During the Pahlavi period in Iran (1925–79), poor and working-class families were more likely to expect young sons to work to support the household. These boys, in turn, were more autonomous. Middle-class families, on the other hand, protected and controlled boys. Researchers have assumed that religious zealotry was the primary inspiration for boys to enlist in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, ignoring the ways in which class inflected boyhood. While religious fervor may have been a motivation for some of the poor and working-class Iranian boys (between ten and fourteen) who enlisted, the expectation that they work took precedence. Moreover, at least some of these boys were eager to participate in war-front masculine homosociality rather than remain in feminized domestic spaces. This study analyzes biographies, census data, newspaper accounts, and original oral history interviews.
Due to the illegal movement of goods and people, the Khuzistan-Basra frontier, like many other borderlands in the region, represented a liminal space for border dwellers and the Iranian state. Although scholars have written about the migration that was endemic to the early nation-building period, the consequences of this movement in the latter half of the 20th century require further exploration. Well into the 1970s, Iranian migrants and border dwellers complicated citizenship, evinced by the Pahlavi monarchy's failure or refusal to offer them their rights. The Iranian archives prove that, decades into the nation-building project, local dynamics continued to exert tremendous influence on Iranians and even superseded national policies.
Historians of Pahlavi Iran have demonstrated that physicians, pharmacists, dentists, and nurses were encouraged by early nation-builders to civilize patients and shepherd the masses into modernity. Medicine, however, was not only a top-down affair. Medical professionals maintained a dialogue with their patients, cognizant of the cultural mores of local communities and the threat of medical malpractice lawsuits. In fact, medicine, far from a universal science, was highly localized, inflected by traditional curatives (like herbs and spices), shortages of medical equipment and drugs, and local policing to safeguard patient rights. Through social history, scholars may examine the dialectic between patient and provider, which proved fundamental to the practice of modern medicine in Pahlavi Iran.
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