Coming of Age in Iran

An inside look at young Iranians navigating poverty and stigma in a time of crisis Crippling sanctions, inflation, and unemployment have increasingly burdened young people in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Coming of Age in Iran, Manata Hashemi takes us inside the lives of poor Iranian youth, showing how these young men and women face their future prospects.Drawing on first-hand accounts, Hashemi follows their stories, one by one, as they struggle to climb up the proverbial ladder of success. Based on years of ethnographic research among these youth in their homes, workspaces, and places of leisure, Hashemi shows how public judgments can give rise to meaningful changes for some while making it harder for others to escape poverty. Ultimately, Hashemi sheds light on the pressures these young men and women face, showing how many choose to comply with—rather than resist—social norms in their pursuit of status and belonging.Coming of Age in Iran tells the unprecedented story of how Iran’s young and struggling attempt to extend dignity and alleviate misery, illuminating the promises—and limits—of finding one’s place during a time of profound uncertainty.

The major contribution of Hashemi’s book lies in a vast spectrum of examples unfolding the mechanisms through which the low-income youth, on the one hand, internalize the conformity versus performance game; and, on the other hand, redefine the meaning of dignity beyond its immediate connection with capital accumulation. By putting the moral self at the core of its analysis, Coming of Age in Iran adds further nuances to the literature on bottom-up responses to economic deprivation ... the stories presented in the book are a thought-provoking invitation to reassess the value of shifting and evolving subjectivities for understanding broader social transformations., Manata Hashemi’s Coming of Age in Iran is a fascinating and timely study of working class youth negotiating the difficult conditions of their work, status, and self-respect. Hashemi combines a keen attention to gender and class as well as to the details of local and regional identity, in Tehran and beyond. Understanding themselves as modern individuals who must make their way in a world of limited economic opportunities, dilute religiosity, and faded revolutionary dreams, Hashemi shows how these young men and women save face and find dignity, publicly performing community norms of accommodation while privately searching for the elusive goal of individual opportunity., What does it mean to be young, poor, and aspirational in Iran? In this rich ethnography, Manata Hashemi answers by describing how young people ‘perform’ upward mobility, convey moral virtue and largely obey dominant social and cultural norms. This nuanced book offers a different picture of Iranian youth: conformists rather than rebels, they are intent on maintaining their dignity as they negotiate their precarious circumstances., Manata Hashemi is an astute observer who provides readers a clear understanding of youth in Iran ... a highly informative account of Iranian youth struggling in poverty and can be viewed as a significant contribution to ethnographic and sociology scholarship., As an ethnic Iranian with knowledge of Persian and the local context in Iran, Hashemi is more than qualified to produce such an important piece of work…Hashemi argues that Iranian youth should not be summarily characterized with lopsided tags such as marginalization, hopelessness, and exclusion because there is a culture of acceptance of dominant social norms amongst them, which constitutes agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

Manata Hashemi is the Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the co-editor of Children in Crisis: Ethnographic Studies in International Contexts.