Shahram Khosravi's Ethnographies of Precarious Lives in Iran: The Ayatollahs' State Merges into Global Neoliberalism

Not about human rights per se, Khosravi's book demonstrates, in its own distinctive ways, the irrelevance of cultural relativism in the context of the contemporary nation-state. His explorations capture the crosscurrents of the authoritarian state, the working poor, middle and upper class families, and their young sons and daughters. He interlaces his ethnographies with theoretical discourses associated with intellectual luminaries such as Ernst Bloch, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Rancière, to name a few. Thus informed, his ethnographical hermeneutics coalesces the Shiite Ayatollahs' invention of the vice-regency of the Islamic Jurist (velayat-e faqih) with global neoliberalism, setting up the context for Iranian precarities across classes and genders. Here, I focus on two interconnected "processes" he explains in details: The working poor and a subcategory among them, vilified as "thugs and ruffians" and in more details, the middle class youth "caught in a position of betwixt and between" the state and the family.