In May 2017, BBC Persian posted a short video message on its Instagram feed that was submitted by a young Iranian viewer. This was Milad, a postsecondary student and resident of Qom, Iran. He outlines his “expectations of the presidential candidate” that he voted for, and calls upon this candidate to advance social and cultural opportunities “for people like me.” He complains that recreational activities (sargarmī) in Qom—a “religious city,” he points out—are limited for youth. The video ends on a rather despondent note as he suggests that actually realizing these expectations will probably prove costly for the candidate.
Shahram Khosravi's Precarious Lives is an anthropological exploration of the circumstances and lived experiences that underpin such appeals. The voices of its interlocutors strike many of the same chords that Milad does. In this regard, Precarious Lives may be read as an extension of Khosravi's earlier monograph on middle-class Iranian youth in Tehran (Young and Defiant in Tehran [Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008]). This time around, however, we are presented with a wider analytic lens: describing forms of precarity among, for example, the working class and urban poor, while also placing these experiences beyond Tehran. As a result, the chapters read more like progressive variations on this theme, precarity, rather than a sustained study of a particular locale or set of social practices.
Khosravi clarifies the scope of “precarity” early on as “a defining feature of society in general” (p. 4). The introduction takes care to foreground the various ways in which the experiential contents of this concept are unpacked in the chapters that follow. These include vulnerability, social exclusion, a sense of being stuck in an abortive present, and a lack of confidence in the future. Tracking closely to this notion is that of “hope,” which is explored as both a lingering aspiration for a better life and a shared approach or “method” to this end (p. 14).
Complementing this notion of precarity and its role as an organizing theme of the book are those of “youth” (pp. 16–17) and “citizenship” (pp. 15–16, 19). Khosravi extends “youth” beyond its demographic connotations to dwell on shared perceptions and experiences of delayed adulthood. We regularly hear from unemployed but educationally accomplished thirty-something-year-olds living with their parents. Chapter 2 does critical work here as it historicizes this notion of youth in the context of postrevolution Iran. Enter the “1360 Generation”: a local idiom referring to Iranians who were born in the first couple of decades following the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Chapter 3 extends this discursive analysis by examining official policies and structural arrangements that have so beset this generation with frustrations as to warrant its public characterization as jaded (especially in popular discourse) or a potential source of moral pollution (especially in official discourse). By “citizenship” Khosravi means the agentive ways in which youth either subvert such policies and arrangements in their everyday lives, or overtly rebel against them. Chapters 4 and 5 give ethnographically rich accounts of such citizenship in public space. In the “streets,” we find young Iranians using coffee shops to avoid normative restrictions on socializing between genders (pp. 144–53), and engaging in tournaments of masculinity through automotive arts such as drifting and joyriding (pp. 155–65).
Khosravi is keen on comparative analysis. We are repeatedly offered parallels with recent scholarship on various social practices (e.g., graffiti) along with more encompassing concepts such as precarity and the life worlds of youth in the region. Rather than reproduce the work of his contemporaries as grist for his mill, in other words, he offers his analysis as more of an occasion for conversation.. I found this refreshing.
Precarious Lives also succeeds in weaving together multiple strands of analysis, theoretical frames, and myriad sources of data (e.g., statistics, popular entertainment, legal proceedings, life narratives, etc.) into a “big picture” analysis of everyday life among Iranian youth. Generality and coherency, the perennial odd couple of anthropological monographs, seem almost reconciled.
Another major success of this book is the sustained tension between oppression and resistance. I rarely lost sight of the stakes involved in “citizenship” and “hope.” This is not a work that diminishes the fact that the Islamic Republic—despite the intensity of political competition among elites and the widespread participation of people in this competition—remains a violent dictatorship in many ways. But neither does it reduce such dictatorship to a caricature. Acts of citizenship, here, do not neatly fall outside of the state but come across as affordances within its contradictions (e.g., youth culture is implicated in neoliberal policies that promote its commodification, and the Green Movement coalesced around a vetted candidate in the national elections). For all of these reasons, this work is a major contribution to the anthropology of contemporary Iran.
Like any ambitious work, Precarious Lives has its share of shortcomings as well. There is the matter of floating interlocutors and theorists. Much like Milad's message on Instagram, the voices of Reza (p. 59), Behzad (p. 95), and Bahram (p. 157), among many others, appear abruptly to punctuate a point and then recede into the background. We learn little more about them beyond their opinion on an issue, and the fact that they live with their parents. Theorists are also limited to casual appearances. It was not uncommon, for example, to find the likes of Mikhail Bakhtin, Hanna Arendt, and Émile Durkheim briefly referenced on the same page (p. 128), again, to punctuate a point. I would have preferred that Khosravi use his ethnographic data for theoretical critique so as to highlight and expand the limits of the theoretical heritage from which he draws.
Perhaps more significant are the theoretical blind spots relating to notions of citizenship, and even the theme of hope itself. The voices and practices that inform assessments of citizenship skew toward counterhegemony. This is in keeping with a lingering tendency in the social sciences to regard “agency” primarily in distinction to “structure,” thereby rendering it an analogue to resistance. This reading of agency has been criticized in anthropology for eliding the everyday deliberations and arts of self-making that are dedicated to inhabiting social norms, or even extending hegemony. Are participants in progovernment public demonstrations really simply there either “by force or by promise of reward” (p. 131)? This may explain the conspicuous absence of youth, in this text, who actively participate in institutions and rituals identified with the state (e.g., the Baseej, a paramilitary and social organization). Should we consider them less agentive for doing so? In a similar vein, hope almost exclusively appears as the moral substance of agency-as-resistance rather than an instrument of hegemony itself. This is despite the fact that Khosravi acknowledges its potential as such (p. 14), even noting its use in government discourse (for instance, Rouhani's campaign branding itself as a “government of hope”).
This potential in hope has been receiving some attention as of late. It bears asking: in what ways might the projects or practices that manifest hope for frustrated Iranian youth actually function as cruel optimism? This is a condition that Lauren Berlant (Cruel Optimism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011]) recently described to inhere “when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (p. 1). It is one way to interpret why in Precarious Lives Reza justifies voting, for example, by rhetorically asking, “What is the alternative?” (p. 59). It may also clue us in on why Milad wonders aloud about the limits of his expectations. Precarious Lives affords us an opportunity to explore hope in this light as well. I hope we take it.
