Since Iran's 1979 Revolution, the imperative to create and protect the inner purity of family and nation in the face of outside spiritual corruption has been a driving force in national politics. Through extensive fieldwork, Rose Wellman examines how Basiji families, as members of Iran's voluntary paramilitary organization, are encountering, enacting, and challenging this imperative. Her ethnography reveals how families and state elites are employing blood, food, and prayer in commemorations for martyrs in Islamic national rituals to create citizens who embody familial piety, purity, and closeness to God. Feeding Iran provides a rare and humanistic account of religion and family life in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic that examines how home life and everyday piety are linked to state power.
Rose Wellman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
"Rose Wellman’s exemplary study of everyday life in provincial Iran breathes new life into the perennially topical question of the sources of emotional resonance and moral legitimacy of kinship, religion, and the nation. The result is a luminous anthropological work that clarifies the mutual resonance and naturalizing potential resting between spaces of intimacy and state power."––Janet Carsten, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
"This is a vivid, engaging, and evocative ethnography of the cultural life of an inaccessible community, the Basiji families of Iran—people associated with institutional support of the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 and the Islamic Republic as a kind of paramilitary force. Because they have been associated with political and religious extremism, they have not been taken seriously as a living community by many both inside and outside of Iran. Wellman humanizes them and provides a fascinating account of their rich symbolic and interpersonal lives."––William O. Beeman, author of The Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other
"Conducting anthropological research in Iran these days presents great challenges; such an endeavor is taken on only by the strong-hearted and intrepid. Rose Wellman, among only a few, has accomplished an even greater task: she has gained the trust of Iranian regime supporters and helped us to better understand them and appreciate their reasons."––Mary Elaine Hegland, author of Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village
262 pp.6 x 9Illus: 17 b/w illustrations
9780520376878$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jun 2021