Contestation over people’s role in governing revolutionary Iran - from sherik to shura

The recent violent clampdown on protests in Iran marks the latest moment in a more than century-long struggle over people’s participation in governing Iranian society. It shows a regime imposing itself by force over the people, but also people from villages to cities in Iran seeking an active role in formulating other ways of governing. This contest over different ways of imagining the role of people in systems of governing was present in the run up to the 1979 revolution and has erupted recurrently thereafter.

This presentation is based on anthropological fieldwork in tribally organized villages in south-west Iran. Prof Wright first lived there for 16 months in the 1970s when people were rethinking the concept of partnership (sherik), to move from the political and economic hierarchies that characterized the Shah’s authoritarian regime to more equal ways of working and living together. She participated in everyday activities, including their building of a model village, which they explicitly and reflexively based on ‘equal sherik’.

The 1979 revolution was characterised by people’s participation both in street demonstrations and in locally based councils (shura) that sprang up throughout Iran. Shura involved residents in villages and urban neighbourhoods, and workers in industry and the public sector. They organised their everyday activities, from distributing scarce food supplies to running the oil industry and ministries. Returning to Iran in the 1990s as a guest of the Ministry of Rural Reconstruction, Prof Wright learnt how the role of shura had been a focus of constitutional debates about Islamic governance.

This Ministry started from a student movement to establish shura through which villagers, dispossessed by the intense inequalities of the Shah’s regime, could articulate what resources and technical help they needed to improve their lives. But by the 1990s, the ministry decided on its own technical development projects and shura had been turned into an instrument of local control. This became clear during three short visits to the same villages and especially when the regime made them construct an Islamic model village. By involving her ministry hosts in participatory research with villagers Prof Wright learnt about their problems and the lack of communication between villagers and authorities. She saw how, within the Ministry as well as in the villages, there was a continuing discussion about whether and how to reinstate the revolutionary spirit of participatory governance in Iran.

This lecture has been jointly organised by the Oriental Museum and the Department of Anthropology, Durham University. 

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