facilitated a more analytically coherent response to the tensions Hashemi identifies between “conformism” and “resistance,” “performance” and “reality.” It would also mitigate some of the generalizations of the face-system that border on culturalism by showing how these tensions play out differently among different youth groups or “subcultures” (p. 37).
Overall, Manata Hashemi's Coming of Age in Iran, is a rich book, rare in its attention to life outside the capital and the circles of the elite and middle class. It should be read by anthropologists and sociologists of Iran and the Middle East interested in the everyday lives and aspirations of poor youth. Hashemi's lucid writing lends itself well to reading by academics as well as educated lay readers, especially those looking for a fuller picture of contemporary Iran that makes sense of much that is often hastily explained through the tired lens of contradictory stereotypes.
