Tracing the development of an inclusive political subjectivity through decades of political upheaval leading up to and since the revolution, Iranian society has been regularly wracked by intense political upheavals that challenge state authority and the status quo of established powers and institutions. Most of these protest movements have seemed to fail and have often been followed by a period of apparent quietism. Yet by consistently expanding the participatory claims of an active citizenry, these movements have furthered the democratic potentials of Iranian society. Reconsidering the achievements of the 1999 university protests, the women’s movement (in both its secular and Islamist forms), the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022–2023 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this chapter argues that Iranians have been actively creating themselves and recognizing each other as fully developed citizens. Drawing on the accounts of women of different generations involved in separate movements and protests, this chapter considers evolving changes in consciousness and practices as women struggle for full acceptance and equal participation as Iranian citizens.

The experience of being tied up in Tehran while eating tangerines, and what it signifies as narrative, metaphor, and theoretical intervention. The chapter combines a personal story about a home invasion with an analysis of social and property relations in the space of the local neighborhood. The author establishes her identity as an arous farangi (a “foreign bride”), meaning both an insider and an outsider in the Iranian cultural community. In parallel, analysis of the history of the burgled house and the changing geography of its residential neighborhood reveals the complex transformations in Iranian class positions and urban spatial organization since the revolution. Whether tragic or absurd, the experience of being tied up in Tehran sets the narrative and interpretive paradigm for the rest of the book.

Chapter 5 explores the intensification of cereal cultivation with population growth, land reclamation, and expansion of the labor force in reclaimed lands. In this chapter, I argue that climate change, the transition from a humid climate to a dry one and a decrease in climatic variability due to the end of the Little Ice Age, accompanied by the resettlement of immigrants and refugees, facilitated the reclamation of coastal swamps, and promoted the expansion of grain cultivation.

Death, home, housing, and changes in Iranian identity through the materiality of space and the geography of social relations. Generational change is reflected in architecture, household organization, property values, and historical memory. The modern city and recent speculative residential building developments offer opportunities for more privacy, shiny surfaces, and dedicated space for nuclear families. But the loss of more integrated mixed-class neighborhoods and extended family residential spaces puts different pressures on individuals and the shared urban fabric. One family’s generational and spatial transitions symbolize the changes in Tehran’s social and architectural possibilities.

Chapter 7 highlights the profound impact fig and grape growing across Western Anatolia had on the region’s human and natural landscape.

Chapter 1 focuses on the wide disparity in overall social and economic conditions and ecological disturbances that hindered Izmir’s promising economic prospects and retarded its integration with the countryside before the mid-nineteenth century. In this chapter, I discuss a series of natural and human-made disasters and catastrophes, such as earthquakes, fires, epidemics, and problems and obstacles, and how Western Anatolia’s urban and rural residents coped with them.

Consumer items and gendered identities on display and in transition, existing materially and symbolically within a matrix of relations of production and desire. The practical frustrations and self-confirming identity choices of local shopping lead to consideration of twentieth-century consumer society’s essentialization of individual gender identities despite apparent freedoms and autonomy of choice. Marx’s analysis of the reification of the object and the fetishization of the commodity informs public displays of youth culture: masculine, feminine, and trans. Modern young women and men shape their gendered public personas through the knowing appropriation of brands as identity performance, yet risk repression by the state, society, and family. Whether dancing too exclusively to Pharrell Williams’ Happy, or performing gender identity too essentially through transsexual identification, Iranian youth encounter the limits of branded identity even as they claim the freedoms apparently promised by the social market. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s positing of gender as a choice between two doors, the question of what is behind the doors might matter more than deciding between them.

This chapter explores the sacral aspects of Achaemenid Persian kingship. It attempts to precisely illuminate the ruler’s relationship with the divine and to demonstrate that the assumption of priestly prerogatives was an important aspect of his office. To better appreciate the political function of religion, this study provides cultural and historical contexts for the royal appropriation of sacral attributes. It further contributes to the recent field of study regarding a possible soteriological dimension to Achaemenid ideology by assessing and synthesising new and previously cited evidence for the existence of such an element, as well as its possible applications.