The city of knowledge: History and culture in contemporary Shiraz.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the production and reception of historical knowledge in contemporary Shiraz, Iran. I consider historical knowledge as the set of diverse practices and discourses through which the past is interpreted---from book writing and publishing to monument restorations and conferences as well as conversations and gestures. I analyze this selective process of interpretation in several contexts. I describe the activities of state, municipal and private institutions which administer culture in Shiraz today and show how they construct interpretations of the pre-Islamic and poetic past in relation to the changing discursive space instituted with the revolution of 1979. I discuss conversations between a retired high school teacher and me on the cultural history of Shiraz, focusing on the allusions and elusions through which this history was being interpreted. I analyze two local histories of Shiraz from the 1950s and their reception in the present highlighting how the rhetorical possibilities of different genres frame narratives differently and how available historiography perceived as not aptly representing the past is often substituted by poetry which is the dominant discourse of the city. In the conclusions I discuss practices around historical knowledge in Shiraz as working through several interpretative modalities which structure the interpretability of the past in contemporary Shiraz as a contested field of different positions as well as a site for a relentless process of mediation which smoothes the edges in order to put the past accordance with the entailments of the present. The last pages of the dissertation are devoted to a discussion of this latter interpretative modality through a genealogy of the category of dissimulation. The strategic deferral of truth opens spaces for alternative, albeit implicit, interpretations of history while also reinforcing dominant historicism. The work of dissimulation is, however, often halted by fragments of the past, like the interpretations of the Achaemenid empire or the events around 1953 which leap forward disrupting mediating practices. Seen from this perspective, historiography today in Iran is a crucial field for understanding the tensions and accommodations that traverse the country more than twenty years after the revolution.