| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper traces the emergence of folklore studies and ethnography in interwar Iran. It argues that these disciplines were part of larger nationalist projects of representing and speaking for the "masses." The first part of the paper explores how and why a number of Iranian intellectuals engaged in folklore studies after a period of prolonged political activism in the first few decades of the 20th century. The second part of the paper examines cultural institutions established by the state, mainly in the late 1930s, in an attempt to appropriate and institutionalize folklore studies and ethnography for the purposes of nation building. These efforts were fraught with ambivalences because the "masses" were simultaneously praised as repositories of "authenticity" and looked down upon as a potential source of "backwardness."
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