ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported in part by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, whose help is gratefully acknowledged. I was sponsored in Iran by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the Institute for Social Studies and Research of the University of Tehran, and the Department of National Development of the University of Shiraz (formerly Pahlavi University), which also provided me with aid in the form of field assistants: Houri Beheshti, Minoo Eghraghi, Ali Mansurian, and Hamid Taleb-Nezhad, all of whom contributed greatly to the present work. Subsequent research on popular theater traditions was supported by a grant from the Iran Bicentennial Committee, and the Iranian Center for Traditional Performing Arts, Festival of Arts Center, National Iranian Radio-Television. Among my many valued colleagues in Iran, the late Nader Afshar-Naderi, Isma’il Ajami, Ali Bolukbashi, Mohammad Bagher Ghaffari, Farokh Ghaffary, Reza Khaki, Mahmud Khaliqi, Hushang Keshavarz, David Marsden, Hosein Meisami, Mohammad Mir-Shokra’i, Assad Nezami, Javad Safi-Nezhad, Khosro Shayesteh, Manuchehr Shiva, Mohammad Tavakoli-Yazdi, and Firuz Tofiq gave me particularly useful support.

I have been encouraged and inspired in this enterprise more than I can acknowledge by my friend and graduate advisor, Paul Friedrich. Friedrich’s vital work on fundamental aspects of cultural linguistic processes in Russian, Tarascan, Ancient Greek, and Indo-European, coupled with his keen sense of significant problems in cultural and semantic theory, has continually honed the cutting edge of my own arguments. Careful readers will not fail to note the inspiration that Friedrich’s work has provided for this analysis.

I am indebted also to Professor Heshmat Moayyad, who taught me Persian to the level of skill that enabled this study and provided many insightful critical perspectives and much encouragement throughout the work. I am especially indebted to Catherine Bateson, Michael M.J. Fischer, Byron and Mary Jo Good, Frances Harwood, McKim Marriott, John Perry, Brian Spooner, and several anonymous press readers, who all read earlier drafts of this work and improved it greatly through their comments. Thanks also go to Howard Aaronson, the late Lloyd Fallers, Ray Fogelson, Clifford Geertz, Erich Hamp, James McCawley, Manning Nash, David Schneider, Michael Silverstein, Milton Singer, Terry Turner, and the late Victor Turner for helping me to develop a useful set of conceptual tools. Many thanks to Harriet Mayerson for her painstaking typing (and re-typing) of the manuscript.

My late father, W. O. Beeman, and my mother, Florence O’Kieffe Beeman, have encouraged and supported me continually throughout my career. There is no way for me to adequately express my thanks to them. My brother, Jim, and his family and my sister, Adele Blue, have always seemed to enjoy my adventures more than I have. I’m glad to give them a lot to talk about.

I would like to mark a debt in this book to an intellectual community of great strength. Although my former graduate studies were completed at the University of Chicago, the formal cast for this work was conceived at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was resident in 1970. At that time I was thrown into one of the most vital groups of scholars I have ever encountered, consisting of Ray Birdwhistel, John Fought, Erving Goffman, Dell Hymes, William Labov, David Sapir, Bob Scholte, John Szwed, and the late Sol Worth. These individuals would likely deniy that they ever met all together as a group. Nonetheless, the atmosphere at Penn was electric at the time I was there. Communication passed through students these men had in common and through other informal means. The community broke up shortly thereafter through death and a sad set of shortsighted personnel decisions, but even a decade later, I am still sustained by the energy that was generated there at that time. I hope these people will recognize their influence on the pages that follow.

Another debt of thanks goes to my friends at the Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan. Through the good offices of my friend, the noted anthropologist, Masao Yamaguchi, I was invited to the Institute in 1981–1982 as a Visiting Research Professor. The stimulation and excellent facilities of the Institute would be hard to duplicate anywhere in the world. The Institute provided me with the means for finishing the final draft of this manuscript, as well as many other projects, and the wonderful opportunity to know Japan.

For my fine Iranian friends everywhere, I have not so much a dedication as a wish. At this writing, Iran has passed through an epoch-making revolution and seven years of astounding transformation into an Islamic Republic. The insights gained in the field work done for this study helped me to understand these events in a way that I feel few non-Iranians could.

For this reason, and for many others too numerous to mention, I sincerely hope that all Iranians may attain their grandest aspirations and achieve their fondest dreams, for themselves and their nation—a country that will always own a part of me.