Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran: Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era by Pamela Karimi (review)

In Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran Pamela Karimi offers a history of Iranian modernity through a detailed and exquisitely rendered study of everyday living spaces and commodities. From cooling units to washing machines, visual artifacts and building facades to chairs and home economics pamphlets, Karimi allows domestic objects and the people who give them meaning to narrate the complex negotiations and intersections of secularism, religion, gender, class, and colonial encounter within the forces of modernization in Iran. Shifting our gaze from the big screen of political events to the intimate life of the home, Karimi affords an innovative look into how ordinary Iranian citizens have determined their own aspirations for and meanings of modernity, even as Western colonial influence and strong secularized or Islamized states sought to have the full say.

Unfolding chronologically from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, each chapter explores a facet of daily life inside the home to reveal transformations in the sociospatial boundaries of gendered relationships within Iranian families and society. Far from linear or teleological, however, the book paints a multilayered and complex portrait of Iranian modernity, where ideas of domestic progress were not simply imposed but also animated by those who designed, consumed, and even repurposed household spaces and objects. Chapter 1, "The Hovel, the Harem, and the Hybrid Furnishing," considers the end of the Qajar period, the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, when strict demarcations between women and men's spaces in the home began to blur and interior design recalibrated the gendered dimensions of home. By the early twentieth century educational regimes extended the focus on interior design to health and hygiene in the home.

For part of this chapter Karimi considers oleographs, photographically produced color lithographs made to resemble oil paintings and incorporated into the walls and ceilings of the homes of upper-class Iranians who nevertheless could not afford the paintings or tilework found in palaces. Karimi argues that in their encounter with Europeans, Iranian men exoticized Western femininity. By placing oleographs of European women into the structures of reception rooms, Iranian men could enter a space of fantasy, where the "docile European woman" provided a "realm away from mundane life" (36). While signifying aristocracy to Iranians, European and US guests considered the oleo-graphs "vile" and "cheap" (38). European and American women in particular considered Iranian women lacking in taste and proper attention to the home.

Karimi's framework and methodology in chapter 1 set the tone for the rest of the book. She emphasizes hybridity and fusion in architecture and design and contestation and negotiation in Western and Iranian social, economic, and cultural encounters. In the process, multiple social actors and phenomena become visible in shaping Iranian modernity. Chapter 3, "The Cold War and the Economies of Desire and Domesticity," and chapter 4, "Selling and Saving Piety in Modern Dwellings," most directly address Iranian politics. They demonstrate an increased emphasis on Westernization by the Pahlavi monarchy and rising class divisions in the mid-twentieth century. A growing leftist opposition included Shiite clerics and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s.

Karimi breathes new life into this well-chronicled political history by considering President Truman's 1949 Point Four technical assistance development program, which the United States offered to Iran and other countries in the global South. By exporting technology, products, and resources to improve health care, education, and urban infrastructure, the United States sought to woo Iran away from its alliance with the Soviet Union. Karimi pays particular attention to the Point Four home economics department as a locus of America's "soft power" in Iran, which targeted women as consumers. With the introduction of new appliances, devices, and furniture into the Iranian marketplace, the program targeted Iranian women as consumers. It sought to ease their domestic labors and cultivate "good taste" (88), thereby modernizing them according to American standards. These new commodities created new desires and practices...