Book Chapter

Writing the history of Shiraz

Manoukian, Setrag, Setrag Manoukian

2012,2011

Overview

Most of the scholars I spoke to during the first months of my stay in Shiraz were skeptical of my intention to choose one of the old neighborhoods to study the cultural history of the city. Whenever I asked them if they had suggestions about which neighborhood to choose, they would reply they thought a neighborhood was not a good unit of analysis. It was too narrow and I would be forced to leave out important people and events. Moreover, it was an impossible task due to lack of documents. My idea instead was that the reduced size of a neighborhood would help me find a point of entry into the complexity of the city and would also provide a way to explore the social relevance of knowledge. My questioning about the neighborhood was one of the strategies I used to overcome vagueness in people's responses to my inquiries. I hoped that, by focusing on a restricted area, I could be more effective in posing my questions: the neighborhood could be a good start to move to other things. I was not as concerned with leaving things out as I was with getting a better understanding of the production of knowledge in a small area I could describe in depth. I was also looking for ways to get away from the university environment and take some distance from the trajectories outlined so far in the book. I wanted to seek alternative constellations of knowledge.

• Publisher: Routledge,Taylor & Francis Group
• Subject: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 / Iran / Middle Eastern history
• ISBN: 9781138789449, 1138789445, 0415783283, 9780415783286