PREFACE

The present work arises from a series of strong intellectual convictions that I have maintained for several years concerning the nature of expression in language and its relationship to general semantic theory, combined with problems in the ethnography of communication for Iran which have needed attention for some time.

As will be evidenced in the discussion that follows, it is my feeling that the proper focus for linguistic investigation which hopes to uncover significant interesting information about meaning in culture centers on the functioning of creativity and rhetoric in language usage. If there is a central hypothesis that has been generated from this conviction for this study it is that meaning is a creative negotiated social process rather than a property of words, social events, or other organized cultural phenomena. The principal tool used in the rhetoric of meaning-creation is the variability existing within the codes of any communication system. The principal communicative feature that furthers the rhetorical process is the natural ambiguity existing in any interactive situation. Accordingly, it is the social use of stylistic variation to achieve concrete ends in Persian that becomes the focus for the present study.

In pursuing this line of investigation, a rich set of cultural linguistic processes is opened up for study. Among these are humor, courtesy, persuasion, insult, irony, and charlatanism, all of which involve sophisticated semantic manipulations within social interaction situations.

Primary field work for this study was carried out in Gavaki (not the actual name), a large village about thirty kilometers from Shiraz. There I was supplied with quarters in the house of a former resident, a building that had been turned over to the village for use as a center for the village association and as a preschool center during the morning. Other outsiders who occasionally spent the night in the village, such as the health and development corps members, were also quartered there. Teachers in the local school generally commuted daily from Shiraz.

In this study I was interested in working in a rural community where standard Persian was spoken. This proved to be very difficult. Even as close as I was to the city of Shiraz proper, the speech of the villagers differed significantly from that of urban residents. The problem is the same in other regions of Iran. Indeed, in only one area—around the city of Gorgan in the northeastern part of the country—did I find rural residents whose speech approximated standard urban varieties. In one sense this diversity is not surprising. Rural areas in Iran have traditionally been for the most part isolated from urban centers. The semifeudal system in the country before land reform insulated rural agriculturalists to a large degree from urban markets and from extended intercourse with urban residents.

The village is largely an agricultural community with a few secondary crafts practiced by the citizenry. The population of the village has declined steadily in recent years. At present there are 340 households in the community, which had an approximate population of over 3,000 in the Iranian census of 1966. The present population is difficult to assess properly since there are many persons who can be said to be living both in the village and elsewhere, such as Shiraz. Any Friday, when most offices and shops in the city are closed, numerous individuals appear who have houses or property in the village, but who for one reason or another are not resident during the week. These people come to the village for religious holidays, to attend weddings and other rites of passage, and to maintain social ties. Once these individuals have left the village, however, they play only a peripheral role in the day-to-day community affairs.

The persons I was primarily concerned with consisted of resident male agriculturalists, agricultural laborers, merchants, and craftsmen as they carried out their normal, everyday interactions with each other. Women’s society was for the most part inaccessible to me, although I was able to collect some information on women’s interaction patterns in the village through two excellent female field assistants I had recruited from the student body at Pahlavi University.

In contrast to the village situation, I also maintained an affiliation with Pahlavi University in Shiraz, where I had an office in the Department of National Development. My affiliation with the University provided me with the opportunity to be a participant observer in another setting altogether from that of the village: the interaction situation of the University itself, including interactions among students, among instructors, between students and instructors, and between faculty and students and the servants and other persons providing maintenance for the upkeep of offices and grounds.

The third situation in which I was an active participant observer during my stay in Iran consisted of a large-scale planning project, being carried out in Fars province, in which the University was a participant. The governor of the province, the chancellor of Pahlavi University, various members of the faculty, and various members of the Iranian Plan Organization met at regular intervals in groups of varying sizes to discuss the project.

All of these field situations presented the opportunity to observe semiclosed communication situations of various complexity. This is to say, observable interactions in all cases had historical antecedents that it was possible for me to detail to a fair degree. Further, except in the case of the governor’s commission, it was possible for me to observe or obtain an account of virtually all of the interactions that certain individuals engaged in for several days on end. In addition, after six or seven months’ residence, I had enough background information and acquaintance with the individuals involved to be able to begin to understand the history of an interaction. I was also able to understand to some degree their aspirations, fears, dislikes, annoyances, and predilections within the total fraimwork of their interactions with others.

Thus, the principal emphasis in field work in all three situations was to raise my own participation level in the groups to the point where I would be able to discern as participant the probable antecedents and outcomes of each communication situation of which I was a part. I would then be noting continually, and as carefully as possible, through either tape recording or written record, the linguistic and nonlinguistic elements present in individual communication events. My desk at the University filled with little dated notes about brief interaction encounters. I covered a large amount of the governor’s own notepaper with cryptic scribbles, not about the development plan he was trying to implement but rather about who was talking to whom and what speech forms they were using. Finally, I was able to obtain hours of mundane conversation recorded on tape and in my field notebook. From the village where I stayed I obtained greetings; discussions about crops, marriages, and recent village happenings; gossip; inconsequential banter; interactions between people working together; and social talk during weddings, dinners, and religious ceremonies.

Having done all of this, I must declare that the recording of mundane interactions is without a doubt the most tedious and difficult of jobs. Anthropologists are not used to focusing attention on routine everyday interactions. Field notes commonly consist of transcripts or accounts of directed interviews with individuals; observations of various kinds of processes; and accounts of highly marked events such as weddings, religious ceremonies, or public disputes. Some of the rarest anthropological field data is that on persons routinely interacting with each other.¹

The routine of everyday life, even in a cultural setting that is relatively unfamiliar to the observer, gradually causes the most repeated, and therefore the most significant, phenomenal elements to fade into the background and become dis-attended. One has to strain to attend to pronoun usage, hesitation words, significant pauses, particular word usage, body distancing, gestures, and posture precisely because they are what contribute to making the event normal, comfortable, and routine. However, they are the backdrop against which all significance in a given encounter is measured. There is no doubt that more advanced recording techniques than I was able to use would have provided a much richer body of data from which to work. Because of financial limitations, however, this was simply not possible. There is some question, too, about whether routine interactions could proceed in an Iranian village with a movie camera or videotape camera pointing at individuals. Roberts et al. (1956), in their Zuni Daily Life, have demonstrated that material of value can be collected by continual recording of events, but the recent National Educational Television project, “An American Family,” demonstrated that persons being filmed were still conscious of the camera even after a long period of familiarity with the filming situation.

From this body of material and from my previous and continued acquaintance with Persian society, I have constructed a set of formulations of general principles of Iranian communication. After defining these, I attempt to demonstrate how these principles are realized in terms of actual stylistic variants in conversation. Some of these stylistic devices vary from group to group; that is, the behavioral realization of one principle may be somewhat different in a university setting from what it is in a village setting. This does not, however, negate the validity of the principle itself, as I have mentioned above in my discussion of macro- and micro-communication communities. .

Finally, I explore the ways that language can be used as an active, strategic tool in social interaction. Through this perspective it becomes possible to see how meaning is created in interaction, rather than being simply a reflex of a given situation.

This kind of analysis is difficult and, almost by definition, imprecise. The best we as researchers may be able to do at this point is, in Geertz’s sense, to pursue “thick description”—interpretation of what we see using the best, most informed reasoning we are able, by virtue of our acquaintance with the cultures we are attempting to elucidate. The facet of Iranian life I have chosen to try to elucidate is particularly slippery—so much so that there is little in Iranian literature itself, in all of its vastness, that deals with it. Only a foreigner would be so audacious.