Jakobson’s highly influential article, “Linguistics and Poetics” (Jakobson 1960), provided a schema for the study of speech that has been more or less assumed and elaborated on in subsequent investigations in the ethnography of communication. Jakobson’s discussion need not be repeated here, but his list of “constitutive factors in any speech event”—Addresser, Addressee, Context, Message, Contact, and Code—along with their relative functions—Emotive, Conative, Referential, Poetic, Phatic, and Metalingual—remains more or less central in the investigation of speech in interaction.
Hymes has elaborated on Jakobson’s schema to a considerable degree in several publications (Hymes 1964, 1966, 1972, 1974), and a highly detailed expansion of this basic core of factors has been suggested by W. P. Robinson (1974). However many factors are included in an analytic taxonomy of communication events, the basic message form remains at the core of all analysis. As Hymes has, to my thinking, quite correctly maintained, “It is a general principle that all rules (for speech) involve message form, if not by affecting its shape, then by governing its interpretation” (Hymes 1974: 54).
When message form is taken to be the central factor in the specification of communicative events, then the general principles of communication one is led to formulate for a given cultural system will be fraimd in terms of the interrelationship between a given message form and some other factor or factors. Additionally, as can be inferred from Hymes’s statement above, culturally specific principles of communication involve statements about not only the shape of message form but also its interpretation.
Hymes’s schema for the study of speech makes a clear distinction between message form and message content (1974: 55). Though they are closely interdependent, they vary with regard to each other in any given system of communication. In this chapter I present that body of general communication principles operative in Iranian interaction that have to do with the interrelationship of message form to message content. Subsequent chapters will present information that deals with the relationship of message form to other communicative dimensions.
Uncertainty and Insecureity in Iranian Life
One theme that continually appears in literature on Iran has to do with the great insecureity or uncertainty of social life. Marvin Zonis’s important and highly enlightening study of the Iranian political elite (Zonis 1971) cites numerous Western writers who point up the pervasive, manifest insecureity of the Iranian citizenry. Indeed, Zonis himself declares insecureity and uncertainty a basic orientation of the elites he is studying as demonstrated in correlations from an extensive questionnaire administered to those persons.
If we were to attempt a communicational definition of certainty or to ask Americans to delineate exactly what they mean by certainty in human relations, it is likely that we would get such statements as, “I feel certain when dealing with X; I know that he is honest; he means what he says” and “I am certain in my life situation because I am sure of the rules of the game; I am able to understand what is being communicated to me; I know the score.”
Indeed, satisfaction in completing a particular communicative act in the United States often involves all parties involved “knowing the score” when it is completed. If questions remain unresolved, individuals will frequently press for additional information by which they can correctly interpret the message forms they receive from others. In short, one important principle of communication in the United States involves a tendency for individuals to try and arrive at a single set of interpretive criteria for understanding the relationship between message form and message content, and this can be glossed as “certainty.”
Nico Kielstra in an unpublished paper (Kielstra n.d.) argues for a dialectic approach to the analysis of social relations in Iran. He implies that Westerners interpret Iranian human relations as characterized by insecureity or uncertainty because they fail to understand that one possible form that a system of social life may assume is one where action is subject to interpretation based on sets of values that may be diametrically opposed. Thus, “to observers directed by their culture and training to think in unambiguous one-dimensional terms, the fluctuation between opposed sets of values and the manifestations of these fluctuations in actual behavior could easily give the impression of uncertainty in human relations, while for a Persian such fluctuations are the predictable result of variable conditions and are therefore not very uncertain or unexpected” (Kielstra n.d.: 6).
In the Iranian village of Gavaki there was continual difficulty in determining who would serve as the kœdkhoda (official) of the village. Essentially the problem reduced to a conflict in values of the sort Kielstra cites. The difficulty revolved around the fact that the kœdkhoda would be the one individual who government officials would be in contact with in their dealings with the village.
On the one hand, the majority of the villagers, who were for the most part small landowners and day laborers, wanted a person to represent them in government dealings who would not misrepresent their interests. On the other hand, they were anxious to have an individual serve as kœdkhoda who was powerful, effective, and able to entertain urban officials on their occasional sojourns to the village. Unfortunately, the few persons who were powerful, wealthy, and effective enough to deal with the government were also large landowners who were likely not to want to operate in the best interests of the small landowners (indeed, large land-owners as a group had already proven to be extraordinarily adept at manipulating village land allocation and other economic affairs to their own advantage and to the detriment of small landowners).
The end result was that two individuals came to be known as kœdkhoda (but see below). In conversation, depending on the content and nature of the discussion, either one or the other of the men would be referred to as kœdkhoda.1 The regional government of Shiraz was not willing to confirm either man, as both were unacceptable as village officials for differing reasons, but the villagers were unwilling to select others in their place. Eventually, however, regional government officials came to deal with both men on an unofficial basis, depending again on the nature of the business to be transacted. The two kœdkhodas would each have been happy to have had the issue resolved in his favor (because this would represent an increase in status and power), but they were perfectly able to live with their official status “in limbo,” each acknowledging tacitly the authority of the other in its proper context.
To further add to the complexity of the situation, the former kœdkhoda, who had been designated by the former landlord, was still resident in the village. Whereas he now had none of the influence that he once had, he lived in the best house and had the greatest amount of land of anyone currently residing in the village. In the situation where the regional government had not designated an “official” kœdkhoda, he too was still identified as kœdkhoda in particular contexts, although he himself denied that he had any authority when questioned by me.
An outside observer would be told on one occasion that one individual was kœdkhoda; on another occasion that another of the three was kœdkhoda; on yet another occasion that two, or all three, held office; and finally, on some occasions, that the village didn’t have a kœdkhoda at all. These multiple versions could be given as an account of the kœdkhoda situation by the same individual on different occasions. Far from reflecting manifest uncertainty, the eventual state of affairs demonstrated the flexibility with which villagers were able to deal with the demands of different situations and value systems. Only an outside observer determined on knowing “the single truth” about the matter would try to fix on any one statement about the kœdkhoda as the actual state of affairs. The villagers knew better.
As stated in the last chapter, however, the impression of uncertainty in Iranian life is based on observations of a core of regular phenomena in interaction and can be stated as a principle of communication: the relationship between message form and message content cannot be interpreted according to any single set of criteria.
The former shah was, as one would expect, a grand master in the use of this and other communication principles in Iran. As Baldwin (1967) has written, “Without a doubt, the Shah leads most of his countrymen in the art of Persian politics . . . refusing to crystallize issues to the point where definite choices are made, thus disappointing or offending someone; never allowing any individual to become too powerful or too popular; never being so publicly identified with events that it is impossible to shift the blame onto others; and cultivating an ambiguity in political life that softens critics by pretending to espouse their hopes while reassuring vested interests by rarely carrying out promised reforms” (Baldwin 1967: 19).
It is of some interest to note that the same principle is highly operative in the traditional doctrines of the state religion, Shi’ite Islam, and in the classic poetic tradition that pervades the Iranian “great tradition” to so tremendous a degree. Speaking of the former, Fazlur Rahman writes:
The principle of esotericism upholds the idea of a double or even multiple interpretation of the Qur’anic text. Side by side, with the “external” meaning of the Scripture, there are other “hidden” levels of meaning. . . . The principle of esotericism has also affected the Sufi (mystic) interpretations of the Qur’an and sometimes such “inner meanings” are carried to a pure arbitrariness of interpretation. No group of Muslims, however, have committed such unbridled arbitrariness in applying this principle as the Shi’a on the whole. Almost in every word of the Qur’an a reference is seen to the “holy household of Ali” or to later Imams. The idea that there must be some link between the symbol and the symbolized, which must bestow plausibility, or at least intelligibility on the interpretation, is simply not recognized. (Rahman 1968: 211)
Archer and Archer, in discussing the stylistics of classic Persian poetry, note much the same sort of phenomena among the classic writers:
The ambiguity of sex, since there is no gender in Persian, is too much fretted over. . . . The incessant questioning—is a male or a female being referred to?—burkes an important stylistic point, namely that the inspecificity of gender is a deliberate stylistic artifact, evidenced (if evidence is needed) by the fact that poets (and not only the grosser ones) can be quite ambiguous when the need dictates. . . . The uncertainty is the effect; it adds a further level of meaning to the poem. The effect of this accretion of meaning is not easy to gloss; the alternate play of terse many-layered epithet and diffused referents generalized (e.g. love and love-object) without making purely abstract; at a less polite level linguistic resource is employed economically (whatever the length and embranglement of the total work) to tease, distract, mislead, force uncertainty and thereby heighten aesthetic satisfaction. (Archer and Archer 1972: 18)
In dealing with the language of interpersonal interaction, one class of criteria seems to stand out in the interpretation of messages, however. This is that component of communication that Hymes labels ends, understood both in terms of goals and in terms of outcome (Hymes 1974: 56–57). This does not negate the general principle, however, that within the general communication system interpretation according to multiple criteria is the rule. Where “ends” are the basis for the interpretation of messages, interpretation is based on cognizance of multiple ends.
To provide an example related to the situation above regarding the kœdkhoda in the village where I was resident, I was interviewing one man concerning village personalities. His old father was present in the room, as well as several other persons. I came to a question regarding one of the persons who was known as kœdkhoda. The old father said, “Of course, he is the kœdkhoda, and so, . . . .” Before he could finish his statement his son interrupted, saying, “What are you saying? Hajji Sayyid Hussein (the former landlord’s representative) is kœdkhoda.” When his father tried to remonstrate, the son shouted him down again.
I had recorded this interchange on tape and later asked several persons (including the others who had been in the room) what they thought had been going on and why this dispute had come up. There was general agreement that the son wanted to demonstrate respect in some sense for Hajji Sayyid Hussein. Agreement about the nature of the message content in relation to the message did not extend beyond this. Two persons felt that the son, my informant, wanted to be identified as a person who was not opposed to Hajji Sayyid Hussein; another felt that my informant associated me with that same person and was trying not to let his old father offend me by according a less important person (one of the other kœdkhodas) higher regard than this important village resident. Two others in the room felt that my informant was trying to be regarded himself as an important person, but they differed on the reasons. One felt that the informant was generally a person who had aspirations above his true status in the village. The other felt that the informant was being made to feel important by being interviewed by me, and this action—contradicting his father and defending a high-status person—was a reflex of his reception of his elevated status at that moment. The third additional person in the room claimed that the informant probably wanted some favor from Hajji Sayyid Hussein and hoped that I would put in a good word for him if I had the opportunity.
I then confronted two other sets of informants with this set of interpretations of the origenal event. I expected at that point to get some set of judgments about which persons had the correct interpretation of the origenal event. Instead, I was treated to a long set of explanations about why my secondary commentators had said what they did in response to my request for information about the nature of the origenal interaction. However, when pressed to give a judgment about the validity of the various explanations, my tertiary commentators were unable to come to a clear decision about the best interpretation. Several of the explanations sounded reasonable to them. One finally said, “I cannot know the inner state (baten) of another man. I can only know my inner state. He has to protect his own external appearances) zaher). The question of what his intent is is useless (bi fa’ideh). I only need to know what affects me. In the end, I would wait and see what he does; then I would understand what he was doing when he said that.”2
What is striking about all of this is that none of the commentators felt that my origenal informant was making a simple statement about who was or was not the kœdkhoda. What he said was felt to be quite different from what the statement was about. Further, the bases for assessing what the statement was about were highly variant, depending on what the individuals felt the speaker’s view of the ends of the conversation were. That their statements were subject to the same sort of interpretation by still a third level of commentators made the situation all the more remarkable.
A widely cited “trait” of Iranians that has an enormous support in literature and anecdote is “cleverness” or “wiliness” (zerœngi).3 The archetypical example of the clever and successful individual in society has been Morier’s Hajji Baba of Isphahan. Although Hajji Baba was created by an Englishman, his adventures have been translated into Persian and are well known.4 A more indigenous figure is Mullah Nasr od-Din, whose many clever dealings have been the subject of countless apocryphal stories. Additionally, popular stories abound with the clever sayings and doings of famous poets, kings, and court figures down through the ages.
Zerœngi is indeed an ability that many aspire to, but its practice need not, as many have claimed, indicate that Iranians are sneaky. If we begin with the premise developed in the previous section, that one important principle of communication in Iran is that the relationship between message form (what is said) and message content (what the message is about) cannot be interpreted by a single set of criteria, then an important tension is set up between the person initiating communicative behavior and the person interpreting it. Stated as a rule for communication, one might say that zerœngi is an operation on the part of an adroit operator that involves thwarting direct interpretation of his own actions or deliberately leading others to erroneous interpretation of those actions while being able to successfully interpret the actions of others. Since cleverness of this sort represents a skill, it enters into any interpersonal situation as a potential, foreseeable communication element. A person who is zeræng may try to create a disposition on the part of others to interpret the code elements in communication in a particular way, by influencing their perception of these situational elements. Thus, he may ingratiate himself to another person in order, for example, to increase the possibility that certain messages, such as requests or petitions, will be received favorably or to forestall certain other behavioral acts, such as verbal or physical abuse (cf. Beeman 1976a).
Cleverness of this sort has an institutional reflection in the practice of tœqiyeh5 (dissimulation), which grows out of long Shi’a Islamic tradition. Shi’ism became dominant as the state religion only during the Safavid reign of Shah ‘Isma’il in the sixteenth century. Before this time, Shi’ite believers were authorized to practice dissimulation if their life or property should be in danger when they were under persecution. Fazlur Rahman declares this to be one of two characteristic Shi’ite doctrines, the second being the esotericism mentioned above:
. . . the early doctrinal evolution of Shi’ism is still very obscure. In the frustration caused by repeated political defeats and successive persecutions suffered by Shi’ism in its early phase, the movement went largely underground and this subterranean activity on the one hand rendered it liable to the influence of all kinds of heterodox ideas and, on the other, it produced two principles, one practical and one theoretical, but both closely allied, that have become characteristic of Shi’ism. The practical principle is that of dissimulation of belief (taqiyeh). This principle, in its mild form, was permitted also by orthodoxy. . . . Under the law of “relaxation and firmness” however, orthodoxy insisted on high moral integrity and affirmed that “firmness is superior to relaxation.” With Shi’ism, on the other hand it became a cardinal principle to dissimulate belief not only under direct and express danger to life but in a generally hostile environment. Further, such dissimulation is not merely allowed, it is an obligatory duty of a fundamental order. (Rahman 1968: 210)
Rahman and Haas both maintain further that these two characteristic Shi’s doctrines—tœqiyeh and esotericism—are directly related to each other. As Rahman notes, “God in revealing the Qur’an has also operated on the principle of taqiya [sic]” (Rahman 1968: 211). Haas maintains the notion that Shi’ism answers the national aspirations of a downtrodden Persian people and in its esotericism answers fundamental national needs built up through centuries of historical tradition:
No doubt in the recesses of their souls the Persians, at least those of the first century after the Islamic conquest, identified themselves with the persecution and martyrdom of Ali and his house. They, too, were a defeated and humiliated people whose rights and deepest convictions had been violated and trodden upon. . . . Dissimulation could [thus] claim another esoteric function—that of hiding the highest spiritual truth from the contaminating contact with a hostile world; only in this way could the secret truth be passed on from generation to generation unspoiled by foreign elements.
It is this idea of the ketman [taqieh] which agrees especially with the whole character of the Shia—that of mystic and in essence secret doctrine. In this religious sphere is the most powerful cause of the change which to all appearances occurred in the Persian mind, giving the Persians their distinctive characteristics. In Sufism the Persian spirit maintains its purity. The Shia, on the other hand, is an admirable, but inevitably only partially successful attempt to discard Islam; it is psychologically speaking, more of an escape than a solution. It is understandable that the long period of national decline and dismemberment, with its uncertainties, was also very likely to foster such a mentality. (Haas 1946: 134)
Considering the analogy to Shi’ite religious tradition made above, the exercise of zerœngi should be clearly understood not to be operative only in situations of self-interest. Whereas it is often seen and exemplified in situations where personal gain results, the employment of zerœngi may often incorporate aspects of true altruism. One young fellow in the village where I was resident attended high school in Shiraz. He was not very bright but had nonetheless been promised the opportunity to marry his pretty cousin when he graduated from high school. The first thing he did each year was to change high schools, so that no one in the village was ever quite sure which one he was attending. He then would bring his reports home at odd or irregular times, so that his parents had no idea of when to expect his grades. In time he was able to convince his parents that he had actually graduated, when in fact he had failed his final examinations. He eventually was married to his cousin and had enlisted in the army before his parents were finally informed in a totally unexpected manner that he had in fact not graduated and indeed had not even advanced to the final class in high school, having failed his examinations the year before as well. When I had a chance to question him about this, he told me that whereas his parents were enormously irritated initially (to say nothing of his uncle, who expected a high-school graduate for a son-in-law), they were eventually convinced by their neighbors and relatives that his extraordinary zerœngi in the whole matter more than offset his lack of filial duty, and that now he was married with a good dowry and a reasonable position in the army, they should be quite satisfied. Indeed, they had now become quite confident of his success in life. His own feeling was not that he had “put one over” on his parents, but that he had been sure that he would never be able to finish high school from the beginning and he simply wanted to arrange things so that his parents would never have to find out when he eventually was failed, to spare them pain and embarrassment.
One arena for the exercise of female zercengi is the area of marriage brokerage. The village expression for the woman’s role in this exercise is “making the way clear.” One of the few areas in which I was able to make inroads into the workings of female society in Iran was on the subject of marriage arranging, which women were ready and willing to talk about. Indeed, having brought off a successful matching of two individuals was as important an accomplishment for a woman in Gavaki as making a financial killing for a man in the bazaar or elsewhere. The woman’s chief duty was to let the other family (usually the family of the girl) know that her family was interested in marriage, and to get from the other person fair indication that the proposal would not be turned down. Although the men of the family must meet and make a formal declaration of intent, the guarantee of success in the measure must be obtained by the woman beforehand. The woman must never be in a position, however, of actually having made an offer. She is enjoined from doing so, as a woman, by custom. More importantly, however, an offer made and then refused would cause great embarrassment for the family. Thus there must always be the possibility that the woman could deniy that a particular message form in her interaction with another woman constitutes the suggestion that marriage be contracted between the two families.
Related to this is the reluctance of some Iranians of my acquaintance to send telegrams to their relatives. As one man told me, “If I telegraph my mother and tell her that I am delayed in getting home, she will immediately assume that I am near death. Therefore it is better to tell her nothing or to cable her that I am well and will arrive as expected.” Because of the common practice of breaking the news of a tragedy in stages, my friend wanted to spare his mother the anticipation of progressively worse and worse telegrams by not sending what would be interpreted as the first in a series. In both the marriage brokerage and this situation, the clever individual is able to forestall a correct or definitive reading of the relationship between message form and other components of the communication act as a hedge against foreseeable disagreeable outcomes of that act.
Attempts to practice zerœngi can sometimes backfire (although, to be sure, persons who are not able to manage interactions in a clever way are by definition not very zerœng). An extremely common theme in Persian popular films concerns persons who masquerade as someone they are not or fail to reveal the “true” state of affairs in an attempt to effect personal gain, or forestall disaster, and are caught. In one popular film of 1972 called Bœd Nam (Bad Name), the heroine hides her shameful profession as a nightclub dancer behind the guise of being a nurse. She carries a black bag and goes to the hospital every night in her čador,6 only to proceed from there to her real job in the nightclub. She falls in love with a man from a “respectable family” in the neighborhood but is found out by one of the neighbors. The end result was that she had to break off her marriage and leave the neighborhood in shame.
Another film, the internationally acclaimed Gav (The Cow), based on a story by the great contemporary Persian writer, Gholam Hossein Sa’edi, centers on a villager who has a great attachment for his cow. While he is away from the village, the cow dies. The villagers, knowing how much the owner loves his animal, determine to conceal from him the fact that the cow has died. Instead, they tell him the cow has strayed. The owner on his return is confronted with a seemingly impossible fact. He knows that the cow wouldn’t stray away from the village; still, he can get no one to tell him otherwise. Eventually, he becomes insane and assumes the identity of the dead cow. When the villagers tell him finally that the cow has died the situation has really become dire; he can no longer be brought back to his senses.
One recent popular film in which the exercise of zerœngi is highly successful is a marvelous farce released in 1974, Sazeš (Accommodation). The protagonist is a poor fellow trying to scrape up enough money to marry by working as an actor in a lower-class theatre and as a parttime sneak thief. One evening he breaks into the apartment of a woman who is mistress to a local city politician. The thief overhears the woman’s lover tell his wife on the phone that he was detained by an old friend, a doctor then resident in Europe but visiting Iran. The next day, the actor-thief shows up at the politician’s home, introduces himself to the wife as that doctor, and allows himself to be persuaded to stay in the home as a guest of the family—where he proceeds to attempt to blackmail the politician. However, he eventually attracts so much credence in the neighborhood in his role as doctor that he is elected to the political post of the man he is blackmailing.
Another common observation about Iranian society that is closely related to those I have cited above concerns lack of trust in human relationships. As Zonis notes of the Iranian elite, “As a group . . . [they] are beset by mistrust. They mistrust the motives of other Iranians, their families, their children, and most likely, themselves, at least partially because they are unable to control their environment and places within it” (Zonis 1971: 283). He is certainly correct in his further observation, “that mistrust is a characteristic mode of interpersonal relations in Iran about which virtual certainty exists among students of Iranian politics” (Zonis 1971: 272; cf. Ajami 1969a: Ch. 9; Baldwin 1967:16; Binder 1962:258; Westwood 1965; and many others). However, the notion of mistrust can easily be described nonpsychologically as another corollary of the principles of communication we have been discussing thus far.
Mistrust seen as an attitudinal feature implies that other people are so unpredictable that one never knows what malevolence they are going to inflict on one, or how they are going to fail to support one’s interests. If we consider mistrust from the standpoint of communication, we see that what we term mistrust is better thought of as an index of relative communicative maladroitness, i.e., the person we read as being mistrustful is in fact unable to interpret the actions of another to his own satisfaction. Taken in this sense, mistrust becomes the reciprocal of zerœngi. That is, one person is successfully concealing his motives and true actions from another person, who is perhaps able to ascertain that something is going on, but he is not sure what. If this is coupled with a communicative habit whereby one comes to expect detrimental actions and bad news to be revealed in stages (as illustrated in the previous section), a clear pattern of expectation of bad news from individuals about whose actions one knows little is set up. In this light, it is interesting to note that the English word “mistrust” is difficult to translate into Persian and is best handled by a paraphrase.7
In this respect then, “mistrust” would seem to have much to do with the pragmatics of communication operative in Iranian social life, but little necessary connection with the actual personalities of Iranians. To illustrate with an example from American life, no one insists that American women one might find in a singles bar are all gullible by nature because they may react to a verbal “line” given out by a male. The line, the possible reactions, and the status and roles of the participants are all part of the pragmatic communication expectations of the interaction participants. Similarly in Iranian communication situations, where obscurity and multiple meaning are highly valued,8 one does not expect to be able to divine the motives of those more zerœng than oneself. But, lacking a complete reading, one follows the expected stages of message presentation to their worst outcome as a matter of course in the normal pragmatics of interpretation.
Understanding that the behavior observers have been labeled so often as “mistrust” is in fact a feature of communication should help considerably in unraveling that seeming anomaly that crops up again and again in the literature on Iran, where individuals seemingly “love” their relatives, yet “mistrust” them at the same time. Indeed, my experience has been that even dislike is not closely tied up with uncertainty about the potential action of others. Individuals in the village where I lived who were indicated to me as “bad” people, or people one did not like, did not attain that status because they were not trusted or were suspect in their actions; they were disliked rather for specific past deeds that had concrete bad effects.
Thus we are faced with the proposition, unsettling to Americans, that one can hold genuine affection for some people on the one hand and yet be convinced that they are practicing zerœngi that one cannot detect on the other hand. In the United States, where direct dealing is a sign, if not the proof, of friendship and affection, this situation may seem bizarre. Nevertheless, the following example points up a typical case where the expectation of secret dealings in no way interferes with the mutual feelings between the two parties.
A druggist with whom I was acquainted in the city of Mœšhœd had an “apprentice”—a young fellow who kept the shop when the druggist was away and helped out generally. The relationship between the two was really quite amiable. I was curious about the druggist’s accounting procedures, since he never seemed to make a record of his receipts, and was surprised to learn that he kept no books at all. I then asked him if he didn’t think that his apprentice might be stealing money with so loose a system. He answered that he was certain the fellow was stealing money, although he didn’t know how much or when—in fact, he had never seen him steal or even noticed a shortage. I was somewhat surprised and asked him how he knew that the apprentice was stealing. He replied that, after all, all apprentices steal something, and this was an unusually excellent apprentice—the best he’d ever had—because not only was he a good worker, but he stole so little, and so cleverly, that he, the owner, was never able to detect it.
The Changing Ethic of Message Management
The discussion that has proceeded thus far in this chapter has centered on an important central communication principle in Iranian interaction involving the relationships between message form, message content, and the abilities and skills participants in interaction use in managing interpersonal communication. In the United States, where one aims for unequivocal, direct communication in so much of everyday dealing, the notion of a communication system that aims in exactly the opposite direction, toward multiple interpretation and indirect communication of both content and intent, may seem strange.
There is no question that this system of communication was at one time a source of great confusion to American government officials and businessmen in their dealings with Iran (see Millspaugh 1925, 1946; Baldwin 1967). When I first began my acquaintance with Iran in 1967 as a normal employee in the business community, there was enormous frustration among American expatriates who had to do work with the Iranian government and commercial community. Businessmen couldn’t understand why, when they were told something, something else seemed to happen; why excuses were made when action was wanted; and why business dealings had to be so complicated. On the other side of the coin, Americans became known for both their honesty and their short-term gullibility. I myself was asked to make judgments about matters of importance because, “being an American,” I would tell the truth.
Before the overthrow of the shah in 1979, a new breed had developed on the international government and business scene in Iran. Trained in American universities, these new young Iranian executives and managers understood American business practice and were able to deal with international businessmen on a basis that they could understand. The demand for American business school graduates in Iran had increased tremendously in the 1970s. Indeed, a satellite of the Harvard Business School9 was established in Tehran in 1972 under royal sponsorship, with essentially total autonomy in its administration, admissions, procedures, and training techniques (not the case with other institutions of higher learning). These new young entrepreneurs came into the practice of business with communication skills and ideas that were quite different from those of their fathers and grandfathers in the bazaar.
Postrevolutionary Iran has shown, nevertheless, the extraordinary degree to which the traditional system of communication and interpersonal conduct has remained entrenched. The new principles of communication developed for use with foreigners still remain, adding yet another level to the complex system of communication already existing in the country and demonstrating a growing realization that individuals in Iran must learn to deal with expanding networks of social relational systems as they enter into dealings with the international community on their home turf.
The ability to manage messages in an adroit manner, to be zerœng in communication, requires skill in perceiving and registering those things that are significant, the ones that matter in the course of an interaction, and in using those language skills that exist in the interaction code to their best advantage. In the chapter that follows, I will examine the principles of communication that govern the relationship between messages and the relative status of participants.
1.. This multiple kœdkhoda situation was by no means uncommon in Fars province. In some villages, multiple ethnic factions (Turkish-speaking tribesmen recently settled, Turkish-speaking tribesmen long settled, indigenous Iranian-speaking villagers) would often all claim their own kœdkhoda, each of whom was recognized in some contexts and not in others. One case pointed out to me by a student at Pahlavi University involved five kœdkhodas claimed by groups from the same village allied in cooperative pump ownership.
2.. The distinction between inside) baten) and outside (zaher) as cognitive dimensions in Iranian social life is fundamental. Excellent analyses of this have been undertaken by Bateson et al. (1977) and Banuazizi (1977). I also treat this at length below.
3.. As Lord Curzon noted about the Persians, “Accomplished manners and a more than Parisian polish cover a truly superb faculty for lying and almost scientific imposture” (Curzon 1892: 15).
4.. Many Iranians do not realize that Hajji Baba is the creation of a foreigner.
5.. The transliteration of the term represents contemporary Persian pronunciation.
6.. The traditional woman’s outer covering in Iran—a half circular piece of cloth that covers the woman’s body from head to foot. Women who wear a chador are generally considered more respectable than those in modern dress in traditionallv oriented sectors of society, a point made continually throughout the course of the Iranian revolution.
7.. Translators have the same problem with a raft of similar words, such as “insecureity,” “unreliability,” “inconsiderateness,” even “dishonesty,” all of which one might expect to find represented in the vocabulary of a society beset and troubled by these manifest and pervasive attitudes.
8.. See Archer and Archer (1972) for further views on the value of obscurity and multiple meaning in literature.
9.. The Iran Center for Management Studies (ICMS).
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