Feeding Iran: Shi`i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic by Rose Wellman (review)

Nuclear weapons, contested treaties, and fraught international relations are at the forefront of what Western audiences hear about Iran these days. In Feeding Iran, Rose Wellman offers us something quite different: a rare window onto the quotidian lives, including the foodways, of those who support the current Iranian state, in contrast to the dissident voices within and outside of Iran. Wellman's ethnographic fieldwork took place amongst the Iranian Basij, the paramilitary group that supports the principles behind the Iranian revolution of 1979. These Basiji Iranians are committed to the Islamic Republic, in contrast to those it describes as "Westernstruck." Wellman's primary field site for a year and a half is the provincial town of Fars-Abad, where she was not quite family, but also not quite a guest for the duration of her fieldwork, abiding by the standards of respectability of her host Basiji family, participating in their vibrant social life of hosting and visiting as well as in their everyday chores of cooking and preparing food.

While the term "paramilitary" normally evokes political or religious extremists, that is not the view we get from Wellman's book. Instead, we read of the very ordinariness and practicality of these Basiji families, as they attempt to live decent lives. The proper comportment of their bodies is envisioned as essential to their own souls, the moral and physical wellbeing of their families, and to the ongoing success of the Islamic Republic. Far from the state unilaterally imposing ways of being on their people, she shows how Basiji understand their everyday practices to uphold the state and its current interpretation of the Shi`i Islam. Religion is not cordoned off as a separate sphere; the words and traditions of the Prophet Mohammad and his martyred grandson, Imam Husayn, continue to inform quotidian behaviors of Wellman's interlocutors. These texts are consulted to make interpretations of everyday events and to justify actions and decisions. Wellman also demonstrates how for her Basiji interlocutors, the more recent religious history of the 1979 revolution overthrowing the Shah permeates everyday life. Equally important are the effects of another key historical moment: the eight-year, Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988. The everyday effects of the vicious violence and the chemical weapons are still felt in the persistent coughs of the veterans, the injuries of the survivors, and the dead, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, who are understood as martyrs.

The book opens with a moving account of a reburial of two of these unknown martyrs in the town of Fars-Abad in 2010, brought from the border of the Iran-Iraq war during the yearly commemoration of this war. The ceremony, both military and religious, culminates in a collective shared meal of lentils and rice, introducing us to the main theme and undoubted strength of the book, the weaving of food, kinship, religion, and commitment to the state. These commemoration rituals involve careful cooking and distributing of foods as a means by which local participants constitute themselves as pious religious individuals and committed subjects of the Islamic Republic.

The first chapter is entitled "Blood, Physio-Sacred Substance, and the Making of Moral Kin." Wellman, inspired by the work of Susan McKinnon, Janet Carstens, and Gillian Feeley-Harnik, breathes new life into the anthropological study of kinship, offering nuanced discussions of how patrilateral, matrilateral, and milk kinship continue to structure quotidian lives in Iran. Lest we become too fixated on biological kinship, Wellman demonstrates how essential food (beyond breast milk) is to actively creating these kinship ties. Her reflections on how the "esteem" of the descendants of the Prophet, the sayyeds, and their "physio-sacred" position in local communities is recognized, and in many ways constituted, by food practices is particularly interesting.

In the second chapter, "Feeding the Family: The "Spirit" of Food in Iran," Wellman describes how, in this context, food is never separate from morality. Food is always "religio...