We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 July 2010
I thank Professor Nikki R. Keddie for her constructive critique and am using this opportunity to clarify a few points. First, let me reiterate that I do not consider statist approaches to be “wrong,” but “one-sided,” and that I am not calling for their disposal but for “trying out new sources and perspectives then fusing them with state-centered perspectives into a broader panorama of Pahlavi Iran” (pp. 38–39). I see neither “sins” nor “an ongoing struggle between ‘statists’ and ‘antistatists.’” Such language would undercut a productive debate now and disregard the fact that in the long run—as some excesses of the cultural turn in the 1980s and many historians' subsequent search for new historiographic syntheses demonstrate—the pendulum always swings back.
1 Paidar, Parvin, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
2 Recent studies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe may serve as useful inspirations; see my article (p. 53ff.) and Jarausch, Konrad, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999)Google Scholar.
3 A pioneer of the latter is Ladjevardi, Habib, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
4 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adelkhah, Fariba, “Économie morale du pèlerinage et société civile en Iran: les voyages réligieux, commerciaux, et touristiques à Damas,” Politix 20 (2007): 39–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adelkhah, Fariba and Olszewska, Zuzanna, “The Iranian Afghans,” Iranian Studies 40 (2007): 137–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Keddie, Nikki R., Sayyid Jamāl ad-Din “al-Afghāni”: A Political Biography (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1972)Google Scholar.
